josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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Danto's catalogue of philosophy's forms of literary expression in 'Philosophy and/as/of Literature':
'dialogues, lecture notes, fragments, poems, examinations, essays, aphorisms, meditations, discourses, hymns, critiques, letters, summae, encyclopedias, testaments, commentaries, investigations, tractatuses, Vorlesungen, Aufbauen, prolegomena, parerga, pensees, sermons, supplements, confessions, sententiae, inquiries, diaries, outlines, sketches, commonplace books, and, to be self-referential, addresses, and innumerable forms which have no generic identity or which themselves constitute distinct genres: Holzwege, Grammatologies, Unscientific Postscripts, Genealogies, Natural Histories, Phenomenologies, and whatever the World as Will and Idea may be or the posthumous corpus of Husserl, or the later writings of Derrida, and forgetting the standard sorts of literary forms, e.g., novels, plays, and the like, which philosophers have turned to when gifted in those ways… '
Berel Lang, I think, approaches this list by way of the (totally sensible) coordinates (or radicals of presentation, probably) of author and audience. But I think its sloppy mishmash of generic titles, names of forms, names of genres, literal titles treated as if they were names of forms or genres, etc. really needs to be periodized somehow before it could be of much use. When, say, are which forms the new or normal or privileged ones? When and which are the instruments of critique, investigation, dogmatizing, etc? And then you can sensibly investigate, say, the selves and worlds that go with the forms.
—Say, on the level of 'obvious to a human being': obviousness bearing ontological commitments. Oneself, others, things, places, the world.
Obviousness, not as a perceptual or epistemological category, but as an existential.
'Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a "beetle"…' (§293). —Supposing that everyone has (is) a box is as much a part of the trick as the something is.
Goethe and Herrick while waiting for the sun to peak. Simple forms for saying simple things.
Where do the distinctions drawn by philosophers exist? What sustains them? Less, it seems, than sustains our words, or the diagrams and notations that mathematicians use. It's not, as urged, that they are finer; they are practically insubstantial. —The philosopher's mania is that they not go unthought.