Additional Questions
Philosophical Problems: 1. I have described the episode of Judith Shakespeare as a story within a story or the staging of a story. How might this description relate to Woolf's narrative method of presenting us with a stream of consciousness? Thinking through this analogy what might we learn about our understanding of the notion of self-consciousness?* Where does the analogy break down? 2. Is the notion of extension adequate for identity through time?**Given Descartes' conundrum, how might 'the self' be defined? What then do we mean by self-consciousness? How might Woolf's narrative method be said to bring about self-consciousness? 3. How does the Judith episode function (what does it do?) In light of Woolf's narrative method? (Does it provide a contrast? To what end, for what purpose?) Remember that the story of Judith was a response to the Bishop's assertion that "it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare." How might the juxtaposition of narrative techniques at this particular point of the book shed light on Woolf's thinking about self-identity? 4. How is identity achieved in Woolf's work in the pieces we have read thus far? What role might Truth play in this network, or web, of questions? How might we be true to ourselves, according to Woolf? What might that mean? Is the question 'how do I be true to myself' this same as 'what is the true self'? 5. What is the function of fiction? How might fiction be said to enrich our lives? How might ethics be related to aesthetics, i.e. fiction? Footnotes: Footnote* Could an analogy be drawn between film and consciousness as a stream? During the editing stage, a filmmaker looks at his film frame by frame. Just as identity is preserved from one frame to another, might the 'self' retain its identity (through time) by the same or a similar principle? Might our stream of consciousness be nothing but a real of film? Footnote** Descartes writes in his third meditation in contemplating a piece of wax: What now is this extension? Is it not also unknown? For it becomes greater when the wax is melted, greater when it is boiled, and greater still when the heat increases; and I should not conceive [clearly] according to truth what wax is, if I did not think that even this piece that we are considering is capable of receiving more variations in extension than I have ever imagined. We must then grant that I could not even understand through the imagination what this piece of wax is, and what it is my mind alone which perceives it. I say this piece of wax in particular, for as to wax in general it is yet clearer. But what is this piece of wax which cannot be understood excepting by the [understanding or] mind? Is the self nothing but a piece of wax, 'an idea'? Footnote*** I.A. Richards wrote in Lecture IV of The Philosophy of Rhetoric: ...The evil influence of the assumption [that the meaning of words can be obtained in isolation] is most glaringly shown with the abstract words upon which all discussions of general theoretical topics. Outside of the sciences-- in our talk about politics, society or conduct, or about science itself, in all branches of philosophy including psychology, in all discussions of art, literature, language, truth, beauty and the good, our principal terms incessantly change their meanings with the sentences they go into and the contexts they derive from....But both the extent and the plan of these deluding shifts are hidden from us by the assumption I am attacking. It leads us to think that the shift of meaning is a flaw in discourse, a regrettable accident, instead of a virtue. And therefore we neglect to study the plan of the shifts. The assumption is that words have, or should have, proper meanings which people should recognize, agree about and stick to. A pretty program, if it were possible. But, outside the technical languages of the sciences, it is not possible. For in the topics with which all generally interesting discussion is concerned, words must shift their meanings thus. Without these shifts such mutual understanding as we achieve would fail even within the narrowed resultant scope. Language, losing its subtlety with its suppleness, would lose also its power to serve us. The remedy is not to resist these shifts but to learn to follow them. They recur in the same forms with different words; they have similar plans and common patterns, which experience enables us to observe and obey in practice--sometimes with a skilful ease which seems amazing when we examine it. We may reasonably hope that systematic study will in time permit us to compare, describe and explain these systematic ambiguity or transference patterns on a scale as much surpassing our best present-day Dictionary Technique as, say our present competence in chemistry surpasses that of Bacon who foresaw it. Even now, if we could take systematic cognizance of even a small part of the shifts we fleetingly observe, the effect would be like that of introducing the multiplication table to calculators who just happened to know the working of a few sums and no others. And with such a clarification, such a translation of our skills into comprehension, a new era of human understanding and co-operation in thinking would be at hand. It would not be difficult to do not a little towards this at once. What stands in the way is chiefly the Proper Meaning Superstition and the effort it sustains towards increased rigidity in fields where rigidity is inappropriate. Note also that the time of publication of these lectures, 1936, is but a few years from Woolf's. (Note that what Richards says here applies to the Descartes passage, as I have quoted above, as well.) The word 'genius' I would argue is an abstract word. In seeing the connection between this passage and what Woolf does with the Judith episode, I would argue, we can gain a deeper understanding of how Woolf sees the function of moral and ethical discourse in her work. Footnote**** Nietzsche once wrote in his essay “On the Utility and Liability of History” (1874): Everyone has made at least this one simple observation: a human being’s historical knowledge and sensitivity can be very limited, his horizon as narrow as that of the inhabitant of an isolated alpine valley; each of his judgments may contain an injustice, each experience may be marked by the misconception that he is the first to experience it – yet in spite of all these injustices and all these misconceptions, he stands there, vigorously healthy and robust, a joy to look at. At the same time, someone standing close beside him who is far more just and learned grows sick and collapses because the lines of his horizon are restlessly redrawn again and again, because he cannot extricate himself from the much more fragile web of his justice and his truths and find his way back to crude wanting and desiring. By contrast, we saw the animal, which is wholly unhistorical and dwells within a horizon almost no larger than a mere point, yet still lives in a certain kind of happiness, at the very least without boredom and dissimulation. We will therefore have to consider the capacity to live to a certain degree unhistorically to be more significant and more originary, insofar as it lays the foundation upon which something just, healthy, and great, something that is truly human, is able to grow at all. The unhistorical is like an enveloping atmosphere in which alone life is engendered, and it disappears again with the destruction of this atmosphere. It is true: only when the human being, by thinking, reflecting, comparing, analyzing, and synthesizing, limits that unhistorical element, only when a bright, flashing, iridescent light is generated within that enveloping cloud of mist – that is, only by means of the power to utilize the past for life and to reshape past events into history once more – does the human being become a human being; but in an excess of history the human being ceases once again, and without that mantle of the unhistorical he would never have begun and would never have dared to begin. What deeds could a human being possibly accomplish without first entering that misty region of the unhistorical? Or, to put metaphors aside and turn instead to an illustrative example: imagine a man seized and carried away by a vehement passion for a woman or for a great idea; how his world changes! Looking backward he feels he is blind, listening around him he hears what is unfamiliar as a dull, insignificant sound; and those things that he perceives at all he never before perceived in this way; so palpably near, colorful, resonant, illuminated, as though he were apprehending it with all his senses at once. All his valuations are changed and devalued; many things he can no longer value because he can scarcely feel them any more; he asks himself whether all this time he was merely duped by the words and opinions of others; he marvels that his memory turns inexhaustibly round and round in a circle and yet is still to weak and exhausted to make one single leap out of this circle. It is the most unjust condition in the world, narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to dangers, deaf to warnings; a tiny whirlpool of life in a dead sea of night and oblivion; and yet this condition – unhistorical, anti-historical through and through – is not only the womb of the unjust deed, but of every just deed as well; and no artist will create a picture, no general win a victory, and no people gain its freedom without their having previously desired and striven to accomplish these deeds in just such an unhistorical condition. Just as anyone who acts, in Goethe’s words, is always without conscience, so is he also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one thing, he is unjust to whatever lies behind him and recognizes only one right, the right of what is to be. Thus, everyone who acts loves his action infinitely more than it deserves to be loved, and the best deeds occur in such an exuberance of love that, no matter what, they must be unworthy of this love, even if their worth were otherwise incalculably great. Supplementary Reading: Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Richards, Ivor Armstrong. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1936.
0 Comments
|
ArchivesCategories |