Kurt Mosser: Never Say Kant

Well fans, another weekend almost gone and another game goes down in the books.  What will mark this game for posterity?  Three things: bad hitting, bad pitching, bad fielding and nearly all of it at the hands of Mssrs. Baker, Montague and Mosser.  For most of us, "W" stands for win, but for these boys it can only mean "when", as in "when will I stop hacking at pitches way outside the strike zone?", "when will I retire a side in less than 70 pitches?" and "when will I hold onto easy dribblers coming at me in slow motion?".  Final score: 9-5. 

Fans, we'd like to take a moment and give a big Wiffle Welcome to our newest player, Chris Anderson.  Chris has just come up from the scout league where, as he showed today, he's "prepared".  We expect big things from Anderson and from the looks of today's performance we'll get them.  Cheers Chris and good luck for the remainder of the season!

Finally, another chapter in "Profiles in Wiffle Courage".  Your humble narrator takes a holiday next week, but will be back soon with more exciting bios.  This week...

Kurt Mosser: Never Say Kant

Kurt Mosser (b.1957) is thought by many to be the greatest theoretician the game of Wiffle Ball has ever known.  His lengthy and complex “wiffle” system is designed to lay a firm foundation for the entire sweep of a player’s scientific, moral and aesthetic experience of the game.  It is his intention to determine, once and for all, the precise limits of a players knowledge of the game, by means of a critique of the powers of the player’s mind itself.  In this way, he could answer Giamatti’s skeptical doubts, refute the exaggerated claims of such rationalist meta-wifflers as Vincent and Kuhn, and decisively answer Landis’ great question: What can I be certain of regarding Wiffle ball?

Mosser’s “Transcendental Wiffle-osophy”, as he calls his system is outlined in his three major works: The Critique of Pure Hitting, The Critique of Practical Hitting and The Critique of Peter Berwald.  The key to Mosser’s theory is the epistemological reversal which he calls his “Greenbergian Revolution”.  Previous theoreticians had all supposed that the aim of Wiffle Ball was to make the mind (and the bat) conform to the independent world of balls.  But, on that assumption, we could never be certain that the mind had succeeded in conforming itself correctly to the balls.  As Landis argues in his First Inning, the game itself may be a dream; and, as Giamatti pointed out, even if the game we perceived was real, we could never know with complete assurance why anybody bothered playing. 

But suppose we consider the opposite hypothesis for a moment.  Instead of the mind conforming itself to the ball, what if the ball conforms itself to the mind?  Could it be that the mind carries within itself certain wiffle-forms that it imposes on any ball that appears, either in or out of the strike zone?  Could space, time, causality and even poly-vinyl chloride, be mind-imposed conditions of anything being a ball?  If the answer is yes, then we can explain how we can have absolutely certain knowledge of the game.  For we can be certain that the balls in our experience will exhibit all those features which the mind itself imposes on them. 

After much analysis and reasoning, Mosser has come to the conclusion that his revolutionary hypothesis is correct.  The mind, he argues, contains within it certain bat and ball forms of perception and thought which act as conditions of admission to our experience of the game.  We can be certain that all our experience will take place on asphalt, that it will proceed through six or nine innings and it will consist of balls, bats and movements in causal interactions with one another, precisely because all these forms are imposed on experience by the mind itself.

Thus Mosser’s philosophy is at one and the same time optimistic and pessimistic.  He reassures us that our knowledge of the game is valid, but cautions us that it is valid only for the length of the game itself.  In the end, the “Transcendental Wiffle-osophy” is a lesson in intellectual humility, for it teaches us that the wiffle mind lacks the power to penetrate the ultimate veil of appearance and grasp the inner nature of the game itself and why some players persist in swinging at the lousiest pitches.

Hagiographies "r" Us. Copyright 2009.