Ultimate Mathematical Library


	by: Donald Phillip Verene en \| Lexington Books

Speculative Philosophy
by: Donald Phillip Verene

* Publisher: Lexington Books
* Number Of Pages: 190
* Publication Date: 2009-04-28
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0739136593
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780739136591

Synopsis

In this illuminating volume, Donald Phillip Verene challenges philosophy to pass beyond the limits of criticism and reflection toward a form of speculative philosophy that express the Hegelian sense in which the True is the whole and the Socratic sense in which the aim of philosophy is self-knowledge.

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: On Philosophical Tetralogy xv
1 The Canon of the Primal Scene in Speculative Philosophy 1
2 Philosophical Pragmatics 13
3 Putting Philosophical Questions (in)to Language 23
4 Absolute Knowledge and Philosophical Language 35
5 The Limits of Argument: Argument and Autobiography 47
6 Philosophical Aesthetics 55
7 Philosophical Memory 69
8 Culture, Categories, and the Imagination 83
9 Metaphysical Narration, Science, and Symbolic Form 97
10 Myth and Metaphysics 109
Notes 127
Index 145
The Author 149

Preface
ix
In a footnote to the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,
Kant claims: “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism
everything must submit.” Reflective critical thinking is the slogan of modern
philosophy. Whether practiced as deconstruction, analytic metaphysics, or critical
theory, philosophy stands by this slogan. We wander in the Dantean dark
wood, sorting out truths from error, and then, because for every argument it is
not beyond human wit to create a counter-argument, resorting them. Critical
thinking is driven by a fear of error. It is unable to complete its own process because
there is always more to criticize, including the most recent conclusion that
criticism has produced. As criticism, philosophy is always threatened by fatigue.
Its reasonings offer no final illumination or relief. Advancing and evaluating arguments
is a necessary and natural part of philosophy, but is it all of it?
In a few lines in his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel defines the
form of thought and expression upon which philosophy, he claims, properly
rests. He calls this the speculative sentence. The speculative sentence, spekulativer
Satz, is an extraordinary discovery in modern philosophy. It ranks in importance
with the discovery in ancient philosophy of the Socratic question as the means
through which philosophy can be produced. The Socratic question allows us to
bring any aspect of human experience before the mind and consider its being
and its meaning. The formulation of questions makes the mind dialectical, moving
it from one perspective to another, one question to another. The speculative
sentence turns this series of perspectives back upon itself, revealing its pattern of
self-development. The ancient pursuit of the question, joined with the power of
expression framed in the speculative sentence, gives philosophy its fullest range
of thought.
The speculative sentence has within it a circular motion, in which the meaning
of its subject term is found in the connection of the subject term to its predicate,
but once this connection is grasped, the meaning of the predicate term must be
taken against the subject, and the meaning of the subject reconceived. A further
sense of the subject then emerges, to be expressed in a predicate. The circular motion
is self-contained, yet it is always passing beyond its present state to a greater
comprehension of the meaning it contains.
Hegel gives the example: “God is being.” The predicate appears to be something
substantial into which the subject dissolves. But that is not the intention
of the sentence. The predicate is to state the essence of the subject. When the
predicate is brought back to bear on the subject, God ceases to be a fixed subject,
and is grasped anew. Hegel gives a second example: “‘the actual is the universal,’
the actual as subject disappears in its predicate. The universal is not meant
to have merely the significance of a predicate, as if the proposition asserted only
that the actual is universal; on the contrary, the universal is meant to express the
essence of the actual.” Reflective, critical thinking thus loses the firm objective
basis it believed to be in the subject. The project of such thinking—to collect and
classify the contents of experience in a fixed order—is overcome once this internal
movement is realized by thought.
The inner form of the speculative sentence is dialectical, a doubling-up, a
twice-reading that continually expands upon itself, offering greater and greater
spheres of meaning, approaching the grasp of the whole of things. The product
of this process is the True grasped as the whole. It is grasped in a grand narration
that does not aim at sorting out true from false assertions but aims at showing
how all assertions are both partially true and partially false. Like Hesiod’s Helicon
Muses, who sing both true and false songs and so provide us with the art of
expression, the speech that arises from the speculative sentence lets us put the
world together in thought. The art of the speculative sentence, like the art of the
Muses, allows us to pass from the dialectic of partial truths to proclaim the
greater truth of the whole that contains them. To speculate is not to speak in a
fanciful way or to think in an unfounded way apart from experience. To speculate,
as a way to embody the love of wisdom that distinguishes philosophy, is to
attempt to meditate and narrate the whole of things in a way that satisfies reason
in its connection with sense, imagination, and memory.
Philosophy pursued as speculation excludes neither reflection nor analysis.
Both of these are required in speculative reasoning. But speculation also requires
a willingness to risk imperfection. The narration of the True as the whole leaves
behind the security that critical reflection and analysis offer. Critical reflection
and analysis keep very tightly to those aspects of experience that can be understood,
that can be ordered and classified. To speak about the whole the philosopher
must stand common sense on its head and attempt what is in principle impossible—
to glimpse the whole of experience from within experience, to have
the divine perspective.
x PREFACE
Critical reflection and analysis are forever comedic, which is part of their attraction.
They always have present in principle the happy outcome—that their
efforts will allow them to sort out truths from errors. Speculation is always
melancholic because its task, in principle, cannot succeed. In principle, thought
can never attain a vantage point outside experience and grasp it as a single object
that can then be captured in speech. Yet not to undertake the task of speculative
thinking is not truly to engage the power distinctive to the human being—reason.
To restrict reason to critical reflection and analysis is to restrict the human.
Philosophy that produces the speculative narrative inherent in the power of
human reason is part of high culture, and has been so since the time of Plato.
Philosophy is part of the world of arts and ideas that make any culture a truly
human culture. Philosophy, like the world of arts and ideas, is not for the many
but the few. In the world of nations not everyone has interest in the fruits that
leisure and contemplation bring, nor need everyone have such interest. Century
after century, most people do not pursue the activities of high culture. They pursue
material comforts through work and spiritual comforts through entertainments
and religions. In generation after generation, countless individuals also
find themselves in societies and situations in which any personal pursuit of the
leisure of high culture is inaccessible, not even imaginable.
All cultures contain systems of wisdom, but not all pursue a world of arts
and ideas in which philosophy develops. Philosophy as an invention of Greek
and European culture has never disappeared in the twenty-five centuries since
its inception. It has always been preserved as a part of high culture. High culture
is high because it involves those uses of the senses, imagination, memory,
and reason wherein human beings deliberately and sustainedly attempt selfknowledge—
to grasp what is distinctly human in an ultimate way. High culture
is motivated by a sense of the absolute, the ways in which what is absolute in experience—
the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—can be imagined and
thought.
Speculative philosophy should not be considered as simply a revival of
Hegelian philosophy, although Hegel is the most complete source for it in modern
philosophy. Its roots in Great Britain and the continent include the philosophies
of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, R. G. Collingwood, Rudolf Hermann Lotze,
Benedetto Croce, and Henri Bergson. In Russia they include Nikolai Berdyaev
and the pre-Revolutionary philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov. In America speculative
philosophy has its sources in the writings of Josiah Royce and in the nineteenthcentury
St. Louis Hegelians, such as W. T. Harris, George Howison, Denton
Snider, and Henry Brockmeyer—who titled their journal, the first philosophical
journal in America, Speculative Philosophy. A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality,
the primary text of process philosophy, begins with what Whitehead terms
“The Speculative Scheme.” In the latter half of the twentieth century speculative
PREFACE xi
philosophy was pursued by Charles Hartshorne, in his extension of Whiteheadian
metaphysics, by Brand Blanshard, in his idealism, and by J. N. Findlay, in
his combination of speculative and phenomenological philosophy in The Discipline
of the Cave, The Transcendence of the Cave, and his essays in Ascent to the Absolute.
More recently speculative philosophy is represented in the writings of
Robert Neville and William Desmond.
The essays that follow are various ways of regarding philosophy as it exists
within human culture. They concern the philosophy of culture and the culture
of philosophy. They draw repeatedly on the major sources of my own philosophical
thought—Vico, Hegel, and Cassirer, accompanied by other sympathetic
thinkers, such as Collingwood and Whitehead. I add to these one major
literary figure—James Joyce.
In these essays the reader will find there has been a deliberate attempt at repetition
of major themes and claims. Each essay stands on its own and can be read
as such, but taken together they share ideas. The reader will encounter the same
idea more than once, often cast in a different perspective. I think philosophical
books should be a pleasure to read, at least for those prone to pursue wisdom. I
also think major ideas need to be approached and re-approached, from various
directions. Repetition is an integral part of the philosophical sense of truth. A
truth loses nothing by being said more than once. Truth, as narrative, not deductive,
is always a twice-told tale.
My intention is to instruct, delight, and move, and in so doing to encourage
the reader of these words to think through the issues individually. In this way
it may be possible to revive the spirit of speculative philosophy in an era in which
it is all but lost in the movements of Anglo-American analysis, continental
hermeneutics, post-modernism, applied ethics, gender and race theories, and so
forth. These forms of professional philosophy are enormous distractions to the
philosophical mind because they are so gratifying and engender so much social
approval.
Philosophy always suffers from a lack of respectability and always yearns for
it, allowing the pointer on its compass to be pulled in so many directions that it
risks losing its true bearing. This true bearing is to allow the human being and
human culture itself a means to look completely at itself—to see things whole.
These essays are meta-philosophical. They present a philosophical position
but they do not present a system of speculative philosophy. Philosophy by its nature
takes itself, its own existence and nature, as a problem. Speculative philosophy
in particular is self-comprehending. More so than the critical or analytic
spirit, the speculative spirit seeks to say what philosophy is. These essays approach
philosophy as a kind of ultimate literature, a literature focused on what
is absolute in human experience. Philosophical activity is essentially literary activity
in the sense that philosophy depends upon the word, spoken or written, to
xii PREFACE
conduct its pursuit of wisdom. Philosophy, like poetry, aims to take language to
its limits, but unlike poetry, philosophy attempts, in this process, to join imagination
to reason.
In one of the philosophical passages of Finnegans Wake, at the beginning of
the third chapter of the first book, James Joyce includes the line “to tickle the
speculative to all but opine” (50.13–14). It is the only time speculative occurs in
the Wake. Here it is linked with Nicholas of Cusa, who appears as Micholas de
Cusack, and with Giordano Bruno of Nola, who appears as Padre Don Bruno,
both of whom Joyce regards as precursors to Giambattista Vico, who appears
throughout the Wake in many guises, including “the producer (Mr. John Baptister
Vickar)” (255.27). Vico can be identified with the protagonist of the Wake,
H. C. E., Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Here Comes Everybody, and Vico,
like Earwicker, is the “Courser, Recourser, Changechild” (481.2).
Joyce associates the speculative with the mutuality of opposites. “To tickle
the speculative” is to see how everything and everybody is a “twone” (3.12):
“Now let the centuple celves of my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them,—
of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me—by the
coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that identity of undiscernibles
. . .” (49.33–50.1). Like Cusanus, Bruno is a master of opposites: “alionola equal
and opposite brunoipso” (488.9). Within his own identity, his “egobruno”
(488.8), Bruno is opposite: “Bruno at being eternally opposed by Nola”
(488.10–11). Vico’s solution to opposites is to be the master of the cycle of what
is “whorled without aimed” (272.4–5) but which “annews” (277.18). Joyce reverses
the order of historical influence: “a jambebatiste to a brulobrulo!”
(117.11–12). Vico’s speculative opine accomplishes the solution to the problem
of opposites by his corso and ricorso of events such that “all of whose I in my hereinafter
of course by recourse demission me.” The speculative always requires this
sense of the dialectical structure of experience. With dialectic comes the sense of
repetition. The speculative is like a song and no true song is sung only once.
Hegel makes one momentary appearance in the Wake as “hegelstomes”
(416.33) in the famous Ondt and the Gracehoper sequence of the third book.
Joyce’s reference to Hegel is preceded by the question: “Had he twicycled the sees
of the deed and trestraversed their revermer?” (416.30–31). This question of the
twicycled and the trestraversed, of the two-in-the-one-in-the-three, sums up
Hegel’s project of a science of the experience of consciousness in the Phenomenology
of Spirit. These and so many others are Joyce’s literary formulations of the
speculative sentence in which he turns litter to letter to literature and back again.
The philosopher, to begin his dialectic, must first sit in the poet’s chair.
Although philosophers must go to school with the poets, philosophical
thought always aims at something more than poetry can provide. For the speculative
philosopher this something more is not literal-mindedness but, as Whitehead
PREFACE xiii
holds at the end of Modes of Thought, it is mathematical pattern. Poetry can provide
meter but only philosophy can provide an ultimate sense of pattern that can
satisfy reason. Even if we hold that true philosophy is never written down, because
the nature of things is always just beyond the power of language to represent it, we
write down this claim. What philosophy itself is, is never fully stateable, yet our access
to it requires the use of language.
There are seven themes that take on various forms throughout this work: (1)
that the True is the whole; (2) that philosophical argument requires grounding
in philosophical narrative; (3) that philosophy is a kind of humanistic literature,
governed by the Muses; (4) that philosophers must go to school with the poets;
(5) that philosophical systems necessarily employ the principles of composition
of classical rhetoric for their expression; (6) that philosophical systems are theaters
of memory; (7) that self-knowledge is the aim of speculative philosophy.
Philosophies are, in the end, written for philosophers. The purpose of speculative
philosophy is the Socratic pursuit of the Delphic gnothi seauton, of selfknowledge.
The self can turn back upon itself only speculatively. It cannot attain
a vision of itself through a critique of its own actions or an analysis of the empirical
basis of them. Speculative philosophy, whether presented in objective or
subjective style, is autobiography, an art of self-writing in which the philosopher
comes to see what being is and, in terms of it, what the human being is, including
the individual life as governed by the love of wisdom.
A critic may ask whether in all these pages their author has ever truly defined
speculative philosophy. As I recall, Louis Armstrong was once asked, “What is
jazz?” He replied, “If you got to ask, you aren’t ever going to find out.” The speculative
spirit is necessary to speculative philosophy. It is a way of coming to philosophy,
a sense of things. The spirit is not in everyone. But when it is present,
philosophy is musical.
I thank my colleagues at Emory and at various other universities for their
helpful readings of this work in manuscript: Thora Bayer, Ann Hartle, George
Benjamin Kleindorfer, Donald Livingston, David Lovekin, George Lucas, and
Frederick Marcus. Philosophical thought always requires friends. I thank Molly
Black Verene, assistant director of the Institute for Vico Studies at Emory, for all
her work and advice in the preparation of this book.

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