Relaxing Ideas: Punctuation and Boxing

J. Perl

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Mallarmé is often said to have been a Platonist "of some kind." But the description holds only to the extent that one believes, as Stéphane Mallarmé did, that the difference between ideal and real is a matter of punctuation and diction. Transcendence was for him an intensification in language, a property of exclamation points and italics. Ontology and poetics aside, Mallarmé's insight has practical value, at least in my walk of life. Common Knowledge receives, for the "Peace and Mind" symposium, submissions that argue at the top of their voices that intellectuals must lower their voices. I rarely know how to break the news to authors of such pieces: vehement discourse against vehemence in discourse is self-contradictory—but that is obvious and not the problem. The problem is that aggressive talk about aggressive talk draws aggression toward itself. The Sermon on the Mount was not for nothing by invitation only. A recent case of what I mean is Leon Wieseltier's reply in New Republic to Louis Menand's wondering in New Yorker about the relationship of belligerence and certainty. "Menand thinks that truth is merely a warrant for terrorism," [End Page 394] Wieseltier writes, "that objectivity is just an early form of fanaticism, that certainty only kills . . . Menand has risen above substance. He is indifferent, and afraid." I do not know whether Menand will respond to that remark. Were my advice sought (and few seek it), I would say: "Be indifferent and afraid. Given the metaposition you have taken—and who will grant that a metaposition is what you have taken? soldiers see only battle lines—you cannot win for losing or win for winning. There is just one way to get on with it: Let them nail you. Then rise above substance on the third day." The hard part of quietism, turning cheek, is overhearing warriors repress their own indifferences and fears. I not infrequently want to say to a lecturer or the author of a book or sometimes even to a lunch partner: "At ease, ensign. Permission granted to speak freely"—except that so many of such people outrank me, indeed are admirals of the fleet. On the other hand, if I may drop the military metaphor and, for a change, deal with military brass: it is by now conventional wisdom that, to win wars or prevent them, we need to "think outside the box." That box and the need to think beyond it comprise, in the military and in business, a cliché about transcending clichés (routine beliefs and practices), but the provenance of these ideas is academic. They derive most directly from T. S. Kuhn and his paradigm shifts but more generally from contextualists and their hard-to-shift contexts. I prefer the military-industrial version. Box reveals, as paradigm, episteme, and other Greek words do not, that (unless you are a butterfly or small rodent in the hands of an unsupervised child) such enclosures are not life-threatening. Boxes are notoriously disposable; and when you need them, when in transit, you need them badly and may fluster when enough in the right sizes cannot be found. Still, a box is a final resting place for corpses. There is a school, there are several schools, of academic thought that maintain we are enclosed, each of us, in a milieu of some kind and, once in, cannot get out, may not even know that we are in, cannot imagine the contents of other milieus. The difference between us and a butterfly or small rodent is that we (or a subset of "us") somehow, somewhen, constructed our own constrictions. And if the box or milieu of beliefs in question is not a box we live in but just some box we own, then...
Original languageAmerican English
Pages (from-to)394-398
JournalCommon Knowledge
Volume9
Issue number3
StatePublished - 2003

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