Preface: the Toast
Dr. P.Q.:
For most of my life I have had a
secret wish, a secret prayer. For some,
its contents might appear a bit bizarre and entirely irrational, yet I do not believe
that I am the first, the last, nor presently the only, to hold such a
dream. The particulars of the dream are
infinitely hard to rightly conceptualize in my own mind, to iron out its
millions of possible flaws in a way that sits comfortably
in my stomach, and so I do not have much faith in my own ability to describe it
adequately on the page for another. I fear that no matter what words I choose,
every person reading will come up with their own interpretation, every word
with a dramatic history of its own to
the reader, and so meaning itself slides further into some estranged alcove—not
fully its own cave but some small sliver of an area where our two meanings
overlay.
If I were to try, however, it would
be something like this: It would be discovered somehow, in some sort of
entirely non-operational and non-medical procedure way, that all my life I have
had a very tiny and accidental brain tumor. I use the word tumor only because I do not
know any other word, but I do not mean to offend anyone who has had their life
in anyway affected by some terrible form of cancer, and more properly, a tumor
isn’t quite the idea.
Whatever I am trying to describe
here would be entirely benevolent, and easily enough removed once discovered by
some form of black-magic, no doubt. The
net-value of all of this, the result of having this deficiency removed, would
be a proper understanding of all that hitherto had passed through my mind. So far, all the content of which has come and
go as a jumble of broken-thoughts—loosely connected words in a language
resembling my own. It would be my way
out of the Cave, so to speak, and
best of all I would be able to blame my captivity there entirely on powers
beyond my control: All former errors of
logic would cease to be my own, prior intellectual short-coming erased, and a
brand new era of philosophy would usher forth from my finger-tips, through a mind no longer hampered. Real virtue
would be clear as daylight; rhetoric would become easily discernible from
knowledge. My eye for truth would be forever fixed inward, as the eye of
Socrates was turned when he met the doctor of his soul, Zalmoxis (Lampert 166).
Put simply, I would no longer be at loss for words in ethical matters
pertaining to our souls.
I
believe that it is under the guidance of this prayer that I have recently been
directed to the discourse of the post-structuralists and even the
post-modernists, in whose company I have found agreement to my thesis. It is long past the time when the
metaphysicians have been sent scrambling from their centers. We have discovered from the Buddhists the
precepts of change and the un-ending inwardness that reduces everything to
nothing. And then, we learned to reject
even that.
We are
concerned now with the lived conditions
of the world. We no longer await the
freedom of necessity or reason or God’s angry scepter that turned out all along
to be our own ressentiment. Our new fashion is to dance around the old
truths in celebration for where we’ve been because we have seen the errors of
forgetting, even poetically, for even a moment in the human-fires of Auschwitz. We are not blind to the past but we are not
tortured by its blood. The old feeling
was that we were always in a state of settling into a new sort of skin, the
kind of which, if we were ever to have shed off, would always leave us more
naked and vulnerable. Our new knowledge,
our new understanding, though, is vested in accepting that civilization itself
only covers up its own inexistence. The
signified is unmasked as a hoax. But
rather than deploring our displacement from our island in the Sun, we have
taken to celebrating in the name of life.
God has taken our place on the island which we have no interest in
recovering for its own sake, but rather for ours alone do we look upon Him. We have finally become beautiful Sophists.
I would
begin celebrating by a long toast dedicated to some key Sophists along the way,
who made our blessed ignorance a possibility.
The usual names, no doubt, need rattled off: Fathers (of all types), Apollo,
Plato, Kant, Mothers and sisters, and Shantideva; these signposts are scattered
landmarks, which from a birds-eye view would all be seen as pointing in an miss-shaped
circle, leading impossibly nowhere and in no particular direction. But these names also fall outside of current
discourse, so much for them.
-1-
[Only now do the
dinner-guests arrive all at once in their flashy apparel. They begin taking
their seats at the far end of the table and only reluctantly do they sit next to
the dinner-host, "that is the way with good friends," he tells
himself. The napkins on each guests'
plate has a passage embroidered into it, resembling lecture notes. There are
also name plates in front of every guest, because there was no seating arrangement
these names are entirely arbitrary.]
Dr. P.Q.:
I think
that by this point in our four to five year relationship with one another, we
should all be well aware of the problem that plagues us all.
[Blank stares.]
Yes,
meaning, intentionality, and all their related fallacies. Plato warned us to keep our city free of the
artists, but I look around this table today and I see a lot of artists. Ah, yes.
You have all come in here with your many colored coats, those garments
gathered from the four corners—you disloyal
artists.
But, sir, aren't we beyond Ideas? I can
hear you asking this very questions in your heads, though you are too afraid to
say it yet.
Our Republic, you say, is all the more diverse, all the more
honest, thanks to castrating Plato. We
have committed the act that he explicitly condemned in his treatise and are
thankful for that, we existentialists. God is on His island now, not in the
sky. All the better we are for it! We are no longer philosopher-dogs, no longer
guards and camels, but we are lion-children—forever right, forever free, with
all of our flavor, creating the most magnificent salad—since here I assume
you are all vegetarians, you morally free artists.
But I
have a different name for us. Virtual Philosophers, I shall call us, and shall
explain in due time. As Virtual Philosophers,
as well as with artists, sometimes we like to adorn ourselves with
multi-colored clothing where each individual color is supposed to express how
free, diverse, and accepting (not to mention, unique) we are. How anti-structualist we are! But I have a warning to issue you: in doing
this we all invite a great deal of risk.
The very real risk that our many-colors turn out, in fact, to be only a
dull and convoluted sequence, each color lacking in the intricacy of its origin,
the splendor of its original. What we are left with is representation that
refuses to be recognized as such and is instead confused with a lived condition. Yes, it is as though in our attempt to wear
as many colors as we can, we in effect end up having no color to show at all.
Or, in
our attempt to accept and value everything, each item loses its identity, its
heritage, its diversity, its very value.
True diversity, positive diversity, cannot flourish in these conditions,
we in turn reject everything that comes our way, especially that which we had
come to know first—that which should be an item of ourselves. The Delphic order to know thyself, thus becomes impossible, not only that but even
worse, it becomes something which we despise more than anything else. We want to reflect a well rounded education,
do we not? A worldly outlook, not some Eurocentric monocle that is glazed over
in the filthy scum of colonialism and capital economics. Filthy words and filthy values!
[He looks around the table at the weary faces.]
Ian
Walker-Sperber, read your napkin, and if you would, do speak up.
Sperber:
"In the shadows of a sleeping head pressed against the
clovers meaning must unfold, as do tulips from the earth in early spring"
(Walker-Sperber).
Dr. P.Q.:
Remarkable. Meaning must
unfold! As do tulips. As do tulips. Should not spring unfold in every
flower? Does the origin of every flower
not but help to beautify the garden? Do
we really wish to have only a single tulip which all other flowers are reduced
to? How odd that this archaic way of
thinking would find its way into the lines of an undergraduate poetry journal.
You see, this artists too, is a Virtual Philosopher.
But
what is meant by Virtual Philosopher anyway?
What makes us so proud, why do we rejoice in all of this risk? Roland
Barthes, if you would, read.
Roland Barthes:
"Writing
is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin...writing is the
neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative
where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing...it
is language that speaks, not the author" (Barthes 1322 – 3).
Dr. P.Q.:
Yes,
after the death of God, why not the author too?
Barthes begins to strip the author of his capacity to create. He cannot say what he wants to say. Firstly,
because his language is inherited and he can never be its source. The definitions of all words are lost within
one another: language signs point to one another indefinitely. It is
language itself that speaks, not the author. Secondly, this points to the problem of the
writer as positing meaning at all: is the writer the one containing the meaning
of the text, or does the reader impose meaning upon it? The reader brings his or her own background
to the text and cannot possibly know what the writer wrote, but rather, only knows what they themselves read.
Roland Barthes:
"Once
the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile...when
the 'Author' has been found, that text is 'explained'—victory to the
critic" (1325).
Dr. P.Q.:
Yes,
yes, enough, quite enough! What has the critic to do with the philosopher? Barthes,
you have read too far into your napkin, as usual. Lets skip Foucault, he won't get us anywhere.
Jacques Derrida, what do you have?
Jacques Derrida:
To
start with, I identify from Levi-Strauss the concept of bricoleur, that is, "someone who uses 'the means at hand,'
that is, the instrument he finds at his disposition around him, those which are
already there" (Derrida). Secondly,
there is bricolage, "the necessity
of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less
coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engineer...should be one
to construct the totality of his language...the engineer is a myth" (ibid).
Dr. P.Q.:
And so,
our great heritage is the deaths of God, the author, and the engineer. So well!
What we are left with is brick-laying,
always with the blueprints of others, the blueprints themselves never depicting
either its origin nor a clear end.
Let us
consider, as a small example, the case of an old secretary of our very own
philosophy department, not long ago retired.
She believed, very strongly, that she could receive a full degree's
worth of an education by merely reading the many student paper-proposals that
came her way. The students were her
brick-layers, and she collected those many bricks to construct her own
wall. Each brick illuminating her own
world! We Virtual Philosophers are
engaged in endless grunt work to build the building which has no center, no
origin, and no final cause. We are
efficient, that is for sure, but for what?
The question itself fizzles into an incoherent breeze. Speaking of breezes, I have a short story to
share, a mythos of my own, which, as we have just learned, cannot possibly be
my own.
Sitting
in a room, alone, a man began to doze off in his armchair. That is when he
began to hear distant utterances from outside his window. He rose to his feet, crossed his chamber, and
opened the window—clearly there were audible words, they seemed to be lines
from a poem:
Turning and turning in the
widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Now, let us forget that we know these are the words of
William Butler Yeats, from his poem "The Second Coming." Our poor protagonist is not as well read as
are we artists, we Virtual Philosophers; he does not know the origin of these
lines.
This
man's house was many miles away from any neighbor, he lived in total
isolation. Could the wind be making
poetry? Was someone lost in his
woods? Was it only his imagination playing
tricks on him? Perhaps he had fallen
asleep and this was only dream-content. What
did any of these questions matter, anyway?
Weren't these words alone evidence of poetry? Does it matter if the
source of these words were the intentionless wind, the utterances of a
travelling bard, or the tricks of his own imagination? Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, what does
your napkin read?
A Student:
It
appears to be the origin of your mythos, sir...
Dr. P.Q.:
I did not ask for your interpretation, I asked you only to
read. What is on your napkin?
Steven Knapp and
Walter Benn Michaels:
The
author's "intended meaning" and "the text's meaning" are
one and the same, it is a mistake to confuse them, from page 2492, of some
un-Godly anthology, sir.
The
theorists relate to the reader a story of waves inscribing a poem onto the
beach, and the question becomes, "whether the marks counted as language,
what determined the answer was a decision of an intentional agent," from
2496, sir.
Dr. P.Q.:
Yes,
very good. Without an intentional agent
behind the appearance of words on the beach, did the markings only resemble
language? If the wind was responsible
for poem heard by my own protagonist, then did those sounds only resemble
words? The wind could not have
intention, but the drowsy philosopher certainly does have intention. An
intention to interpret based on his own profession, on his own life's
passion. No doubt, such passion cannot
produce a beautiful interpretation. One
unique, though perhaps not necessarily worldly
enough for acceptance today: still, I would argue, it may be more positively
diverse than most of those allegedly worldly
interpretations that assimilate beyond their capacity—beyond their own honest
outlook into a realm outside themselves.
And so,
why is God dead? By imagining that some God created existence we necessarily
ascribe to existence an element of intentionality, an agency behind it
all. This is the divine purpose that we
now flee from in our many colored jackets.
We realize that by doing so we project our own intention upon the
universe, and worse, our own moral identity which not all should be held to. These coats make it difficult to recognize
one another. They let us make believe
that we do not need truth and that we are independent of it. We are beautiful sophists, now aren't we? In
our elegant and blurred dress. Our
formulation of the Virtual Philosopher needs one final stop, Wolfgang Iser,
what do you bring to our dinner?
Wolfgang Iser:
"Central
to the reading of every literary work is the interaction between its structure
and its recipient...The text itself simply offers schematicized aspects through
which the aesthetic object of the work can be produced" (Iser 1524).
He
posits that the literary work has two poles, the aesthetic and the artistic, but
that the work itself exists at neither end, but somewhere in between,
"virtual in character as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text
or the subjectivity of the reader" (ibid).
Dr. P.Q.:
Ah,
yes, and so it is, the work itself is a wall, built in pure bricolage fashion, between where it
began and where it was received. If both
the writer and the reader are each bricoleurs,
then the resulting work is mere aggregation of bricks from both ends blocking
the full interaction with one another.
Each brick is its own stumbling block.
Each brick is half writer half reader.
Each brick itself is virtual. We
have killed God, author, and engineer, now to kill philosopher as well—there is
only now, Virtual Philosopher. The
result of all things arbitrary, nothing truly diverse, nothing accepted: all is
rejected, all is culture, nothing natural, nothing existing positively,
everything a negation and a reduction to common terms. Man is now the measure of nothing, for his
measuring stick is itself an evil device to be mistrusted and cast off. Freedom is virtual, a dull note with no
meaning: a vague in between, a mild but repressed gesture to act. As intentional agents we cannot even be shown
to have a will at all, only the memory of one that is preserved, though
perverted, through the great acts of bricolage.
The Ethical
[It is uncertain who
said what follows.]
The
upshot: Anything that can be considered rightfully as “nature” does not need,
and cannot be, studied. All study is
artificial, a framework that de-naturalizes.
A tree loses its relation to nature when we describe it—it then enters
language, it becomes a symbol, an unnatural invention of culture. An action becomes unnatural when it is studied. Therefore, all morals, all ethics, are
unnatural. Without the structure that
contains it or describes it an action is only animalistic, instinct, wholly
apart from ethics: The wolf has a will because it does not question its own
action. An odd reversal develops when
rationality is cast away.
Epilogue: Legacy of Evil
You
will find no core evil among any individual human. No seed, no genesis of evil;
Satan incarnate has never walked or slithered among mortals. There is, rather, a legacy of evil words,
evil ideas and contexts, each building upon another and so on. All origins in this regard are myths. Each idea is mere simulacrum, subjectively
received through virtual existence between individuals through the complexities
of each host of ideas. The host is he who gives toast to the
Promethean mortals of rhetoric. The
hosts are those greedy enough for audience, an ethos, control, and eternal
resonance, like when a dinner host strikes the wine glass and its vibration
rings clearly in the ears of all those dinner guests gathered around the
table. This table, however, is one that
extends through time inviting guests from all ages to attend, to listen, to
applaud.
Every member of the dinner party can
(hypothetically) hear exactly the same speech and will end up with their own
representation of the original speech.
Plato identified this time and again in his dialogues, such as in Charmides where Socrates is seen
questioning the beautiful youth to see how far his own words had gotten away
from him while he was away at war (Lampert 156). There were, at the time, no philosopher-dogs
to watch over and care for his words, Critias had failed in that regard.
The point is that philosophers must
consider the subjective, even while they construct the universal—to do
otherwise is reckless and has been shown so time and again. There needs to be awareness to how some truth
claim may be received by another’s interaction with it, that is, in its virtual
existence. No true representation of
one’s thoughts will ever manifest in another—and we share neither will nor consciousness. The eternal, as it turns out, is a fragile
thing.
Works
Cited
Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author.” The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism Second Edition. Ed.
Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2001. 1322 – 6. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play.” <http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html>
Online.
Visited: 1, December 2012.
Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction Between Text and Reader.” The Norton Anthology of Theory &
Criticism
Second Edition. Ed. Vincent
B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1524 – 32.
Print.
Knapp, Steven and Walter Benn Michaels. "Against
Theory." The Norton Anthology &
Criticism Second
Edition. Ed. Vincent B.
Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2491 –
2506.
Print.
Lampert, Laurence. How
Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of Plato's "Protagoras,"
"Charmides," and
"Republic." Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
2010. e-book.
Walker-Sperber, Ian. "To Sleep." Rainy Day.
<http://rso.cornell.edu/rainyday/pdf/rainyday_fall_2011_large.pdf>
Online. Visited 1,
December
2012.
Yeats, William Butler. "The Second Coming." PotW.org <
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html>
Online.
Visited: 1, December 2012.
