Wood on Scott

September 24 2004 David Wood

First I want to say what an uncanny pleasure this occasion is for me. I am here at Vanderbilt this Friday afternoon in part because I was attracted to a university and a department I had long associated with Charles Scott. He had invited me to talk a couple of times in the 80s. I knew, rationally, that the job was available only because Charles had left. But it did not quite sink in until I arrived and found him gone. Uncanny too was the sense that I was taking over the place that Charles had occupied. It took me a while to feel I was wearing my own shoes, rather than flopping around in his seven league boots. In short in my early days here I was haunted by Charles, in a good way.

The second uncanniness comes from this specific occasion — of having someone (tho not just anyone) talk about one's work. The narcissistic pleasure is real enough. But alongside it, there is the fascination of hearing one's name attached to ideas, wondering whether one still believes what one once wrote. If authorship is a public struggle for sense, a book can sometimes seem like the moment the milk in the saucepan boiled over. Afterwards the froth subsides. Did I really say those things? Did I mean them? What did I mean by them? Then a reader appears and starts to warm up the stove again. Uncanny too is the particular take that another has on one's work — especially when he is a friend, albeit a stern one — an extension of the strange sensations one has when one learns what other people think about you, or you are shown a new photograph of yourself — this time marginally displaced onto a book, the academic fetish object par excellence.

And then there is the very idea of responding to comments — whether one should defend one's ideas, correct the interpretation, engage in polite gratitude, Derridean ingratitude or start thinking afresh about the questions raised. It is not clear that there is a proper response, and if there is, what it should be. In some ways Charles has made things more difficult for me by not being too critical. Instead, he has translated me, transposed me into a subtly different key, with a bit of poking and prodding on the way.

So, let me say at the outset — thank you. Not least for capturing much of the spirit of my own philosophical enterprise. Yes, this was, a think, a "good translation day".

What I propose to do is to take up a number of the issues you raise to explain why they matter to me, and to philosophy. And I hope that this broader significance will each time become evident. Talking about philosophy, will I hope overflow from time to time into philosophizing.

If I may, I will start by responding to two remarks about the tradition. You said that "if you have no interest in Heidegger and in the lineage in which his thought occurs there is no reason for you to read this book". You connect this with the dangers of translating the kind of experiences at issue in this tradition, into canonical Western philosophical structures. Later on you mark as one of the themes you will not ask me about — "my ways of incorporating aspects of the AA tradition". I think I can helpfully illuminate these together.

It is true that this book could not have been written if I had not read Heidegger. Thinking after Heidegger means both thinking in the wake of Heidegger, and also "thinking after" in a way that echoes running after, or taking after. But rather than putting it as Charles does, I would rather turn it round and say that you could not enjoy this book and not end up with an interest in Heidegger and his lineage. I truly hope you do not need a pre-existing interest. As much as I believe in singular events in history, and the need to protect cultural specificities from too ready colonization by the night that blackens all cows (and here I am thinking of Heidegger's very careful dialogue between a Japanese and an Inquirer, in which he cautions against too ready a translation of Japanese aesthetic concepts), — as much as I believe in these precautions, I also believe that much of what Heidegger has to teach is us translatable — not into canonical Western philosophical structures, but into a certain sensibility, responsibility, and a way of thinking. And if this translation is in some ways a betrayal, it may also be an invigorating transformation. When Thoreau talks about walking as setting out on a journey with no assurance that you will return home, he is voicing a shape of thought that Heidegger could have echoed.

And I think it is important to confess publicly that my own philosophical inheritance has been indelibly formed by reading Ryle, Austin, Wittgenstein and other quasi-analytic types — each of whom understood philosophical health in terms of a certain openness to the richness of "ordinary" non-philosophical language. — the rough ground, as Wittgenstein put it. Even more heretically, I would say, we still need to pursue the ways in which the multiply hybrid dimensions of the English language offer, or can be deployed in such a way as to offer, ongoing resistance to what I have called the naturalizing of the concept-object relation. Most "ideas" can be expressed in English in multiple ways, drawing on a whole variety of embedded language. (English contains more words than all the other major European languages put together.) This very fact is a source of resistance to conceptual systematization, although it is not central to Heidegger's thinking. I would add that there are even aspects of Humean empiricism or the common sense philosophy of Reid and Moore that I would want to draw into the circle of friends of this phronesis.

The tradition that most interests me moves from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Derrida etc. As I see it, philosophy begins as critique of mere opinion (so obviously this started with the pre-Socratics and Plato), but with Kant et al, it starts to turn its critical apparatus on itself. And at a certain point a second shift occurs, perhaps with Nietzsche. It becomes clear that the very form or style of philosophy is an issue. Philosophy makes descriptive, declarative statements, but the idea that it has a subject matter such that we could take these claims literally is not wholly credible. The linguistic turn turns into a self-consciousness about the manner and style in which we philosophize. The question of method becomes the question of how we write and think.

This connects to another issue Charles raises without pursuing — the "abstractness" of my thinking — which is arguably in tension with my interest in performativity (esp. in the last chapter, "The Performative Imperative"). It seems, in other words, that I do not consistently engage performative gears, that I relapse into abstract conceptual thinking. I think he is right — I do this. I would offer two kinds of explanation or justification: (1) that there is nothing wrong with abstraction as a subsidiary routine, as it were. It is probably unavoidable. It only becomes problematic when it claims a privileged status. (2) Every performative gesture can be made the object of abstract reflection. Indeed I would claim that in philosophy there is no escape from this play between performance and reflection. SK for example explains the significance of indirect communication, and even why it is foolish for anyone to imagine that a direct account could achieve the same effect; Nietzsche tells us "my style is a dance...", Hegel talks about his Phenomenology of Spirit as a "working through", And these comments enrich our performative participation. I do not even know if abstraction can be con fined to being in the service of performativity. I would rather think that there is an unending dynamic interplay. Perhaps we need to consider that abstract reflection itself has performative dimensions — such as recommending, insisting, commanding that we schematize our thinking in certain ways. And of course sometimes we will respond to this "thanks, but no thanks" or with refusal or indifference.

A parallel point can be made about all the versions and varieties of the project of interruption, disruption, transformation that Charles rightly attributes to me. Philosophy has something of a double task in my view: first (though there is no order here), to interrupt every formation that claims a false universality, that hides its origins, that pretends to be a natural occurrence. In this respect, philosophy presupposes the natural attitude, common sense, the ordinary, and it exercises a certain vigilance over it. Without the cave, there is no need for illumination, but without the habits and practices developed in the cave there is no possibility of illumination. But there is a second task which Heidegger actually does take up, and which I largely neglect in this book, and that is to give something like a philosophical acknowledgement at least of those aspects of human existence where reflection does not flourish — habit, recurring practices, the symbolic reservoir on which we draw etc. We need both to think through the necessity of the unreflective, while yet continually questioning the necessity of the particular point at which the boundary is drawn.

Charles addresses from many angles a particularly vivid example of this play between, let us say the ordinary and the special — when he speaks of retrieval, repetition, renewal — even "life". The key to the significance of this cluster of concepts has to do with there being genuinely different possibilities of inhabiting time, possibilities which can both be thematized philosophically, and also performed or enacted. There is a difference between what we might call routine repetition, and what we might call eventuation. Eventuation covers creation, transformative renewal, reaffirmation, invention etc. It is tempting to think that we could somehow vote just for the second, for "life" lets say. More sober assessment however, no less life-affirming, surely suggests that what is always at issue is not life or death (routinized representation) but an economy of life, a necessary interweaving of the two. And, to repeat the previous point, while we must affirm this necessity, the demarcation line is always open to dispute. One final point here if I may, creation re-creation, need not in any way involve a change of content. That may even be a distraction. What is at stake is not "the new" in the sense of novelty, but the possibility of renewal — what we might call the innocence of becoming.

The secondary significance of the content of renewal here is connected to one point at which Charles directly takes issue with me. It's another "interruption" — this time, in Levinasian vein, the interruption wrought by "the alterity of the other" which I claim has nothing to do with the other's qualities. This issue provides Charles with an entree to a discussion of my imagined ethical (and even religious) orientation., so it is worth a little attention.

The point of saying that the other's qualities are not at issue is that my recognition of the mere existence of the other is enough to break my narcissism — whether they are young or old, tall or short etc. But this may well be a point at which a certain abstraction is actually unhelpful. Surely it matters how this narcissism is interrupted, and that will depend on whether I am confronted, as L would say, with a "widow", orphan, stranger on the one hand or a friend of lover. Or perhaps even a non-human creature like the monster yellow-trousered spider on my barn door. And surely it matters whether the stranger is someone hungry cold and in need of shelter, or someone who needs to hijack my car.

Levinas is not alone in proposing a relatively undetermined account of our confrontation with the Other. Hegel, Husserl, Sartre and Heidegger preceded him. Not to mention G.E.Moore, and those AA philosophers puzzled about other minds. It is true that the Levinasian horizon I was alluding to suggests an ethical tone of the discussion. But that is missing from the rest of the tradition. And we could even say that it misses something important about L — that the experience of the face of the other is not an ethical opening so much as the opening of ethics.

Nonetheless, what I hear and respect in CES's concern here I do need to take seriously. You recall at the end he dangles in front of me the juicy worm of danger, and even as I can see the glint of cruel metal, I cannot resist the challenge, even as he affects to protect me ("an ethical and religious man"), from a certain discombobulating self-overcoming.

If I understand him aright, CES has a deep Nietzschean suspicion of both the ethical and the religious, or a certain projective demand we too readily make on the world. Given the chance, he will instead rub our noses in its indifference.

Now, on the surface I plead guilty as charged. Ch. 9 "Comment ne pas Manger" does read something like an ethically driven upbraiding of Derrida's refusal to take the animal question seriously, even as he celebrates the end of humanism. I take the end of humanism to entail the end of the overriding privilege accorded to the human, But it could be said that my humanistic values (justice, opposition to cruelty and exploitation) are intact, and just being extended and expanded.

Charles is ruthless, I believe, in attempting to root out — both in himself and others — every trace of sentimentality. He has a relentless and powerful will-to-truthfulness, a nose for the self-serving illusion, for the crazy cruelties we inflict on ourselves as well as others. I think that when he hears the word responsibility, he hears, lurking in the shadows, guilt. If the ethical or religious man, as Nietzsche might say, is the product of a guilt-ridden conscience, and if guilt is a disabling, pathological inhibition, then every rumor of the ethical needs to be hunted down, and run off the farm.

I would like to conclude by suggesting to Charles a different kind of overcoming from the one he pretends to shield me from. Could we perhaps drop, or soften, the connection between guilt and ethics? There is indeed a problem with moralism. Nietzsche here talks about moralic acid, which reeks of both guilt and ressentiment. But we can think of the ethical in a quite different way: the word I have used is response-ability.

I want to suggest what I am aiming for in this book is something like response-ability and that it cannot be reduced to the ethical (or the religious). If anything, the reverse would be true. We could understand responsibility as a rule-based form of moral obligation that would kick in when an appropriate target arises. But I would prefer to think of it quite as much as a capacity to respond to the other in the fullest least mediated way possible, not e.g. as a "case" of this or that, but in all its concrete untranslatable specificity. Such a response-ability applies to people, situations, events etc. It would include e.g. attending to all the contradictions and difficulties, and all the myriad ways in which the thing itself bursts out of its box... Now you might say, "why should we do this? Is there is a concealed should or ought here?"

I have no doubt that ethical options do eventually arise, that there is no strait path from knowledge to virtue. But equally, I think that there is a vast amount of work to do in getting better acquainted with things, people, creatures, and situations, as well as in developing the skills we need to adequately respond to each of them. Am I saying we should do this? I would put it differently — that the failure to know, to understand, to look, to listen is a failure to relate. It is not first, or not just an ethical failure, it is, if you like, an ontological failure.

I will give one example: the squirrel hunter. [story of guy who couldn"t shoot a squirrel when he saw two of them playing] He changed his behavior because he saw something.

Charles was worried he might be urging me into dangerous territory. Well, I can see the danger alright. Ultimately it will be said, this response-ability will never add up to duty, to obligation, so it cannot get us to the ethical. But while this may leave some dissatisfied, it at least shows how we can approach an ethics without guilt. The sort of philosophical work I envisage would result not in issuing prescriptions but in issuing invitations to respond.

Thank you Charles for accepting this invitation to respond to my book.