It occurs to me that the drain-circling vertigo of current politics in the USA can be attributed in large part to the fact that the people who profess to know what’s going on prefer nouns to verbs. They’re well-versed in what’s already dead, in what’s being born, not so much.
I found it! Offering without editorial intervention of hindsight. Risk wasn’t in my thinking, admittedly…. more, with only the language of the past to guide we’re thwarted in seeing the future before us…. until, that is, maybe, when it becomes the past? Anyway.
“You are sending me back to a box of dusty books to search for Concord and Liberty by Ortega Y Gassett. A fusty memory of a comrade in arms who – in reference to that book – said something about there being no language for some things (Gene was also a reader of Ludwig Wittgenstein and big on natural language). And Gene quipped about not understanding the transition form the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire – that is, not having the language to understand – until World War II. Ugh. Never had a chance to go back and tease out precisely what he meant, but I found the book and attempted to ferret out a context, a hint, or a clue. Got nowhere, and packed the book away. Now, here you are talking about nouns and being versed in what’s already dead. And, that ghost of a conversation extends its tendrils back to haunt me. When I finally get back home, once more into the breach for me.”
Reading it again, I might have deleted it! I’m not sure it makes any sense. And, for the record, I think Concord and Liberty got lousy reviews.
Ah, another genius who escaped the Jesuits’ clutches with a mental purseful of their crown jewels. I confess I’ve read no Ortega y Gassett at all, but I’m familiar with several of his adjacents—most notably Husserl and his phenomenological epoché, Nietzsche and his manic dances on the corpse of Christianity. And no worries, your comment makes perfect sense to me. I’d say your friend Gene’s bon mot has about it a whiff of history not repeating itself but rhyming, of Chou En Lai’s reply when asked about the influence of the French revolution that it was “too early to say,” of Sartre’s observation that “existence precedes essence.” We arrive at the language for representing any phenomenon in one of two ways, by encountering it directly, or by analogizing it to some previously digested encounter. An existentialist would say that the first method is preferable, albeit dangerous. The second method, on the other hand, while comfortable, leads into stagnation, the death wish cloaked as stability.
In my own case, somewhere along the way I settled on my own peculiar amalgam of Dionysian exuberance and existential stoicism. It began in the surprise of finding Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant in translation a congenial read (I once got thrown out of a freshman philosophy class by a professor devoted to Russell and Wittgenstein for defending it too vigorously.) His La Republique du Silence, which I read in my early twenties—again in translation—became a kind of catechism for me, pulled off the shelf again whenever I began to doubt the maturity of my current political engagements. I remember waiting a whole year for the English translation of La Critique de la Raison Dialectique to appear in the US, eventually giving up in despair before some academic Johnny Appleseed—I no longer remember who—gifted me a bootleg photocopy (both volumes) of the London edition. It disappeared in one of my early moves, and when I looked for it again at some point in the early Nineties, it was no longer there. Maybe I only dreamt it, who knows? So much of life has passed for me in the same way—was it real, or was it Memorex….
Sigh. Now I know two people who were thrown out of their philosophy classes…. or, in Gene’s case he was thrown out of the philosophy department.
Going to have to mull your thoughts some more. Gene’s path and mine crossed under some unusual (?) circumstances. Might be grist for a lengthy email? How to explain a truly subversive form of teaching intended to subvert the discipline of a service with the very recipients of that service? Gene was fairly adamant that to understand a “that”, and to agree on a “that”, you had to have a “that” to point to. We “encountered” a whole shit ton of stuff on that path. He would not have dismissed the usefulness of analogs when all else failed, but his tendency was to encounter.
In any event, you’ve given me some additional paths to follow. Thank you for those avenues.
Sounds like a regular Socrates, your friend Gene. Was even forced to swallow the (metaphorical) hemlock. Another sort of character we need more of. One would hope that someday the world will be mysteriously full of them—suddenly the mode of the music changed, the walls of the city beginning to shake. The haruspications of the moment aren’t favorable, I admit, but if we know anything at all, we know that while prophets may not be immortal, they are eternal. It’s the one comfort an individual may legitimately take from the collective.
P.S.: lengthy emails are welcome, assuming you don’t want to post the contents on a more or less public forum like this one.