To Those to Whom I Spend My Life Writing, Part III

Before reading this, you might want to read parts I, II and the Addendum for proper context.

For my final paper which also serves as an "addendum" to this series, I considered beginning with what I considered a "problem of quotation" as a way of expressing what I had thought were inexpressible impressions of Cavell's Cities of Words. As I attempt to bring this (one-sided) discussion to a close, I will bring in the problem of quotation in my explanation of what I intend these essays to convey.

First, to answer an issue raised in the comments. Some of you ask: what kind of action do I propose with my interpretations of moral perfectionism? Well, there is no specific action or set of actions that I advocate and insist that you perform. Granted, the injunction shared by Emerson, Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche, et. al. to--in various and sometimes contradictory attitudes--follow or obey or remain attentive to one's own "genius" is a proposal to perform certain activities, namely, those activities which you are able to choose out of self-knowledge and understanding. But notice that this implies in simplification that any action so chosen is legitimate; philosophers are right to distrust such a relativist stance as 1) its formulation is derived from a simplified reduction of multiple philosophical attitudes and 2) re-establishing a philosophy from this simplified derivative de-values or debases the ideas from which it is formed. So I want to avoid summing-up various philosophers under the guise of "moral perfectionism" without loosing any ability to discuss Cavell's readings. At the same time, going back to my endorsement of the the shared injunction "genius" provides, I can more clearly identify my proposal as not joining the chorus of radical relativism but rather as an attenuation of the philosophic attitude. "What the hell do you mean?" is a required question here.

I can beg the question as I usually do; I can say, "I don't want you to believe you can pick and choose philosophical ideas as you feel comfortable with them or pleased by them; but I do want you to avoid studying philosophy based on what others find to be important." I could say that, and in a way I have, but that is just a simplified sketch of my intellectual stance. Instead, however, I'll go to a higher level of question-begging and quote Kierkegaard from the Philosophical Fragments as a comic example of the precise opposite of what I propose as the philosophic attitude (and by this choice of a comic opposite I risk placing the pseudonymous work closer to the actual philosopher than anyone would like--had the quote not already been masked by Kierkegaard's brilliant humor).

"But perhaps someone will say, 'This is the most ludicrous of all projects, or, rather, you are the most ludicrous of all project-cranks, for even if someone comes up with a foolish scheme, there is always at least the truth that he is the one who came up with the scheme. But you, on the other hand, are behaving like a vagabond who charges a fee for showing an area that everyone can see...' -- 'Maybe so. I hide my face in shame. But, supposing that I am ludicrous, then let me put things right again with a new project...Now I am going to be so courteous as to assume that you are the one who invented it my project--more courtesy you cannot expect. Or, if you deny this, will you then also deny that someone has invented it, that is, some human being? In that case, I am just as close to having invented it as any other person.'"

and, responding to his imaginary interlocutor that he is the "shabbiest" plagiarist ever,

"...I presumably must hear with shame that I am a liar. But why the shabbiest? After all, every poet who steals, steals from another poet, and thus we are all equally shabby; indeed, my stealing is perhaps less harmful since it is more easily discovered."

but, to the charge that he has stolen from the human race in general,

"If that is the case, then if I went around to every single human being and everyone certainly knew about it but everyone also knew that he had not composed it, am I to draw the conclusion that consequently the human race composed it? Would this not be odd?...You called my conduct the shabbiest plagiarism, because I did not steal from any single person, did not rob the human race, but robbed the deity or, so to speak, kidnapped him and, although I am only a single human being--indeed, even a shabby thief--blasphemously pretended to be the god."

The allusions here are split between Socrates and Christ (which raises the riddle, did Kierkegaard mix Socrates with Christ or Christ with Socrates?). I take it to be the butt of Kierkegaard's joke in the Fragments that one cannot possibly claim originality; this is a joke that, when you laugh at it, you are faced with the scathing critique of Hegel that accuses him of milling together old ideas to make them "flow." And so I'm similarly met with a critique of my use of quotation and formulate the central problem of quotation as thus: one cannot speak without putting into play the same words, the same phrases, and (sometimes, but more often than we think) the same ideas already used--perhaps infinitely--by others before us. We are conditioned, as it were, by the acts and expressions of our ancestors. (But do not take this conditioning in an absolute sense; think instead of Harold Bloom in Anxiety of Influence or the work of Jean-Luc Godard.) Philosophy as a practice--or the philosophic attitude--seeks to put stress on these conditions and break the pattern called "conformity."

Conformity is not merely the compliance to norms and standards; conformity in its philosophical sense is to ascribe to unoriginal or "debased" forms of thinking. The method for overcoming conformity is philosophy seen though (but not dispersed throughout) the works of the various philosophers we spend our lives reading. To whom do I spend my life writing? The answer that I (too) neatly conclude on is that I spend my life writing to those who can distinguish between blasphemy and praise--I trust my words to those who can listen creatively (dare I say, sportively?) and who can answer with respect both to my and their own hidden voice. Such is a highly pretentious way to represent my thoughts on the theme of moral perfectionism, but I guess, as Emerson says, and I quote with the requisite trembles, "one cannot spend the day in explanation."

Postscript (12.14.06): I unfairly tossed in the linked terms "blasphemy" and "praise" that Cavell discusses in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. I think I might answer for myself in saying that the obtuse illusion is meant to turn attention to Cavell's use of the word "debased" in Cities of Words and point out the similarity between his concerns about conformity and his concerns about philosophic speech. It requires yet another essay, but if one could tie together these two texts of Cavell, I expect one will learn why Cavell is so interested in certain instances of "ordinary language" as philosophically interesting utterances.