A kind of timeless present

In comments here Philip Cartwright rants writes:

This brings us to the link between history and philosophy. You've right that they're not the same thing, but the more I consider it the more I think it distorts philosophical ideas to suppose they can be studied as a single discussion taking place in a kind of timeless present. That notion (for me) is itself one of the ideologically-loaded assumptions of philosophy. 

On the one hand, I agree. I think it's relevant when studying Plato's thoughts on politics to know that a relatively democratic Athens executed Socrates and lost in a terrible war to the undemocratic Sparta. I think it's important when studying Aristotle to know that when he says plants have souls he doesn't mean by 'soul' what we might think he means. It's worth knowing who and what people are responding to when we read their works, and worth knowing the language they are writing in, both in terms of being careful about translation and in terms of knowing technical terms and so on.

On the other hand, what are you going to do? If we are interested in more, or something other, than intellectual history, then we have to read these works as part of a conversation with us. And we are stuck in the present. I can't make myself a 17th century Frenchman in order to understand Descartes. I can't make myself share his concerns. This limits the extent to which I can understand him and his work, if only in the sense that I will not be able to relate to it as a well educated 17th century Frenchman might. But it doesn't follow than I cannot get anything out of his work.

With (or even without) a little knowledge of the Reformation and the beginnings of modern science I can find concerns either of my own or at least that I can imagine myself having expressed in his work, and take seriously his attempts to deal with them. Understanding Descartes does not mean being Descartes, so I think it's a mistake to think either that we simply cannot understand him because he belongs to another time and place or that we can understand him if only we immerse ourselves sufficiently in that time and place. A field trip to La Flèche will do the trick! No, it won't. But it is worth keeping in mind that he comes from another time and place (though not, I think, another world) partly to keep ourselves alive to the possibility that we might be misunderstanding (especially if he seems to have made a stupid mistake) and partly to increase ourselves (to fend off smallness) by imagining ourselves in very different circumstances (increasing our sense of possibility) and by coming to see how like us temporal and spatial foreigners can be (yes Descartes lived a long time ago, no he wasn't therefore stupid). 

It's not so much that Plato thought as he did because of the history of Athens (after all, not every Athenian believed in his ideal republic) but that we might not think as we do about politics if our recent history had been otherwise. I doubt it's healthy to reduce others to mere products of their times, but it probably is healthy to see ourselves more that way, i.e. as products of our times. As long we don't just fatalistically and conservatively accept this as a destiny there is no point trying to overcome. It's also probably healthy to see others as others, not simply as easily 'relatable' versions of ourselves, but I imagine the strangeness is most effectively experienced after the familiarity or by way of finding that relatability breaks down here and there.      

Presumably quoting or paraphrasing Wittgenstein, Bouwsma says (September 14th 1950):

About this time we sat on a bench and he began to talk about reading Plato.  Plato's arguments!  His pretence of discussion!  The Socratic irony!  The Socratic method!  The arguments were bad, the pretense of discussion too obvious, the Socratic irony distasteful---why can't a man be forthright and say what's on his mind?  As for the Socratic method in the dialogues, it simply isn't there.  The interlocutors are ninnies, never have any arguments of their own, say "Yes" and "No" as Socrates pleases they should.  They are a stupid lot.  No one really contends against Socrates.  Perhaps Plato is no good, perhaps he's very good.  How should I know?  But if he is good, he's doing something which is foreign to us.  We do not understand.  Perhaps if I could read Greek!

That's one way to read Plato: you read and try to make sense, but in the end conclude that he is too foreign for us to judge his work. But Wittgenstein draws this conclusion because he can't find anything good in Plato's philosophy (he likes the myths, but not the arguments). If you can't judge something to be nice don't judge it to be anything at all. If you can find something good in Plato, presumably then, Wittgenstein would have no objection to your judging that Plato is good. Other things being equal, etc.

Here's more Bouwsma (on Wittgenstein on Descartes):

On Thursday evening we met at Black's. It was my turn to introduce the subject. I introduced: Cogito, ergo sum. After I had finished, W. took it up. "Of course, if _______ now told me such a thing, I should say: Rubbish! But the real question is something different. How did Descartes come to do this?" I asked, did he mean what leads up to it in Descartes' thinking, and the answer was: "No. One must do this for oneself."

I'm not sure exactly what this means. Presumably you couldn't ignore the text completely and still claim to know how Descartes came to do this. You need the text to tell you what this is. But you need more than just the text. You need to bring yourself in, your own thinking. Thinking of Descartes as a mere product of his times is a) irrelevant to doing this, b) possibly harmful, in the sense that it would undermine your ability to imagine yourself into his words (where imagining involves not picturing but actual thinking, i.e. meaning the thoughts you think), and c) the kind of bad faith that Sartre associates with Antisemitism and other kinds of racism (because it denies the free will of the person in question). Knowing some history, etc. might help in identifying the this but it won't help otherwise. You're on your own there. And in the present, always.

Rorty on nonsense

In "Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn," Rorty distinguishes between two kinds of Wittgensteinians: therapeutic Wittgensteinians, such as Conant and Diamond, and pragmatic Wittgensteinians, like Rorty. A big part of the difference is their different attitudes towards confusion and nonsense:

consider the difference between the everyday use of epithets like “confused” and “nonsensical” and their technical use by Wittgensteinian therapists. When Descartes mocked the Aristotelian definition of motion (“the actualization of the potential qua potential”) as unintelligible, he did not try to back up this charge with argument. The term “unintelligible” was just a rhetorical flourish. His point was simply that it would be better to treat “motion” as a primitive term than to try to synthesize mechanism with hylomorphism. When other fans of the New Science called various Scotist and Ockhamite doctrines “nonsense” they did not mean that these authors had failed to attach meaning to the words they used. Rather, they used “nonsense” to mean something like “not worth bothering about, now that Aristotle has been dethroned by Galileo and Newton.” “Useless” would have been as appropriate an epithet as “confused.” (p. 170)

There is a difference between Rorty and, let's say, me on this, but I don't think it's quite the difference he presents. Philosophical Investigations 500 says that:

When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation. 

I doubt that any of the New Wittgensteinians would disagree with this, and it's certainly close to Rorty's idea of what 'nonsense' means. As far as meaning is use, meaninglessness (aka nonsense) is uselessness. It's also worth noting that part of the resolute view of nonsense is that 'nonsense' is not a technical term. So I think that Rorty has obscured the difference between himself and the Wittgensteinian therapists.

The real difference might almost be called an ethical one. He cares about usefulness in a historical and more or less consequentialist way (which is one reason why I'm always surprised to find myself agreeing with him). Now that Aristotle has been dethroned his views are nonsense. And that means they are simply not worth our bothering about. The goal, as Rorty says, is "to create a better human future" (p. 169). Therapists, on the other hand, care about individuals or selves. They want to improve themselves and to help, or at least understand, others, and not in a mass way, should anyone think that possible or worthwhile, but as individuals. So it matters to them why Aristotle thought as he did, why Descartes thought as he did, and so on. Understanding comes before cultural change.

This understanding is of a particular kind, though, it seems to me. It is not historical and it is almost egocentric. One puts oneself in the other's shoes, thereby ignoring causal factors. So a Wittgensteinian might want to know why Descartes thought as he did, but she will not do this by taking into account his Jesuit education or the politics of his day. At least, that kind of thing is not likely to be her primary focus. Wittgenstein himself did not go in for that kind of scholarship. His method is suggested by this passage from O. K. Bouwsma's record of conversations with Wittgenstein:

On Thursday evening we met at Black's. It was my turn to introduce the subject. I introduced: Cogito, ergo sum. After I had finished, W. took it up. "Of course, if _______ now told me such a thing, I should say: Rubbish! But the real question is something different. How did Descartes come to do this?" I asked, did he mean what leads up to it in Descartes' thinking, and the answer was: "No. One must do this for oneself." (pp. 12-13)

If cogito ergo sum is rubbish then it is because it is useless in something close to Rorty's sense. But the interest of the therapeutic Wittgensteinian (as I understand it--I don't mean to speak as if for other people) is not in what we can use and what should be left behind if we are to improve our culture. The interest is in how an intelligent person can be led to talk nonsense, and how we can avoid the same fate. And that means  taking seriously the possibility that Rorty is right when he says of Heidegger's Das Nichts nichtet:

The language game in question is one that Heidegger deliberately and self-consciously created. It is utterly implausible to think that Heidegger might have been led, by a process of elucidation, to find himself “confused about his relation to his own words.”

Rorty also says that, "Anything will have a sense if you try hard enough to give it one," which is at least close to being true.

But it is possible to struggle to find the right words, and to struggle to think well about something. Heidegger didn't believe that thinking was a breeze, or that whatever he said would be just fine. Neither did Aristotle or Descartes. So what Rorty finds "utterly implausible" is possible, however unlikely it might seem or be. This does not mean that it would be a good use of time to try to imagine how the process might go with Heidegger (although it might be). What it does mean is that there is a way of erring with language that Rorty is (consciously) overlooking. It is not utterly implausible that lesser minds than Heidegger and Descartes might go wrong in this kind of way. And it seems perfectly reasonable--both normal and useful--to call this kind of error "speaking nonsense." So therapeutic Wittgensteinians are concerned with a broader category of nonsense than Rorty is, have a different goal (more personal than political), and therefore a different focus. But I don't think the difference is anything to do with a technical use of 'confusion' or 'nonsense' by the therapists.

Yo no soy marinero

I know it's a well known passage, but I still don't know what to make of this from Descartes (in Jonathan Bennett's translation):

Nature also teaches me, through these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I (a thinking thing) am not merely in my body as a sailor is in a ship. Rather, I am closely joined to it—intermingled with it, so to speak—so that it and I form a unit. If this were not so, I wouldn’t feel pain when the body was hurt but would perceive the damage in an intellectual way, like a sailor seeing that his ship needs repairs. And when the body needed food or drink I would intellectually understand this fact instead of (as I do) having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. These sensations are confused mental events that arise from the union—the intermingling, as it were—of the mind with the body.

This related passage is curious too:

Again, why should that curious tugging in the stomach that I call ‘hunger’ tell me that I should eat, or a dryness of the throat tell me to drink, and so on? I couldn’t explain any of this, except to say that nature taught me so. For there is no connection (or none that I understand) between the tugging sensation and the decision to eat, or between the sensation of something causing pain and the mental distress that arises from it. It seems that nature taught me to make these judgments about objects of the senses, for I was making them before I had any arguments to support them.

The words "(or none that I understand)" are surely crucial here, since there is a connection between hunger and wanting to eat, and another "between the sensation of something causing pain and the mental distress that arises from it" (although I'm really not sure how there can be two things in this case). It seems to me that there is a continuum (perhaps even a discontinuous one, if that makes any sense), from symptoms that one must learn are removable by, say, drinking water to painful knowledge of thirst. So I might cough a little, or feel vaguely like coughing, and diagnose that I should go to the water fountain. A baby would have no clue what was wrong, and perhaps little sense that anything was wrong, if it felt the same sensation in its throat. But at the extreme of thirst the knowledge that one needs water and the feeling of discomfort are, I imagine, indistinguishable. (I think Schopenhauer is good on this sort of thing, the dry throat as thirst embodied. And thirst is for water, so the concept of water is, so to speak, embodied in the throat and tongue.) So we can perceive something like mild thirst or pre-thirst in an intellectual, sailor-in-a-ship kind of way (which I suppose is what enables us to distinguish between the intellectual and the sensory or bodily), but we also sometimes experience "mental events" that are confusions of the intellectual and the bodily.

In the Third Meditation, Descartes says that "nature taught me to believe" means "I have a strong impulse to believe," but if God is no deceiver then, by Descartes's lights, these impulses should be true. So I am an intermingled unit of body and mind. We can conceptually distinguish the bodily from the intellectual, and so God could keep the mind going after the death of the body, but this mind would have no sensations (because sensations are, effectively, proof of the intermingling of mind and body). Nor would it be me in the full sense.

Gordon Baker and Katherine Morris (p. 153) say that Descartes means to say that the connection between the "tugging sensation" and the decision to eat is inexplicable, incapable of being understood, because it involves an apparently causal connection between something physical and something mental. But it only appears impossible when viewed from the sailor's perspective, it seems to me. And I am not a sailor.