It feels earlier than it really is (9am). Food, friction, and philosophy.
I. Food
The problem with making a pie is then needing to eat it.
The actual eating is, of course, a pleasure. But there’s always a little guilt, except, perhaps, during the holidays or other special occasions when the overindulgence of desserts and other treats is not just expected but almost part of the definition of what makes those events what they are. It’s not that at other times desserts are a guilty pleasure, it’s that in order to finish a pie while it’s still ‘good’ requires multiple pieces a day. And that seems excessive.
But it is a chocolate-espresso pudding pie, so the guilt is short-lived and replaced by bliss.
II. Friction
Misunderstanding — the usual culprit — led to friction but not an actual fight. The details will remain unsaid.
The crueler irony is not when one party is the villain and the other the victim (see also: Rosemary’s Baby) or when one party expects a pleasant surprise and the other delivers devastating news; but rather when, as in “The Gift of the Magi,” the two undertake analogous tasks for analogous reasons but due mainly to a lack of communication still end up hurting each other.
de Maupassant was perhaps the better writer, but O. Henry is where the sadness is.
Neither of us is particularly happy in this town. It offers no career prospects for either of us, the cultural opportunities are limited with little chance for improvement, and this is not where either of us would choose to settle down and make a family. It’s an (optical) illusion, perhaps, but because the town doesn’t move forward, we feel not like we’re standing still, but rather that we’re losing ground.
And so there was silence and grumbling, and finally open discussion. Then rest and relaxation.
III. Philosophy
When a term or idea has a long history, it ends up with a cadre of related definitions; it would actually be easier if said definitions were more greatly separated. Instead they blend and fade, and slowly transition.
To summarize: Descartes comes along and proclaims that to be true an idea or perception must be clear and distinct. He does not, however, set up good criteria for what he means by clear and distinct. But we more or less trace this notion to him. Leibniz comes along a bit later, more or less following in Descartes’ rationalist footsteps, but provides several upgrades while maintaining the terminology. Clear and distinct is where truth is found. But first: an idea or perception can be clear or obscure. If obscure, stop. Do not pass go, etc. If clear, if can further be distinct or confused. The improvement upon Descartes — and here I’m drawing heavily upon Stephen Puryear’s rather detailed but also quite wonderful “Was Leibniz Confused about Confusion?” — is in providing nominal definitions of what distinct and confused mean so that we can distinguish between them (not that it tells us what they really are, per se, but at least that we can tell them apart … that we can decide whether something is one or the other). Following him we have Christian Wolff (1679-1754, not to be confused with Johann Christoph Wolf, 1683-1739, a German polyhistor and book collector), who maintained the system of clear vs. obscure, and further distinct vs. confused. Leibniz’s taxonomy goes further, and from section XXIV of Leibniz’s “Discourse on Metaphysics” we have: “What clear and obscure, distinct and confused, adequate and inadequate, intuitive and assumed knowledge is, and the definition of nominal, real, causal and essential.” ‘Distinct’ may be further broken down — though ‘confused’ may not be — into adequate and inadequate, and adequate further — see the ‘Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis” (1684) — into symbolic and intuitive. A couple things are relevant here. An idea or notion, concept, apperception … whatever is considered … is, in its whole, clear or obscure depending on whether as a whole it can be picked out. It is distinct or confused based on whether its parts can be — and I’m being rough here — picked out. That is to say, ‘X’ is clear and distinct if its parts are clear, rather than obscure; distinct and confused are to the parts as clear and obscure are to the whole. One might then be motivated see adequate and inadequate as to the parts as distinct and confused are to the whole (or to the parts of the parts, as distinct and confused are to the parts) … and so on. While Leibniz effectively stops at symbolic vs. intuitive, one might be willing to take this chain further and further, zooming in as with a fractal. That’s the first relevant observation.
The second is that while truth, according to Descartes and Leibniz, as well as Wolff and his followers, is to be found in the realm of clear and distinct ideas, notions, apperceptions, etc., the realm of the clear and/but confused (the and-but I’ll cover later) is where the aesthetic is found. This is at first explicit in the works of Wolff’s pupil, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762), who coined the term ‘aesthetics’ in 1735 who published his own work of that title beginning in 1750, but the seeds were planted back with Leibniz, who in the same section XXIV of the “Discourse” writes:
When I am able to recognize a thing among others, without being able to say in what its differences or characteristics consist, the knowledge is confused. Sometimes indeed we may know clearly, that is without being in the slightest doubt, that a poem or a picture is well or badly done because there is in it an “I know not what” which satisfies or shocks us. Such knowledge is not yet distinct.
But what Leibniz does not make explicit here but what one can eventually infer is that the aesthetic, such as the beautiful, is not a matter of truth or knowledge, that it must remain clear and/but confused, that to “refine” it would be to remove that which makes it beautiful or similar.
There is a corollary to this. Imagine a ‘perfect’ intellect, one that can always perceive clearly and distinctly … adequately and symbolically. Such a being would always have access to truth, but would always miss beauty.
Eventually the world of philosophy moves past the rationalist system of Descartes and his heirs. For a while the critical vocabulary of knowledge and truth is dominated by Kant and the “Ding an sich,” the “synthetic a priori,” and so on. Hegel gives us his version of the dialectic, and Marx refines it. Schopenhauer’s pessimism fuels Nietzsche, and the 20th-century analytic philosophers rewind past Kant to Hume and attempt to take another path. The clear-and-distinct, and its cousins, become memetic zombies, often resurrected but rarely rehabilitated, frequently misused or misquoted.
IV. Footnotes and Further Notes
- Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics“
- Lectures by Gilles Deleuze: On Leibniz [Deleuze refers to “confusedly and obscurely” … neither Leibniz nor his followers would allow such a pairing]
- Hooker, Michael, ed., “Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays,” page 13.
- Johann Christoph Wolf
- Christian Wolff
- Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
- Continental Connections Thursday #2: On clarity and exact thinking
