Flashback to flashback to philosophy school in Fall 2008–for Mr. Esterheld.

Physics, Book 2, Chapter 8, last paragraph—my dear friend, Aristotle.

Last week, on our date at the Argonaut after my barbaric Friday evening make-up class, H.B. was kind enough to listen to me talking out my disdain with Neo-Platonists, who will use debaters’ arguments to cover their refusal to see distinctions of kind. Specifically, I had come from a class on the Physics which had held a decent conversation, for CUA, but a rather typically insane one, in what it showed up about philosophy students who are not sensitive to the small but killer differences between one kind of thing and another, especially when it comes down to honestly looking at their own experience. (You don’t want to know what they were saying about love the other day, or rather not saying.)

You will catch Aristotle comparing nature to art, to distinguish the powerful ways in which they are the same and different. (Art, my friends, is a poor translation of the Greek word TEXNH, or technê with a long ‘a’ sound at the end, which is the word for all making, knitting, cooking, poem-making, shoe-making all included. This is why the Greek language is cool, because you don’t have to search to notice that shoe-making has more in common with poem-making, than with birds singing or children being gestated.) Art and Nature are for once the same, in that that neither deliberates–– Now, of course we clearly see the artisan deliberating in art, as Aristotle points out, but Skill as such–Lady Technê in all her perfections–does not. The professor (a lady) was saying that art-not-deliberating was like a downhill skier, who’s not thinking about what to do next, because he’s in the moment. Real art, she says, doesn’t think about it.

Now, this example is fine, if you can feel around the language she used to describe it, as the way she explained it was extremely problematic–but of course the talkative Neo-Platonist had to go there. Not thinking? Automatically bad! (But there’s thinking and thinking, my friend…) Particulars, he said, are always particulate, and some kind of discursivity is always necessary to deal with them, and discursivity must equal the thinking-it-through of deliberation. Having no real sense of what being in the moment was like, or why it is so necessary to cultivate athleticism, the virtue of the debased body, he had to attach some kind of abstract little moments to the skier, based on abstract understandings of what discursivity and action are.

So then the Thomist was like, but discursivity in thought is not the same as discursivity in action! And that was enough for him, which is fine. But the Neo-Platonist, with his prior conviction that the Realm of Becoming is nothing compared to the Hypostases of Soul, Mind, and One, had to keep going, because action can’t be allowed to be whole. It’s always partial, he said–dealing with becoming, the only way it can be done, is with Thought (by which he really means, abstract thought, in his way). Now the Thomist has it right–that he’s confounding discursivity in thought with how we deal with particulars in action–but while Thomas could have gotten more particular and restructured the example to make it clear, this Thomist could not. He was willing to allow the truth of the phenomenon, and could tell that one of Thomas’ peace-making distinctions was needed, but couldn’t bring it home. The professor in turn tried to restate her initial example, using the same words, hoping that by stressing the terms, the meaning she was pointing to would be clear, but it wasn’t. (And that’s why Friday evening make-up classes are barbaric.)

So, I tried to point out that deliberation is a very specific kind of thinking, that leads to choice, from which there is no turning back–you know you’ve made a choice when you’re actually acting. ‘Second thoughts’ mean, you didn’t really Choose yet. (One has really got to let the Ethics give off the occasional ontological light, after all.) The athlete is a good paradigm for this moment, because he’s already chosen. He knows how he’s going to do it, and he can be calm until the right particular rolls around to him. He sees it–what to do–he uses intuitional, nous-thinking, the fifth intellectual virtue in this aforementioned Ethics–without needing to take a discursive step back and count on his thumbs. If he counts, then he’s probably not going to cut much of a figure in the Majors. Art can’t afford to deliberate; in order to achieve this, even art has to have some kind of share in the highest, non-discursive kind of understanding. Art doesn’t deliberate, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t think.

But most do not look to the Ethics for ontological light, and my attempt to make peace between the Thomist and the Neo-Platonist fell to the dust. Such is graduate school, and the factions of thought.

But fortunately afterwards there was the Argonaut, and in the jumble of hipster talk and television around us, old HB brought it back home. HB immediately recognized the real force of the Sport example, good observer as he is, and also provided some helpful manly advice on Baseball to confound my enemies, or my friends, for that matter. (His experience in re Sport has been invaluable, because while I’m generally up for viewing a noble contest of victory, I have a far better shot at epistêmê, for what goes on in the more womanly TEXNAI of messing with string and needles. I may still not understand, for instance, the reasoning behind the feint, how it’s made, when to use it, how to ever, ever recognize that someone’s making it. That’s why I absolutely suck at basketball.) There’s a superstition surrounding this /In the Moment/ we all hear of, because in sports, it’s notoriously difficult to find and especially to keep; witness the baseball player’s so-called “slump.” Thus it is often courted as a non-rational, fully animal moment: yet this will make it forever elusive. No, HB is right: being in the zone is inhabiting the essence of skill, essentially reasonable skill. Not discursive skill: skill that is reasonable like nous is: skill that sees. Our trouble with getting into the moment, is not that we think too much simply, but that we don’t know what kind of thinking to use.

Hence the calm of the true athlete comes from already having chosen, from knowing precisely what to do with his body in order to catch the ball, provided of course it is humanly catchable; he waits cannily in that timeless space for the baseball to declare its direction so that he may pounce. The thought is the deed, the deed the thought; this is why athleticism is beautiful.

What of the more homely example of, say, knitting? Practically speaking, as any knitter knows, deliberation is perhaps one of the most important and hard-to-learn parts of the making process. What size should I make, what color should I make it–the smallest cross-section of the tip the iceberg. In my early days of making, I used to see a few materials before me and leap into the pleasure of action, without considering if what I made would be useful or beautiful; or if my choices would lead to the utility or beauty I allowed my imagination to project. In the last few years, by contrast, I’ve struggled with an over-abundance of deliberative scruples, enough often to paralyze me before I begin. But if art does not deliberate, then we have to say that these things take place before that choice, before we’ve entered the heart of the activity of skill.

Think of the action of knitting an entire row–once you learn to do this most simple of activities, pick your yarn and needles and get casting on out of the way, all need for discursion and deliberation vanish into the calm of knit stitch after knit stitch. While I’ve learned that my pleasure increases the more beauty and utility I aim at, the integral pleasure is why I continue or indeed bother at all with the craft. That’s the true pleasure of being truly skilled, I think, that every decision is ready to hand without fuss or worry; you know enough, roughly and in outline, to be confident that when you meet that onrushing particular you’ll know what to do directly. You could say that Skill does not Hesitate. (Which in turn gives rise to its peculiar hubris, but that’s a story for another day.)

Action is whole, neo-platonist pipsqueaks! It does participate in timelessness; if it doesn’t, we’re all in trouble, artist or no: the exact quotation is more like, “surely *even* art does not deliberate.” (It must be seen, that there is thinking that deliberates not.) There can be an immediate harmony between the highest mode of knowing, and action–and art, lowly art, provides a serendipitous way to notice this. Thank goodness HB is around, who knows this without having to deliberate about it. And takes one out for drinks.