[MD] Doug Renselle & Language

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Krimel,

Matt said:
Meh.  I can't get too excited about that as a problem.  I tend to think 
the advantages of "Quality" and "dynamic/static" as choices in terms 
for Pirsig's purposes far outweigh the disadvantages.  Those terms
 are like Hegel's Geist or Heidegger's Dasein: stuff you get to play 
with when deploying the vocabulary.

Krimel said:
I love the KJV because its terms are foreign. I am bothered by a 
word with known meanings suddenly having none or some other. 
I detest the illusion that that baggage can be set aside.

Matt:
Meh, and I take it you're more like a "meh," too, given the relativity of 
foreignness.  What's detestable (and theoretically so) is believing the 
illusion, rather than understanding it as a heuristic.  For example, 
"close reading" as an operational term was brought into the 
humanities by the New Critics.  By the 60s, everybody was sick and 
tired of the theoretical assumption that a text should be read without 
bringing in any knowledge external to the text (mainly because 
everyone had become suspicious of the internal/external distinction).  
So, today, New Criticism as a theoretical position is ancient history 
in the academy.  However, everyone teaches close reading, because 
smart people realized that even if it was a theoretically untenable 
position, it was a tremendous practical skill.

I'm reading off and on right now Robert Pippin's Hegel's Practical 
Philosophy, and he makes a point of saying that Hegel went out of 
his way in trying to make up a new philosophical language to state 
with precision his thoughts.  The opacity of Hegel, of course, is 
legendary.  What is wonderful about work on Hegel by people like 
Pippin or Brandom, or on Heidegger like by Dreyfus and Haugland, 
is that they take seriously this attempt to say precisely by means of 
language that otherwise has other connotations, and what it 
produces is a response to dark writing that is "we didn't know 
what they were saying until now."  I think that's a good response.  
We need people who go out on a limb and try and say new things 
with old language by saying, "Ok, try as much as you can to block 
out what you know about Geist--see what happens if you collage 
your terms of understanding this way."  The current resurgence of 
interest in Hegel in anglophone philosophy is centered, I think, 
around the rising appreciation that Hegel inaugurated a way of 
understanding this phenomena of retrospective understanding, 
and it's role in intellectual progress and the like.

Krimel said:
My first class, (not the one threatening Foucault) is on Narrative 
Identity, team taught by a Heideggarian and an auto-ethnographer. 
There is a literary connection there you might find interesting.

Matt:
I've been toying a lot with the indispensibility of narrative for 
identity (and much else) quite a bit recently.  It's, basically, the 
radical notion of Hegel's I alluded to above.  The seminar you're 
taking sounds like it will be very interesting.  I have an essay to 
be posted at the end of the week on my site called "The 
Ellisonian Self" that goes through some of the stomping ground 
I've been in.

Recalling your teaching life in psychology, you might check out 
Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought if you haven't already 
run into it.  She's part classicist, part philosopher, part 
all-around-know-it-all, and that book is a major entry into 
rethinking the emotions, and she spends some time on the 
centrality of narrative to growth and whatnot.

Good luck with your program.  It's a great feeling, I know, 
starting into one.

Matt