An alternative title for this journal was “The Scrivener”—after Bartleby, the scrivener, Herman Melville’s literary Rorschach test, a man who prefers not to. A scrivener is paid to write, but for now, at least, Under the Net is free to read.
Its actual title is stolen from a 1954 novel by Iris Murdoch—her first—about an idling writer, Jake, and his philosophical friends. The novel features fireworks, the abduction of a showbiz dog, and a philosophical dialogue, The Silencer, from which its title, in turn, is stolen. “[The] movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth,” a character in The Silencer declaims:
All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.
The image is stolen, a third time over, from a passage of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on scientific theories as nets whose mesh carves up the world in different ways.
There are two things I love about this passage and the novel in which it figures. One is that, despite its pomposity, The Silencer comes to seem the only worthwhile writing Jake has done: sometimes a fear of pretension is a fear of ambition or genuine self-expression. It gets in the way of creativity. (Let that be a warning to my readers.)
The second thing I love about the passage is that, while it states a view I have come to share—that description, not abstraction, is the better part of philosophy—the image in the passage undermines itself. Who would not prefer the freedom of flight to an unseemly crawl under theory’s net in the mud and dirt of particular truth?—But we are not birds. “Are there [Platonic] forms of mud, hair and dirt?” Murdoch once asked. My argument, like hers, assumes that there are.
A similar self-defeat is vivid in a much-cited aphorism from Wittgenstein’s later work: “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” It’s supposed to be a slight, but as my undergraduate teacher Jane Heal riffed in a recent interview: “What’s wrong with that? We all need a holiday sometimes.”
All of which is an elaborate preamble to saying: what I hope to write in this space are a philosopher’s notes on life, or books about it, together with advertisements for Life is Hard, holidays snaps of philosophical language on the beach, and perhaps a few revivals from an old endeavour. I’ll try post every other week.
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Bartleby seems an anti-Bartleby story to me.
Bartleby is by far the least vital character in the story in every aspect right down to his pallid complexion. Even the worker who is named after his love of ginger nuts is more alive and vital than Bartleby.
At the end, Melville makes a metaphor of Bartleby out of the dead letter office. He is a dead person, with no aspirations, no pleasures, no engagements with the world. It is screamingly obvious that being a scrivener would be better than being nothing. Being a letter is better than being a dead letter.