In Pursuit of the Unattainable

 

 

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

 

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

                                   

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6 -

 

 

In their discussion of the notion of method, the authors of The Emptiness of Emptiness (EE) approvingly quote Richard Rorty, who writes “…the idea of method presupposes that of a privileged vocabulary, the vocabulary which gets to the essence of the object, the one which expresses the properties which it has in itself as opposed to those which we read into it.”    

 

It’s true that for the most part scholars assume that more or less what they do is to ‘let speak’, that is, they do the necessary groundwork so that the subject matter of their study is able to reveal itself.  Years ago, I remember reading a work titled What Plato Said, written by one of the foremost authorities on Plato at the time.  What the author did in the volume was reveal to us what Plato really said, meant, thought and so on.  It was the first time that I began to really wonder where the scholar himself had disappeared to – was he still there?  Perhaps he had managed to completely excise himself from the work and to call forth the ghost of Plato.

 

Yet is there actually something inherent to the idea or notion of ‘method’ itself that presupposes a ‘privileged vocabulary’ such as the one indicated by Rorty? 

 

A common claim in this week’s readings is that one’s method is, to some extent, one’s prejudice, that we necessarily approach our object of study with certain preconceived notions or modes of interpretation.  As the authors of EE claim, “what we learn in our encounter with these texts is in every way a function of the tools we bring to our study.”  So it appears that ‘method’ is what one possesses, a tool one carries in one’s tool-belt.   

 

The 20^th century was arguably ‘the century of method’, a century absorbed in methodological concerns.  Perhaps it was telling that Nietzsche, who died in 1900, at the doorstep of the century of method, had argued that the history of philosophy (and of scholarship to a lesser extent) was nothing more than the history of the justification of prejudice.  The great thinkers of history were nothing more than brilliant deceivers, con-artists, who were driven by a yearning to justify their own prejudices.  We should bare in mind though that Nietzsche wasn’t attempting to reduce the history of thought to such a simple formulation – all he was doing was identifying a pattern among intellectuals, one that, he believed, was indicative of aspects of the historical movements of thought and scholarship.  Although it’s almost difficult to argue with Nietzsche, when one thinks of how productively methods employed prior to the ‘postmodern age’ had managed to marginalize and silence voices of dissent and the diverse categories of ‘the feminine’ and ‘the abnormal’.                

 

Thus far, it would seem that Rorty and Nietzsche are right about what the notion of method denotes, that it is nothing more than how one studies an object, a ‘how’ or ‘path’ that assumes a final and achievable destination or goal, an objective essence, as Rorty puts it.  As the authors of EE point out, such thinkers as Nietzsche, James and Rorty have argued that this is simply a myth, a mythos or ‘narrative’.  So does this mean that, when we read a text, we’re only able to read into it?  Moreover, I’ll ask again, is this reading of method, that it presupposes an essentialist teleology, inherent to the idea or notion itself?

 

Why don’t we explore the word method more thoroughly.  It’s a compound of Greek origins, derived from the preposition meta, meaning ‘with’ (in this case), and the noun hodos, meaning ‘way’ or ‘path’.  So I guess the above reading of the word is also etymologically sound: method is ‘the path with which one is’ or ‘the path one is on’; either way it seems to be one’s own path, with its ‘possessional origin’ in oneself in a sense, not in the other that’s being studied.    

 

Interestingly, as can happen with compounds, especially in Greek, given the richness of the language and its vocabulary base, the whole contains more than its constituent parts.  Methodos also means ‘pursuit’, not what one is with, what one already possesses, but what one is not with, what eludes one and that at which one aims.  It would seem that method is simultaneously what one does and does not have, is and is not with or on.  What is method telling us here?  We’ve talked about what it means to ‘take a path’, to ‘be with a method’, but what might it mean to ‘be without’ one and to be so simultaneously? 

 

Appropriating the language of the Mādhyamika philosopher, we can pose the question differently: what does it mean to ‘be empty of fullness’, to be simultaneously lacking and hence in pursuit of what one already has?  Note how it’s not that one is ‘full of emptiness’, which would imply that the goal is to empty oneself of an illusory fullness, but rather that one is already empty, for it is the ‘I’ who is in pursuit, who is dispossessed of that which it seems to already possess.

The simultaneity of this double bind is a temporal distention befitting human finitude.  Heidegger defined Dasein or the ‘human-existent’ as Seinkönnen, as ‘potential-for-being’, which is simultaneously limited in its potential infinitude by the horizon of temporality.  Given infinite possibilities, we are only able to actualize a finite number, because the horizon of our being, which is temporality, is finite.  In Augustine’s Confessions we find an impassioned prayer to God to be saved from the distentio (stretching-out) of temporality.  For Augustine there is no worse pain than the distention brought about by human finitude, by the limitations of temporality.

Existing within the horizon of temporality, we are empty of the fullness of eternity.  Just as there’s no solution, no possibility for transcending human finitude insofar as we’re human, there is no possibility for transcending the double bind of method.  It is true, we are always on a path, but the notion of method tells us more, it reveals our finitude to us, that we never reach any ‘end’ or ‘essence’ on this path, that we are always in pursuit of some ‘culminated path’, some telos, which must necessarily elude us – this is the deception, the ruse that method itself reveals.  It tells us that ‘the search for meaning’, of which the authors of EE speak, is in reality a search for the limits of our language, for the limits of our world.  In our finitude the entirety or unity of the path we’re on eludes our grasp, our pursuit to understand and deconstruct it – we grasp at the whole, at meaning, but all we are offered are bits and pieces, parts of a projected whole.  Method itself reveals that all methods are necessarily finite, limited, lacking in the fullness of eternity; it embodies the human condition: finitude in search of infinitude. 

 

 

A Potential Path Beyond Method

 

Caroline Bynum, in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, speaks of the method or the path pursued to God and religious piety by religious women in the Medieval period.  The Medieval woman would turn inward and read her body and soul as text for symbols, thus creating an internal textuality, a living textuality.  Does this method light a path beyond human finitude?  Surely by journeying inward finitude becomes even more vivid?

 

The Arabic word fitra, which plays a prominent role in Islamic tradition, is usually read as the originary human nature placed within creatures by their creator.  Fitra literally means ‘opening’; it’s the originary opening placed in the creature by the creator so that he may remember and return to his origin – it is the path of return.  The Sufi turns inward, the mystic, the Medieval women, of which Bynum speaks, all turn inward in search of a path beyond finitude.  Perhaps what they find, even if just for a brief and fleeting moment, is their originary fitra and the culmination of their method, which is no longer a path pursued, but a path attained.    

~ by Babak on September 14, 2008.