Reading Notes – Rosen (3)

"What we require in philosophy is not a new system, or solutions to puzzles, but a deeper and more comprehensive grasp of the problems.  This 'grasp' is not a concept or system of concepts, but a dream, albeit a reasonable and lucid dream  The dream loses its reasonableness and lucidity if we attempt to analyze it with the instruments of modern science, or still more fundamentally, if we forget that analysis is itself a dream. .... The attempt to answer the question 'Who am I?' leads one sooner or later, and rightly so, to define oneself in terms of who I am not.  We go wrong, however, when we forget the initial distinction.  The Platonic Socrates is the first to elaborate this distinction as one between human and divine or cosmic nature.  What is called 'Pre-Socratic' philosophy shares with modern scientific thought the failure to distinguish at a conceptual or epistemological level between these two dimensions.  As a result, human life is conceived as an epiphenomenon of essentially homogeneous cosmic processes, regardless of how poetically the conception may be expressed.  This oversimplification results inevitably in a powerful but crude doctrine of reason.  Pre-Socratic and post-Socratic cosmology, one could say, forgets its poetic or dreamlike origins, and rhetoric hardens into technology.  As a consequence, increasing technical mastery is accompanied by a corresponding vulgarization of the human spirit." (p.257)

Stanley Rosen

The Limits of Analysis 

Reading Notes – Rosen (2)

"Analysis is a mode of cognition, and is therefore regulated by the judgment, intuition, or sensibility of the analyst.  Knowing how to carry out a sequence of analytical operations is not the same as knowing the appropriate domain of application, nor is it the same as knowing how to start and when to stop the sequence." (p.3)

"Even if obedience to rules is social or political, the 'we' of society or the political community is unintelligible except as an assemblage of 'I's.' The analysis of what I know is incomplete, and indeed, meaningless, if it makes no reference to how I know it, or that it is I who know it, namely, that meanings mean something only to knowers.  Hence I become a problem in the attempt to establish the public or universal status of what I know.  This problem is not resolved by pretending that it does not exist.  In terms going back to Plato, the 'What is X?' question cannot be totally severed from the 'Who am I?' question." (p.6)

"According to Kant, every analysis depends upon a prior synthesis. If there had not first been a 'putting-together' (whether by nature or the analyst), there could be no 'taking-apart.' This is so obvious that we may well ask why analytical philosophy tends to undervalue, and even to ignore, synthesis." (p.7) 

Stanley Rosen

The Limits of Analysis 

*

Carrying out a sequence of analytical operations in a domain inappropriate to its application cannot be taken to imply that the sequence per se is "incorrect" or inapplicable in an "appropriate place."  It would be the application, not the analytical routine that is "wrong."  Like it or not, judging whether or not an analysis is "appropriate" unavoidably involves an analysis of the intentions of the analyst.

It's still an open question (to me) whether the composer – the one who "composes" or "draws together" – is engaged in an act of synthesis (as the job title implies) or analysis.  The simple (simplistic) answer is that obviously the composer "creates" a synthesis of materials.  But the selection – the sorting through –  of materials to synthesize/compose (what the composer deems appropriate musical materials) appears to be an analytical act.  So we race blindly, deafly backward toward the "intuition" – but do we ever get there?

Reading Notes – Rosen (1)

"In order to make sense, I must have sense, and there are no rules for this. I have been arguing this point in the form of a  defense of intuition, but it needs to be emphasized that the term 'intuition' itself has many senses. My argument cannot thus be intended as a 'theory' of intuition in the constructive sense of the term. On the contrary I am claiming that theory construction is possible only on the basis of intuition, and further, that analytical thinking is saturated with intuition at each step. A complete and exact science of semantics would then be a 'looking' as well as a 'talking.'  We can of course talk about what we have seen, but there is no argument in heaven or on earth that will take us across the gap from seeing to talking." (p.18)

"If a structure then is a combination of forms, it is also true that forms possess structure.  Another way of saying this is that there can be no such thing as a non-circular, exact, and complex analysis of a structure.  At some primitive stage we have to see the structure as a candidate for analysis, and what we see is antecedent to, not the result of, the process of analysis." (p.29)h

"[I]t makes no sense to talk of analysis apart from reference to intuition.  I now add that it makes no sense to talk of the analysis of structure, and so of sense, if by 'analysis' we mean merely the replacement of one structure by  another." (p.33)

"If to talk is to construct, then there is no distinction between a true and a false proposition.  The distinction between truth and falsehood rests upon a distinction between what we say and what we say it about.  But this distinction cannot be drawn unless we are able to see what we are talking about, independently of the discursive aspect of the given act of talking." (p.36)

"The positive  task of the philosopher is to fecundate his analytical skills with dreams, and to discipline his dreams with analysis." (p.260)

Stanley Rosen

The Limits of Analysis