Speaking of Muddy Points...
From Literary Theory:
"The mistake of the Western metaphysical tradition has been to see Being as some kind of objective entity, and to separate it sharply from the subject; Heidegger seeks rather to return to pre-Socratic thought, before the dualism between subject and object opened up, and to regard Being as somehow encompassing both" (Eagleton 55).
So I have a confession...reading this chapter was excruciating because I was so lost. I felt as though I was taken into a dark forest and left to find my way out. When Dr. Jerz said that there would be some methods you would like and some you wouldn't, he wasn't kidding! I think that even if I had understood and been able to comprehend what I read, I wouldn't have liked it. Trust me, I'm far from a philosopher. Philosophy is like Mexican food, it doesn't agree with me. (Insert horrified gasp here) That's not to say that I don't ever look at the philosophy beind something, or that I hate philosophy, it has just never been that appealing to me.
It's especially disinteresting (to me) when the author refers to many philosophers assuming that us English majors know what he's talking about. Have I heard of Descarte, Kant, and Socrates? Certainly! I took a college class in high school about philosophy but I don't remember the significance of these guys. His points would be more apparent if he used easy-to-decode language. If he cut some of the stuff that was minor and added more information to aid the reader, the chapter would have been more effective.
Having said that, I think that trying to look at the philosophy behind a text could be a useful tool in a person's "tool belt" (if you can figure out how to do this). Does anyone understand this chapter and can put it in simplier terms for a simple mind?
Now that I feel stupid and bad for cutting up on Eagleton who is, for the record, much smarter than me, I need to get some shut eye. *Yawn*
But as a last thought, and so this blog isn't a complete drain on your intellegence and is worthwhile to the reader, I wanted to provide an example of chiasmus I found in the text. "There is no object without a subject, and no subject without an object" (Eagleton 50). For those who don't remember, a chiasmus is just a phrase that when turned around, holds a different meaning. For the record, that's my definition, not any book's. Now interpreting this sucker is a little different because it's philosophy. My guess is that all objects, for example a sentence, have a subject. And all subjects have an object, or a purpose if we're still talking about a sentence.
Good night or morning if you will...
The later essays will start to make sense, because you'll start noticing when they refer to concepts you've already read. Metaphysics, simply put, deals with how our senses help us to know the world, free will, and classification.
For instance, "If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" If you define "sound" as "air vibrations that reach the ear and are interpreted by the brain," but no brain is around to interpret the signals, then from one perspective, you can hold that the tree does not make a sound.
You can think of it as an early form of knowledge acquisition, in which people used logic and conducted elaborate thought experiments, and discussed their results orally, long before there existed a print culture to write down accurate measurements of direct observations (which could then be passed down and used for the basis of additional real-world experiments). Metaphysics (which involves observing the world and coming up with theories about how and why our senses tell us various things about the world) is an important step that eventually led to the scientific method (an endless loop of observation, hypothesis, expermient).
Feel free to look up any term that puzzles you...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics
http://www.geocities.com/black_tim/355_Lecture_I.htm
"How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?" and "Can God make a rock so big that even he can't lift it?" and "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Toostie Pop?" are all examples of metaphysical questions, the answer to which depends less on experimentation than on definition.