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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The world is never going to make complete sense to us, yet we find that conclusion almost impossible to accept. Can we live, and feel at home, in a world composed at best of incompatible fragments of meaning? This is the theme that runs through this collection of essays by Raymond Geuss. Drawing on a characteristically wide range of insights from moral and political philosophy, history, and aesthetics, he addresses topics such as knowledge (of self, the world, and others), language, the visual and the auditory, authority, hope, and the success and failure of life projects. He argues that, to get by in our bewildering world, we must embrace the virtue of 'double vision': that is, immersing ourselves in and learning the ways of the culture surrounding us, even as we feel alienated from it. Together the essays explore some of the consequences of abandoning the idea of a unitary view of the world, while at the same time trying to avoid quietism. Seeing Double is a compelling collection of work by one of the world's most versatile and creative philosophers.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Note
Quote
1 Montaigne and the Essay
Otium/negotium
Why otium?
The literary genre for self-knowledge
The instability of desire
No prescriptions
At home or not at home?
Notes
2 Rabelais and the Low Road to Modernity
3 Nietzsche’s Philosophical Ethnology
Notes
4 Autopsy and Polyphony
Notes
5 Speaking Well, Speaking Correctly
Speaking well
Correct Latin
The science of grammar
Uniformity or diversity of usage
Two opposing general conceptions
Notes
6 Succeed, Fail, Fail Better
Success in what sense?
The context of human life
More or fewer abstractions?
Plurality of goals
The literature of failure
Notes
7 Hope
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Quote
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Seeing Double
RAYMOND GEUSS
polity
Copyright © Raymond Geuss 2024
The right of Raymond Geuss to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6089-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945001
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
The city of Kyoto is surrounded by gentle hills and temples. There are about 2,000 temples and shrines of various kinds in the city and the immediate environs. In the hills just west of the central part of the city stands the Ryoanji Temple which has a famous rock garden, a dry landscape of gravel that contains fifteen boulders which have been artfully placed so that from no single vantage point can they all be seen at the same time. From any vantage point on the wooden viewing platform at least one boulder is hidden behind some other. To see them all, then, one has to look at the garden at least twice, from two different positions, and somehow integrate the two images in one’s mind or imagination. So to see everything I must see double. Presumably the monks who designed the garden wished to express what they thought was a deep negative truth about the world, that vision always operates from a particular limited perspective and that human knowledge is like that, too, and can never encompass the world as a whole (certainly not in a single synoptic view). The particular necessity for double vision when looking at this garden can in fact be overcome in the modern world by the use of some technological tools we have developed: we could fly a drone equipped with a camera over the garden, and see it from a perspective that was inaccessible to generations of visitors. Perhaps from that perspective, we could see all the stones. The question is whether this invalidates the original point. Even from this new perspective we won’t see everything about the garden. We can get the ‘wider’ synoptic view from the air only because we happened to invent something new and unknown in the past, actually two things: the drone and the camera. These two inventions are accidents of our history.
It is endemic to the philosophical tradition to find the contingency which might be thought to manifest itself in this story intolerable. Virtually all philosophers worth their salt have tried to prove (or generally, not even tried, but simply assumed) that the aerial view is not merely the result of an accidental human creation. Of course, the creation of the tools was contingent, but the aerial view they provide was in some sense not created, but discovered; it was already there to be revealed. Furthermore, this conclusion can be generalized absolutely in that there is (and must be) such a thing as a final view of the world which includes everything – although it would have the form of a mathematical theory rather than a photo. But still it would be all-encompassing, and although in fact we might never discover this theory, in principle it would have to be something that at any rate sufficiently gifted and supremely lucky humans could – again ‘in principle’ – eventually discover.
This is a very cosy view of the universe that it would be natural then to extend from nature to the social world. When Wittgenstein criticized his colleague Ramsey for being a ‘bourgeois’ thinker,1 he did not mean just that Ramsey had an especially tidy mind, but that he thought the world was a tidy place, a potentially comfortable habitation for humanity where everything could ‘eventually’ be expected to fit together neatly. We don’t actually see how all our beliefs, hopes, and aspirations can be made compatible now, but ‘eventually’ we could (in principle) get true beliefs and realistic hopes and aspirations, and they would have to be consistent. Here the word ‘eventually’ carries an enormous amount of weight; it means mañana – the ‘tomorrow’ which as often as not never comes. Or perhaps a better analogy would be the Pope’s wedding. If I say ‘I’ll pay you, eventually, on the day of the Pope’s wedding’, you would be rash to start banking on this, although it is perfectly possible that one day a Pope will marry, given that the rules of celibacy are mere matters of Church discipline, not doctrine.
What if things don’t finally all hang or fit together? What if plurality of vision and conflict of desire are permanent states? These essays explore various aspects of that possibility.
Chapter 1 of this collection discusses Montaigne, his scepticism about the necessary uniformity and fixity of human nature, and his invention of the essay as a vehicle to explore the self-knowledge that is possible for us, given that we are creatures whose inner lives are a constantly shifting sequence of mutable beliefs and contradictory desires.
Rabelais’ books, which are the subject of Chapter 2, are all about incongruity: they tell stories of people who encounter a size-14 world and try repeatedly, desperately, but with a complete lack of success, to force its feet into a series of size-6 shoes.
The Nietzsche of Chapter 3 is a comparative ethnologist who studies a variety of very different, culturally specific ways of looking at the world and tries to determine what a recognition of this plurality might tell us about how we think of ourselves.
The eye and the ear give us access to the world in very different ways. Chapter 4 (‘Autopsy and Polyphony’) deals with some of the ways in which the visual and the auditory structuring of cognition might not overlap.
We are often tempted to apply standards of correctness or incorrectness to speech, but it turns out to be more difficult than we think to say anything concrete and plausible about the kind of normativity we are imaginatively invoking. This is the topic of Chapter 5.
Chapter 6 deals with an issue that was much discussed in the mid-twentieth century by the existentialists, but seems to me to have been somewhat neglected during the past fifty years or so. This is the issue of the conditions of applicability of concepts like success and failure to human actions, and potentially to a human life as a whole. In the absence of a fixed external criterion for what an action is and the standards by which it is to be evaluated, it seems clear that ascriptions of success and failure cannot be based on anything more than contextually shifting judgements. What is more, while my life is ongoing I can never see it all as part of one single closed process, so the idea of evaluating it as a whole seems particularly problematic. Yet, it seems impossible not to succumb occasionally at least to the temptation to try to do just that.
The final chapter offers a brief discussion of the roles of hope and realism in human life.
Two of the essays in this collection have appeared in print before in English: ‘Rabelais and the Low Road to Modernity’ was published as a chapter in A History of Modern French Literature, ed. C. Prendergast (Princeton University Press, 2017), and is reprinted here with permission; ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophical Ethnology’ appeared in Arion, vol. 24, no. 3 (2017). I have made some tiny changes to these essays for this volume. Three other essays were written in German and published in that language, but have not previously appeared in English. These are ‘Autopsy and Polyphony’, which appeared as ‘Autopsie und Polyphonie’ in the internet journal Soziopolis (5 April 2023); ‘Succeed, Fail, Fail Better’, which will appear in Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie but no exact date has yet been set; and Chapter 7, which appeared as ‘Die Hoffnung’ in Auf Nietzsches Balkon III, ed. S. Bianchi (Bauhaus Universitätsverlag, 2018). I have translated these myself and taken the opportunity to make some small changes.
I am very grateful to Martin Bauer for commissioning Chapter 3; he has a knack of inviting me to write on topics I would never have thought of approaching, and then helping me out in ways that always make the resulting text better than anything I could have produced myself. I wish to thank Sonia Felger, Lorna Finlayson, Peter Garnsey, Gérald Garutti, Brian O’Connor, and Richard Raatzsch for discussions of the topics treated in this volume. All the texts I have written during the past twenty-five years have benefited enormously from Hilary Gaskin’s sharp eye, her excellent judgement, and her constructive suggestions.
Ancient works are cited by standard pagination (thus for Plato by Stephanus page, or otherwise following the most recent OCT). Nietzsche’s works are cited from the Kritische Studien-Ausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari (Der Gruyter, 1981), by volume and page number (abbreviated KSA).
Note
1.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Vermischte Bemerkungen
(Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 40.
und die findigen Tiere merken es schon daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind in der gedeuteten Welt
Rilke
(animals are clever enough to have noticed that we aren’t very securely at home in this world we’ve interpreted)
