Saturday, 13 December, 2003

Purely exoteric I said I was going to take a moment to try to recollect how we were asked to read Plato, Al Farabi or Hume, Locke or the Bishop Berkeley for that matter back when I was in school. This is in response to my post last friday when I noticed even theStraightDope was making fun of Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss is accused of attempting an end run around Historicism . Historicism is (as nearly as I can tell) the fallacy of interpreting the past by the contextual imperatives of the present. That reading it in our own time and culture is an exercise in re-creation - that tells us nothing about the past. Essentially complex ideas do not travel through time. The idea's and values we think we see in the past are our own from the present. Another way of stating this is to say it is the fallacy of claiming direct knowledge of the past or of its wisdom, through human artifacts. That intellection in a past epoch and culture can only be genuinely understood by that culture in its time. All this points to an certain unknowability about the past, and following from that a certain inconsequentiality to the past. All human problems and solutions are products of their particular moment in time. Philosophers, Political Philosophers at least, tend to believe in the existence of persistent fundamental problems of human society and organization. These originate in human nature, or stem from man's place within nature. Stated carefully, presented meticulously, organized with rigorous craft and art, these are universally recognizable. The topics of political philosphy bring attention from that most prickly member of the bete humane: rulers - and the men with either guns or swords they collect around them. There is often little reward for obviousness. Strauss looked at this problem of exegesis and created a distinction between exoteric writing which were those things a writer said that directly answered or were provoked by particular phenomenon of the writers times and world (which a researcher should be versed in) and esoteric writing. The notion of esoteric writing as Strauss defined it occurred when a writer abstracted, generalized versions of the isolated aspects of the human condition and engaged these issues on an idealized plane. Esoteric writing was thought accessible to those diligently and sincerely engaged in investigative interpretation of a writers work. One thought that crossed my mind is to think of it in terms of arguments that recurrently in up in aesthetics: that the effect of the work may not be due to its theme, implicit narrative, or explicit draftsmanship. Rather it may be due to formal considerations; A certain arrangement of line and color producing a universal effect on the human soul. In the arguments I remember, it was habitual for a writer to state his thesis first in its weak or initial form, then move on to stronger forms. The best writers did this without explicitly telling you why. Sometimes without even telegraphing that a new argument was being moved on. It would simply seem that a writer had made his point and inexplicably kept rattling on becoming increasingly vague and hard to follow until you put the book down. If you really wanted to know you had to figure it out on you own, you had to figure what form of the original question the stronger argument was answering and how that differed from the first. If you got that far you had an inkling of how to test a proposition. Similarly, such as with Al Farabi one might observe him making statements about politics, political science, about religion, Philosophy (in its practical and theoretical divisions). Or about the Virtuous First Ruler, and the master of Virtuous Kingly Craft. You will see him wind his way through strikingly parallel descriptions of these. Except they won't be. The comparison which is directly laid out (sometimes occurring in different works) is not complete. All this is a model kit. The finished piece is the insight the reader has gained through their own labor. 11:58:38 PM    comment [];trackback []; It I want to get back to some "sea stories". I put that in quotes because I have three small stories lined up and only one of them takes place on water. These three are Mark stories. Mark Edmunds was my best friend in my Navy days, the first two years at least. The second two years I was transferred to the Pentagon, Mark stayed in Key West. We lost track of one another. Mark was from North Canton Ohio. Mark had a t-shirt; on the shirt was a crazed looking cartoon buzzard. The buzzard was smoking a joint. Mark always claimed that if anyone wanted to understand him they had to understand the Buzzard and the buzzard's ways. The buzzard only desired that you listen to WMMS. It was probably as reasonably good a key to Mark as any. It Mark liked bars, he liked package stores, he liked enlisted man's clubs. He liked the beer and whiskey he could find in such places. I wasn't a big drinker. I always figured I was just under the drinking mans weight class. Testing this served only to confirm it. Mark would head off to one or more of these places nearly every night. The squadron had just returned from a deployment on the Kitty Hawk, and was soaking up a little down time. Mark and I had only recently joined the unit and were looking for things to happen. On this particular night Mark and a few others set off for downtown Key West about eight miles down the road, the Air Station being on Boca Chica key. He left his room key with me, because unlike my room across the hall, his room had a stuffed chair and a reading lamp - this was not Navy issue furniture. Mark was aggravated at me for not going along, once he decided on a course of action he liked unanminity among those around him. I didn't care. I had a card to the base library and a book to read. Sometime around 1230 that night, Mark and his small group came noisily back. Some people are happy mellow drunks, some effusive. Mark was in the category argumentative and belligerent. "You", he shouted as soon as he laid eyes on me. "You should have been there tonight, but no, you didn't want to go, so you missed it." "It" "That's right it. We were where it was tonight, it was all happening right were we were. It was going down and we were right there." "And what was this?", I asked doubtfully, but Mark shook off the question. "No, I'm not saying. You missed it, you'll always miss it. You'll always be sitting here in some chair when it happens out there, because out there is where it is, not here!" Mark was in more than one of his ordinary bellicose moods. He was in possession of something, something that was escaping him and his ability to explain things. He didn't like this, and tried again. "You don't even understand it, so you don't even know your missing it, but I've seen it. I know its out there, I know about it, and it knows I know about it." Suddenly he was seized by a new idea. "I can show you where it was, then you'll see a little. You'll see how close it was, how near you were to it." At the time we lived on the third and top story of the BEQ (Basic Enlisted Quarters) nearest the main gate. We lived on the north side whose end faced up the Keys. So Mark dragged me down the hall to the other end. This was Florida so there were open air staircases on the ends of the building. We went out onto the landing and Mark climbed up on the railing and motioned for me to climb up as well. Kent Dotson one of Mark's roommates and a parachute rigger followed us out and unobtrusively hung onto Mark. "There, you see that blinking red light on that tower, the one with a blue light below it. Next to that another red light that isn't blinking, and just over from that there is a white light you can barely see." I could see them. I saw the blinking red one, at least, and could tell that he was indicating a neighborhood before Duval Street more around the the north end of White street. "Right there", he rushed on in a state of drunken excitement, "in the space between those lights: that's where it was." Through all this he would periodically pause and wait for me or any of the people who had been with him to attempt to doubt any part of it. No one did. I peered into the darkness of the gulf of Mexico and considered the presence of an eternal universal omphalos resting tentatively among the incidental lights of a small out-of-the-way city. Something glimpsed, for a moment, a sizeless page of possibilities folded down into a knot like an origami crane. Mark had no doubts and pointed out the spot triumphantly: "that's where it was. Tonight it was all happening. Right there, that's were you had to be. If you had been there, you'd know, you'd know everything." I was still thinking about this the next morning and tried to ask him about it at the dining hall during breakfast, but Mark had no recollection of any of it at all. 4:23:08 PM    comment [];trackback [];

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