ghost stories

(photo courtesy of Roxana)

Kant, on The Critique:

"It rests on a fully secured foundation,established forever, it will prove to be indispensable too for the noblest ends of mankind in all future ages."

Sidgwick on The Method: 

"It solves nothing, but may clear up the ideas of one or two people a little."

~~~

There was a lovely piece on Derek Parfit; what interested you, you have to admit, was the person more than the ideas. Quite revealing, really. You're always hovering around in the antechamber of understanding,as it were, never able to quite get to the heart of the issue, skirting around the centre. Probably because you lack the mental capacities and temperament for sustained reflection. Instead, it is always the idea of the idea-a fact not unrelated, perhaps, to the preponderance of quotes on this blog. Not that a bit of directness wouldn't be welcome; it's just that what little you do understand (of life-that is what we're talking about, isn't it?) could be written down on a small piece of paper.  

It's a bit like reading Berlin on the history of ideas. Exciting at first, then you think you've been short-changed because all you really have at the end of the day in your hands is derivative, a fuzzy kind of precis of ideas that another person has lived and struggled with over a long period of gestation.

After a series of short-cuts you realize you really don't get anywhere. Of course, you'd love to say that at least part of this hesitancy before 'knowledge' and this disdain for academia stems from some deeply buried religious sensibility, a prizing of wisdom over merely superficial intelligence. But that, too, only highlights the same phenomenon: an idea of religion is all you really have.


~~~

Is it the same with people, you wonder? A sort of irreducible distance. Of course, there's the horrid thought of being 'at one' with the universe but no, that's not quite it. Is it really the case, as the swami more or less said, that we're like shadows of our real selves, a ghostly presence to others?

~~~

There's something comforting reading about old Sidg. I think it's partly the fact that stands at the cusp of modernity. So, here is someone living around a century before you. When you read 1870 it is easy for the mind to jump to 1970 and imagine some sort of parallel, some current of thought from then still very much in our conversation. But it's more than that. It's also the ordinary, day-to-day routines that attract you...the fact that he turns to Aristotle again .."Perhaps this was made necessary by the task of selecting books for the Tripos, perhaps by general preparation for teaching ethics in the autumn of 1867..." It's like looking through a window and seeing parts of a person's life and it seems more real than any fiction you've read. 

His views on religion sound quite progressive as well, without the pompous notions of Progress or Humanity. And then there are his "ghost-seeking tendencies". J. Gray has an intriguing and fascinating chapter on this [link].

~~~

I am almost never there, in these
old photographs: a hand
or shoulder, out of focus; a figure
in the background,
stepping from the frame.
I see myself, sometimes, in the restless
blur of a child, that flinch
in the eye, or the way
sun leaks its gold into the print;
or there, in that long white gash
across the face of the glass
on the wall behind. That
smear of light
the sign of me, leaving.

--Robin Robertson.