Opting out
3月16日 (火ー水) 1:08 am JST
I’ve been attending a number of graduation ceremonies lately. I want to write a haiku about it, but I’m not sure I can make it work. I have:
木枯らしに竹が卒業式の礼
in the winter wind/ bamboo is graduation/ ceremony’s bowing.
I’m afraid the connection between my elements is too stark. It seems almost Chinese. I would like to move things around, but at 6 syllables, ‘graduation ceremony’ is the deadweight at the center of my poem. Shifting things around, I get:
卒業の式に木枯らし吹けた竹
at the graduation’s/ ceremony, winter wind/ blown bamboo
The superiority of this version lies in what is not said. Omitting the bow comes with the risk that the reader may not see the parallel between the motion of bamboo in the cold wind and that of the ceremony’s participants in a chilly auditorium. The advantage of omission is that if the reader does manage to see the bow that is at the heart of the poem, then it is seen even more clearly, since it is observed in one’s own imagination, rather than merely invoked by the words of another.
Other advantages revolve around word placement, though there is still a lot awkwardness surrounding the jammed in phrase ‘graduation ceremony.’ I like that it ends on a clause modified noun, but I wish ceremony could be on the same line as graduation.
About the redundancy of saying both ‘blown’ and ‘winter wind,’ I have mixed feelings. Being redundant is always bad, in every case, but emphasis is OK, and drone is wonderful. Saying both words in this case lies somewhere between pure redundancy and pleasant drone, hopefully on the side of emphasis.
The key to a good haiku is giving a paradoxical perspective. The old poets just used a lot of puns to give their verses double meanings, but Bashô changed the name of the game with his work. Even taking the poem the poem for what it said, there’s always as a dynamic tension in his poems between dueling perspectives on life, the universe, and everything. His poems are equally about both specific, concrete instances of time and the eternal aspect that such instances demonstrate. He includes both while omitting neither. When he says, “Deep autumn— / my neighbor, / how does he live, I wonder?” you know that he’s speaking of a particular moment when he suddenly wondered about the person living across the way from him, and that he’s also asking how possible it is for any of us to know anyone.
My poem is not on such a high plane. If it were, you would be able to see that I’m speaking of a particular feeling I had only a chilly morning as we marked the changing of the seasons, not just the physical resemblance of all Japanese graduation ceremonies to any kind of wind struck bamboo.
Oh well.
3月17日 (水ー木) 12:50 am JST
A lot of times when I talk to people about it, they tell me their problem with philosophy is that it never gets anywhere.
My first reaction to this is, “So what?” We don’t get mad at English majors because they never write the perfect novel. We don’t demand that artists give us the final formula for perfect paintings. More to the point, historians are allowed to continue their studies without us demanding the pretense that they can now predict the future. All of my middle school history books ended with, “Gorbachev is an interesting man. What will happen next? Reply Hazy, Try Again…”
My next reaction is why should we even expect progress from philosophy? If a philosopher is a lover of wisdom and wisdom is timeless, is it any wonder we’re chasing our tale? If philosophers study the nature of Being, and the nature of Being is fixed with respect to rational investigation, then we’d expect that if there’s no way for the results of our investigation to change unless Being changes. That means that there should only be progress if life itself is progressing. So, really the problem with philosophy is that there is too much progress. That new philosophers are able to advance new schools of thought at all is an embarrassment. People aren’t any smarter today than we ever were. Either the Greeks should have already thought of it, or someone is making a mistake. Or maybe Being really is changing. Or maybe all three.
“Ah,” you say, “but science always describes the same world and is making progress, and so is math, which uses the same logic and numbers.”
This raises my next point, if you’re looking for progress, science and math already exist. They’ll be more than happy to take you in. As for philosophy, it’s doing fine on its own. There’s no need to change it into a copy of something that we already have. Making a ‘scientific’ or ‘mathematical’ philosophy is a mistake, since we already have science and math. Philosophy is a mode of inquiry as much as it is a set of inquiry results. Changing its mode to match science or math just reduces the number of perspectives we have on the world. Philosophy has enough to offer on its own without having to imitate others.
The fact is, throughout history, whenever philosophy has become too concrete, it’s forked. First, it divided into natural philosophy (aka science), then budded off into economics, psychology, sociology, political science, and so on. Looked at from this angle, again, the embarrassment for philosophy is too much progress. When things start changing too fast, people decide that the subject under discussion should no longer be categorized as philosophy and give it a new name.
Still, as true as what I’ve just said is, there’s something highly unsatisfying about my answer.
3月21日 (月) 1:45 pm JST
With a fresh spring haircut on my head, I take the Thunderbird back from Ôsaka to Takaoka. These are my thoughts:
What’s unsatisfactory with philosophy is all that advances that have come have either come in fields of secondary importance (that is to say, science, psychology, economics, etc.) or have failed to resolve with finality the question of primary importance, the question of Being. It’s fine that science can finally vindicate Democritus, or that economics and psychology can tag team the invisible hand of the market, but none of it really solves the central problem. Philosophy can speak in the tongues of men or angels, but if it has not the ‘why,’ it is a resounding gong.
And ‘why’ is a question philosophy’s many children are unprepared to answer. It’s true that literature and history are allowed to coast by on their good looks and charm, but philosophy asks so much more. It’s a pity if I can’t find the right haiku, but if I don’t know why or how to live, what else is there to do? That all of philosophy’s children do strive for progress should be proof enough that they inherited this desire from their mother. If I can’t come to a resting place in my investigation of Being, then am I any better of than the Pre-Socratics? At least most of their questions about the physical structure of the world can be answered. If Socrates’ questions about the ideas that structure the world cannot be answered, what good is philosophy anyway?
And yet, (I turn back on myself again), is philosophy so poor? Am I so miserable that I don’t know what it is to be and how I am to live? Everyday, I am, and I live. My own life must be proof that I either must understand how to live or I must not understand how to die. Knowledge is a true, justified belief. These three conditions are easily met. My living shows my belief in life, our minds produce justifications in legion, and truth… Humans, it should be clear, have no innate sense which allows them to distinguish between the sensation of experiencing truth and the sensation of experiencing falsehood. If such a sense existed, lies would not be needed. Instead, we have a sense that allows us to distinguish merely between good justifications and poor ones. So, even if we don’t quite have truth, for human needs, justification should be sufficient to our purposes, since well-justified-but-false knowledge cannot be distinguished from true knowledge. Therefore, we can say that understanding life must be a transcendental precondition of Being, since the experience of living demonstrates logically its existence.
Now at last, we have come to progress in philosophy! The transcendental, which has been called by many names over the years, is what I would point to as the central innovation of philosophy since the Greeks. Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Nishida all claimed to have uncovered a concept independently, but I would say that each of them invented a system of opting in and opting out. I look at life, I see that I’m living it, and I opt into life and out of truth. The key is to ignore what doesn’t enter into an evaluation. Parmenides said, nothing must have the property of nothingness, since a thing is what it is, therefore there is no nothing, therefore there is only Being. To refute this, the new philosopher can say, nothingness doesn’t enter into nothing as a property. It’s 関係ない, no connection. It isn’t a property that nothing can have. By opting nothingness out of nothing, we are saved the embarrassment of finding that nothing is not. Along with Descartes’ cogito, this is one of the best advances philosophy has made. What opting out lets philosophy do is say that some formulas look nice on the page, but once you shake them out in the real world, you find they fall apart because two ideas that don’t go together have been so enjambed. Contrastingly, you can solve problems like the question of Being by finding that the question is overlooking its own basis. To those who would look at a haiku and ask, does it deal in the abstract or the specific, the philosopher may firmly answer, ‘pass.’
No, it’s not entirely satisfactory, but that’s the answer. The question of being turns out to be not entirely satisfactory either. Now, we just have to deal with that unsatisfactoriness. To that end, we have our aforementioned raft of justifications, our culture, our faith, and the guiding principles of the philosophic method, which allow us to cut the hearts out of difficult problems by opting out.
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