My most recent book, Downstream, is about brook trout. People sometimes wonder: why on earth would a professor of philosophy and classics write about such things? Surely I should be writing about metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, right?
To this question I have three brief replies, which I'll say more about later.
The first is that this book really is about those things, even if it won't appear to be so at first blush.
The second is that in fact, I think more philosophers should turn our attention to the matter of lived experience, to our technology, to our tools, and to our ways of knowing the world. It's not enough to know things about the world; we ought to ask just how we know the things we know, and how our tools and our very modes of life and habits affect that knowledge. And everything that hangs on that knowledge.
And for my third brief reply, I turn to Edward Mooney, who, in his introduction to Henry Bugbee's beautiful book, The Inward Morning, recalls a question Martin Heidegger asked Bugbee in August of 1955: “What occasion prompts philosophical reflection?”
Mooney writes that no doubt Heidegger “anticipated a flat American response. Yet he found his question returned in a Socratic reversal. Bugbee simply asked, echoing a Basho haiku, 'Could the sound of a fish leaping at a fly at dawn suffice?'”
To this question I have three brief replies, which I'll say more about later.
The first is that this book really is about those things, even if it won't appear to be so at first blush.
The second is that in fact, I think more philosophers should turn our attention to the matter of lived experience, to our technology, to our tools, and to our ways of knowing the world. It's not enough to know things about the world; we ought to ask just how we know the things we know, and how our tools and our very modes of life and habits affect that knowledge. And everything that hangs on that knowledge.
And for my third brief reply, I turn to Edward Mooney, who, in his introduction to Henry Bugbee's beautiful book, The Inward Morning, recalls a question Martin Heidegger asked Bugbee in August of 1955: “What occasion prompts philosophical reflection?”
Mooney writes that no doubt Heidegger “anticipated a flat American response. Yet he found his question returned in a Socratic reversal. Bugbee simply asked, echoing a Basho haiku, 'Could the sound of a fish leaping at a fly at dawn suffice?'”
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| A rainbow trout in the tail of a pool in Wyoming's Shell Creek, July 2014. The resolution is not great because I took this shot from about a hundred feet up, on a cliff looking down into the pool below. This was one of three rainbows swimming in the slack water at the tail of a pool below a waterfall, hunting for food. If you're curious: shot with a Nikon D3100 and a Tamron AF 18-270mm lens. It was an evening shot, so ISO 2500, lens at its full 270mm reach, f/6.3, 1/125. |
*****
(Quotations taken from Mooney’s introduction to
Bugbee’s The Inward Morning, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999)
pp. xi-xii.
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