today

...Ambitious or new art, that which recognizes a break with what seems a continuous, developing history of artistic traditions and practice, now exists in two states, one I called the modernist (in which the present wishes to maintain the artistic quality, say the greatness, of the past, despite the differences the look and sound of the art, as it were, must discover precisely to preserve its status), and the other [...] I called the modernizing (in which the present would forget the past by, so to speak, by embracing the fact of the present, in its transience, its fashionableness, its distrust of, even contempt for, greatness); apparently ungrounded, the modern in the arts, in both its states, courts the charge of fraudulence; both states cause what may be called philosophy, the modernist by embodying its theory of itself (an origin of romanticism) the modernizing by inviting as a response to it an outpouring of theory and manifesto; and since I spoke of modernist art as assuming the condition of philosophy, bearing absolute responsibility for itself ("seriousness"), I was bound to ask what effect this assumption had on what is called philosophy, whether philosophy contained a counter move toward assuming the condition of art, a wish to bear some responsibility for its own literary conditions, something encouraged by my own growing fascination with the writing of Wittgenstein and of Heidegger, and later with that of Emerson and of Thoreau, given their difference in sound and look from what most of my profession of philosophy acknowledged as philosophy; and it seemed to me that the power of the profession to discourage this move to the literary, let's call it, came not alone from its formidable institutional power (unlike the arts or the sciences, philosophy essentially now finds its sole support in the university), but equally from its quality as philosophy: academic music or painting need not be recognized as a competitor of advanced art, but modern philosophy, in its power genuinely, all but exclusively to represent the present of the history of philosophy, is the scourge of the non-academic, let us say, the literary, in philosophical ambition; a way of putting this asymmetry between art and philosophy is to say that philosophy's struggle against what it perceives as fraudulence or charlatanry(it knows it's debasement under the name of sophistry) is as ancient as the establishing of philosophy in Plato, whereas the the struggle of the arts against their debasement is definitively new, say modern - a further mark of the arts assuming the condition of philosophy; is is part of Wittgenstein's originality to have internalized the issue of philosophy's enmity toward a kind of charlatanry (a test of its seriousness) by including forced or fixated or otherwise inauthentic responses to philosophical perplexities (through the medium of what is called his "interlocutor", voicing his or her insistances or disappointments or cravings in the face of Wittgenstein's corrections), as if we are, in striving to become the philosopher it is in us to become, meant to overcome the sophist it is equally in us to remain.

# posted by amcqu : 10:31 am