Yesterday, one of the anonymati wrote with regard to my
allusion to Socrates’ put down of Callicles, “You've repeated that bit about
repetition many times.” I was curious, so I used Google’s powerful search
facility and quickly discovered that I had indeed cited that passage a total of
five times in eight years. That works out to roughly once every 585 days, which
does not seem to me excessive, but it reminded me of a lovely old story that I
heard during the years that I was living in Massachusetts. It seems that the
wife of a nouveau riche businessman trying to make his way into the rarefied
world of the Boston old Brahmans asked a Beacon Hill lady, “where do you buy
your hats?” The lady looked down her nose at this upstart and responded, “we
don’t buy our hats. We have our hats.”
That got me thinking about my own clothes and I realized that
like the uppercrust Boston lady, although not for the same reasons, I don’t buy
my clothes, I have my clothes. It is years since I have bought a shirt or pair
of pants and the only shoes I have bought in the last five or six years are the
sneakers I wear on my morning walks. Indeed, I don’t even own a suit and the
last time I wore a tie was when my son, Tobias, took me along as his guest to an
Obama White House Christmas party. I no longer buy cars, I have a car – a
16-year-old Toyota Camry that runs adequately and will, with any luck, last as
long as I do.
This tendency to make do with what I already
have is not an expression of aristocracy but rather of old age. When I was
younger, I took pleasure in visiting places I had never been to before. Now, I
sit here in enforced isolation hoping against hope that the day will come when
I can return to my apartment in Paris and enjoy once again the old familiar cafés
and restaurants. I am much the same way with favorite passages from books I
have read. It gives me pleasure to return to Das Kapital or the Critique of Pure
Reason or the Treatise of Human Nature, even though I pretty well already know
what is in those books. And I do return again and again to certain passages
that stand out in my memory. The exchange between Socrates and Callicles is one
of them. The preface of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments is another. No
one would consider it otiose to listen a second or third or even a tenth time
to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, or to return to a museum to see a favorite
painting. So I am content, every 600 days or so, to repeat a passage I like from
a Platonic dialogue to make a point.
Several factors come together here.
ReplyDeleteI notice many of the same things about myself. Actually, I've worn basically the same clothes since I was a university student, blue jeans and generally a blue button-down collar shirt not tucked in. I don't own a suit or a tie either.
Part of that is habit and another part is probably both of us have seen through the consumer culture. We (I presume to use the first person plural) simply aren't seduced by the ads or by the malls. I just don't care what is in fashion and ads in the media simply irritate me.
As for rereading, the number of really great works of literature, philosophy and music is limited. There is only one Homer, only one Plato, only one Shakespeare, only one
Nietzsche, only one Beethoven, only one Brahms, etc. So if you seek greatness in literature, philosophy or art, you're going to return again and again to the same authors and the same works because there aren't many new ones to discover, at least in the Western tradition.
So too with traveling. There's only one Paris. There's only one New York. I don't have Facebook and I don't move in social circles where my status will be increased because I've been somewhere no one else in that circle has been before. I've never, even as a child, been attracted by the wonders of nature or by the more conventional types of sight-seeing. In addition, as global capitalism has spread, you're going to run into much of the same shit everywhere as you do in North Carolina: they're eating the same cheeseburgers in Bangkok as they do a mile from your home.
Again, I don't believe that all of the above is just due to being old and a creature of habit. I believe that a lot is due to no longer being as duped by the system (buy, buy, buy, travel, travel, travel, which is another form of buying) as I once was.
My new discovery during this endless lockdown (Santiago has been locked down for 100 days now) is Dario Sztajnszrajber, Argentinian philosopher and a bit of stand-up comic too.
There are innumerable videos of him in Youtube. He's irreverent, skeptical, contrarian, certainly on the left, and in watching him, I've ventured into more post-modern territory (he's enthusiastic about Derrida) than I've ever ventured into before, but he's kept me sane for these 100 days. I don't believe that anything of his has been translated into English.
I hope you are able to make it back to Paris and enjoy some respite there.
ReplyDeleteWhich neighborhood do you stay in / frequent there when you go?
In my experience, the value of returning to things of the past, whether literature, music, or places visited, for example, is realizing how the change is internal. I discover not only that I have changed but how I have changed even though the matter returned to has remained the same. Physical sight may diminish but the inner eye becomes sharper.
ReplyDeleteOur apartment is on rue Maitre Albert, half a block from the Seine catty-corner opposite Notre Dame.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Wolff --
ReplyDeleteThere is a great deal of wisdom in this particular blog post. Several years ago, I was relating a past event to my wife. Afterwards, she said, "Yes, I remember when you related that story to me last year at Radicchio (Italian restaurant in Philadelphia) and the year before at Grillfish (restaurant in Washington, DC). "Really?," I said, "I had no idea." She said, "Don't worry, it's a good story and I like hearing you tell it again." As I tell my students, repetition never hurt anybody -- it can only help. I have heard you repeat stories before and for me it just serves to reinforce the point. For example, I think Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man" is more relevant than ever right now. When I raise this point with some of my colleagues, they say, "Holy shit, you are right!"
On another note, my dream is to spend a week in you Paris apartment. I know you have rented it out in the past. Is this still an option (assuming the COVID-19 threat is ever contained)?
-- Jim
Jim, at the moment I am not even allowed into France!! But some day, I shall return, and then you would be welcome to rent it. It still has a complete set of the works of Marx and Engels in German. :)
ReplyDeleteSuch lovely thoughts. Shopping is somewhat limited during the pandemic--I occasionally purchase underwear online. I'm not quite wealthy enough to retort that, "I have> my underwear." In any case, I never tire of the repetition. My favorite story on old age from antiquity comes from the beginning of The Republic, in which Cephalus recalls the elderly Sophocles, when asked if he can still have sex replies, "I am very glad to have escaped from this, like a slave who has escaped from a mad and cruel master." Whether Plato intended this anecdote to guide the reader's interpretation of The Republic, as some scholars maintain, the story certainly stands on its own.
ReplyDeleteSo one thing we can work on during this pandemic is setting up a website and waiting list for renting Wolff's Paris Apartment.
ReplyDeleteThat, and campaigning for Kanye West 2020.
Me: That reminds me of an old joke; have I told you the one...
ReplyDeleteMy wife: Yes, but tell me again.
I really like this post as well.
ReplyDeleteI seem to still be of an age (mid-40's) where I vascillate between wanting to devour/consume new books and wanting to revisit cherished ones. My musical listening leans much more to returning to beloved music. I find myself re-telling stories to my wife, which I so kindly preface with "I'm sure I've told you this before".
And now for something completely different...
I grew up in the Midwest and I say kitty-corner. You grew up in NYC and you wrote catty-corner. I am curious where these various phrases are used throughout the country. Although growing up in Minnesota I learned to call "Duck, Duck, Goose" "Duck, Duck, Grey Duck" and to call "monkey in the middle (keepaway)" "pickle in the middle" and my southern wife informs me that both of those are simply ridiculous.
I am in awe of your wisdom and so grateful for you giving me sanity while writing my dissertation. I’m sorry that this has nothing really to do with your post but I had to ask. (I’m not a philosophy major so I might not sound a bit green here). You described Kant’s synthesis of the manifold through space and time. Kant says we become aware of space through exterior intuitions and then time through interior perceptions of some “thinking quasi self” that has been conscious of these phenomena. We can’t be aware of our thinking until after we’ve thought it so we are temporally separated from the self. We then apply this time to other things. Ok. So when we say time, we don’t mean time as the dividend of distance that equals speed. We can still observe that kind of time without being aware of ourselves right? We see objects moving through space and can construct Newtonian time. Are we talking about the groundwork of time itself (a chronotope perhaps) where time operates according to a specific orientation (ourselves). Perhaps this is not scientific time but ideological or moral or social time (thinking of Mannheim’s ideological critique and time consciousness). If that’s the case, we become solipsistic by constructing everything According to our self-centered Time orientation. We create a chronotope that everything else reacts to. We act and others re-act (exactly like a Republican/Democrat would are act we tell ourselves) and their actions are always geared towards our manifold for further analysis. We are autonomous unities of thought. They are just complex automatons of our manifold. This of course leads to your brilliant deconstruction of Kant’s ethical theory. But most of us (except trump of course) learn to create a belief that other beings operate in their own synthesis of time and space. They have their own consciousness that may be unrelated to ourselves. They are, as Levinas put it, infinite visages. If we are mature, we admit that any summary we give of their consciousness will be reductive because our consciousness cannot comprehend a consciousness equal to or greater than its own capacity. We somehow conclude that others exist independently of ourselves. How would your theory of Kant’s ethics respond? Thank you for all the content
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