Why Philosophy? more

Why Philosophy? Today, I’d like to begin by jettisoning one of the more sacrosanct protocols of academic life, i.e., I’d like to open my own statement with some unashamedly ad hominem remarks directed at our previous speaker, Mr. Paul Daniels. Mr. Daniels, I feel the need to inform you, has just stepped down from three glorious, eventful, indeed, exemplary years as convener of the MSCP. Paul has held the office for longer than anyone else in the history of the organization and I do not see his record being supplanted any time in the next decade. For those of you who don’t know what being Convener involves – it’s like trying to invade Finland. You plan, you organize, you bring the undefeatable Red Army to the shores of some nugatory Scandinavian backwater confident of imminent victory. And it’s all brilliant: shiny new country all ripe for the taking, light reflecting off fjords that are actually somewhere else, it’s all going to be glorious except that – somehow - it all starts to go horribly, horribly wrong. Where there should have been easy conquest you get these endless tough, dour, hard-drinking people who invent Molotov cocktails at you by putting flaming rags into their many disused vodka bottles. Only in Paul’s case, it’s as if his invading force consisted entirely of a platoon of prima donna piranhas of opposed political alignments who were all in love with the same shark. But it’s not only Paul’s three extraordinary years as the impresario of the great circus of the MSCP. He is, in addition, what Aristotle calls, a megalopsychos – in the vernacular -- a great-souled man. As such he is also a living refutation of everything that he has just said. But I’d like to take the opportunity on behalf of the MSCP to publicly thank Paul for his exemplary performance of the impossible task that he has set himself over the last three years. Now, I mention all of this, both for its own sake, but also so that you can understand that my complete disagreement with his opening statement does not originate in anything like personal resentment. Instead, the first thing to say about every point in Paul’s philippic against philosophy is that the accusations he puts forward are far from new. In fact, these criticisms were (mutatis mutandis) born with philosophy. They have been its concomitant, i.e. they have literally walked alongside philosophy for all the many years of its wandering. In fact, they are now and have for centuries been part of a symbiosis with philosophy such that the survival and even the flourishing of each is irrevocably connected to the survival and flourishing of the other. And, let’s be frank; when it comes down to it the accusations have always been the same. In one way or the other, despite differences in language, emphasis and the fact that change rules over all things in the sub-lunary world, philosophy has continually been charged with failing to acknowledge or failing to venerate, with failing to participate in or with failing to affirm some activity, some purpose, some ideal or some group of people which a prior, i.e. pre-philosophical, consensus has deemed to be good, or useful, helpful, or noble; sufficiently traditional or sufficiently “radical”, sufficiently “cutting-edge” , pious, life-affirming or…whatever. The second accusation at the trial of Socrates (after corrupting the youth of Athens) was (his protestations notwithstanding) not believing in the gods of the city. It is very important that we should not take this as a remark about what we today would refer to as religion. I do not have time to explain why this is the case, except to say that the accusation is not about a tension between religion and philosophy as much as a tension between philosophy and the gods of the city. In speaking of the gods of Athens we are speaking of a civic religion (an expression that thinkers of an Hegelian turn of mind would rightly consider to sit in the bizarre space between the tautology and the oxymoron) “The gods of the city”, of course, persist intransigently in their existence into our apparently secular age. They are present as what every putatively right-thinking person knows (or thinks she knows) instinctively to be good, true, and/or beautiful: what she feels are the right sentiments at the right moments about the right things. These are the things that everyone (or at least everyone who is supposed to count) agrees are the important things, the “relevant”, the urgent or the valuable. So the accusation runs: Why, given all there is to know, to see, to do, in this ‘single point of light between two eternities’ (Nabokov), why given the small span of our existence would we possibly need lovers of wisdom? Considered in terms of accusations against philosophy: the question “why philosophy” means: why would we bother with lovers of wisdom when surely what our age needs, what the challenge posed by our uncertain future requires are people who actually possess wisdom (technical, political, scientific, moral or metaphysical)? According to this perspective what we need are not philosophers (whatever they are supposed to be) but sages, prophets, statesmen, wise men. Instead of people who profess ignorance, we need answers to the burning questions of the age, handbooks that will tell us how to orient our disoriented lives; bold, brilliant and above all workable plans for how we might best manage or best overcome our political, economic, environmental, and psychological problems? To this kind of question, every philosophy worthy of the name has had a twofold response. The first part of that response involves the fact that no-one can be a philosopher (I’m happy to allow myself to make ex cathedra pronouncements; it’s one of those charming things people don’t like about philosophers) without being beholden to and without taking a certain amount of glee in philosophy’s properly erotic aspect – an aspect that continually locates its questions, its interests, its foci, in a labyrinth of worlds far beyond what right-thinking types and important, cuttingedge, “interesting people” of all ages have blithely pre-defined as the good, the useful, the relevant or the sexy. Every philosophy finds a certain joy in abstraction – in stepping back from what we normally regard as the burning issues of the day to another (stranger) place from which to gaze at the world that throws up these issues. And this joy in irrelevance is partially for its own sake (the wonderfully liberating feeling of being useless) but much more importantly because the indispensable condition for the questioning of all our inherited, sacrosanct, smugly upheld categories and hierarchies of goods, is precisely the ability to abstract from such categories and such hierarchies: to see anything other than our usual lackluster platitudes we need to take a view from elsewhere: to climb out of the cave of received opinion into the strange world opened to us by reflection, reason, dialogue and dialectic. Philosophy (and I am -- unusually for me – thinking of disparate remarks by Gilles Delezue and Alain Badiou) is always provoked by something outside of itself (a work of art, a political problem, a bizarre tenet of theology, the etymology of a word, or the history of a question and its answers). But two things should be noted here: First, there is no limit to the kind of thing that provokes philosophy. Second, this limitlessness of philosophical objects comes from the fact that philosophy must always be different from that which rouses it to thinking. It is this difference between the soul impelled by desire and the elusive object towards which that desire is impelled that means that philosophy is always the lover and never the beloved (erastes not eromenos): always the bridesmaid and never the bride. The fire of philosophy can be stoked by a phrase by a Medieval grammarian –as it often is for someone like Giorgio Agamben – by a quadratic equation, by the kabbalah or by the theory of natural selection as much as the fact that Rome is burning or that the true Church seems to have lost its way. And all philosophy reserves to itself the right to never have to constrain itself to answer in advance, or a priori what questions or objects are worth thinking about because to do this would be to preclude the unavoidable philosophical question about what is worthy to be an object for philosophy, the philosophical questions of what calls us to think, to philosophise. To neglect this question would be to pay the price of an academic specialization, a ‘getting behind the current bureaucratic program’ that is absolutely anathema to philosophy’s erotic nature – what I’d call its inevitable (and inevitably ambiguous) impulse toward transcendence. We know from Plato, if not from our own experiences, that eros is something whose nature is to step over or to soar past boundaries. Love makes fools of all of us, and the love of wisdom makes us the greatest kind of fools: those who would risk (or even embrace) a kind of obvious foolishness in the hope of wisdom. Anyone who has ever been in love knows how quickly love (erotic love as opposed to the gift-giving agape discussed by St. Paul) makes us lose our capacity to separate good sense from nonsense, good behavior from bad, sensible action from silly: love is too mad, too bad, and certainly too dangerous to help us carry out a rational plan, too absurd to allow us to retain the dignity and self-possession of the ego, too febrile to be accommodated into our puritanical ideas of health and good living, too (literally) stupefying (again I think of Agamben’s exemplary work on this matter) to allow us to get on with all the apparently important things we are supposed to get on with. To come back to this question of stupefaction: the Latin Middle Ages knew, as every student does in her heart of hearts (irrespective of their mastery of Latin) that stupefaction, stupor and thus stupidity are inextricably related to study, in short to philosophy. These things are the risks that philosophy takes in doing what it does; they are the equivalent of hamstring injuries for footballers or the solipsism of superstars. Obsessed with the object that has captivated her, the mind of the philosopher leaves behind the canons of sensible activity: it quickly departs from those comfortable places where all good, right-thinking people can be found reiterating the received ideas in the manner of glossy Saturday magazines. This is not to say that is in the nature of philosophy to never agree with such positions or such people: philosophy is not to be confused with being willfully or stupidly contrary for its own sake. But philosophy when and if it does come back to the world of ordinary wisdom, decent people, common sense, et cetera will only do this, after a long voyage that necessarily involved risking leaving all such things behind even if it was only to come back to them in the end: one of the most enduring metaphors of thought and life being that of the Odyssey. Because of this philosophers will appear strange, useless, idle, capricious, and mad. They will be seen to stand, like Socrates, outside the doors of the houses where the parties/the battles/the feasts of our epoch are being conducted, bearing witness to something unseen in the night sky, moving as if dancing with an invisible partner, generally seeming to do something other than the things that we have (always already) agreed are worth doing. And if this seems strange, I would ask the obvious question: how could anyone ever ask the question of whether what we tend to consider worth doing is actually worth doing without this kind of stepping back, this – again, I think of the etymology of the word –abstraction- which as much as it is philosophy’s curse is also its most remarkable and even lovable feature. And if abstraction which sometimes seems dull or pointless is also beautiful (touched by grace) it is because it is the golden child of an incomparable liberty: the liberty to voyage, to depart the known world, for seas of thought that still bear the legend: “here be dragons.” And yet, for those of you are presently squirming with dissatisfaction: what I have said is not the whole story. Since Plato, just as there can be no philosopher who does not delight in the soaring, world-transcending, value-ignoring aspect of philosophy, philosophy has for just as long been beset by a sobering, or disturbing sense that Rome (or perhaps worse, the world) might burn without so much as bringing the philosopher’s gaze down from the heavens for a moment of Rousseauean compassion. This feeling, this, let me repeat, eminently philosophical feeling, is what turns a philosopher to make (as philosophy often does) the kind of accusations that Mr. Daniels, in an exemplary and inveterate philosophical gesture, made against philosophy. Unlike philosophy’s eros, but nonetheless because of it, this tendency for philosophy to accuse itself, is a matter of what we might call a philosophical conscience. By conscience I mean what anyone would mean by conscience: a concern for the morality of one’s own actions that extends to a sense of responsibility to others both within and beyond the sphere of our daily lives. Just as there is no philosophy that does not begin with a gesture of stepping outside of the Platonic cave that consists in the customs, conventions, and truths universally acknowledged of a given epoch, a given city, there is no philosophy that does not feel that the importance of, at least, in some sense, returning to the cave which the philosopher’s strongest impulse caused her to leave (perhaps too quickly) behind. The philosophical conscience that worries about the value of utility or philosophy is different from the simple accuser of philosophy, primarily insofar as it gives rise to the strange beast that, for want of a better term, I would call political philosophy. Aristotle on a number of occasions says that philosophy is born of skholé. (leisure), i.e. in time spent not spending time doing the things we are supposed to do. But Aristotle is also aware of the importance of practical wisdom (phronésis), the virtue in the soul which is most needful in a good general, a good statesman, and most of all in a good person. We measure virtue, Aristotle thinks, by how a person fares when they are faced with the kairos-- the now in which we are required to act, to decide, to do the right thing, to risk having ourselves found to be in the wrong. What this means is that something out there, in the world, calls philosophers from the lotus-eating that is nonetheless the indispensable condition of philosophy’s existence. Because idleness is necessary (for philosophy), but an end to idleness, and to abstraction is also necessary for the philosopher to act in the world, it is a matter, Aristotle says of phronesis – practical wisdom, which is something separate, albeit required by, philosophy. To put this other way, to do philosophy, we have to on the one hand, think about philosophy, we also have to know when to stop asking ‘what is justice’ and to join (at least for a moment) a struggle for justice without having resolved the potentially interminable philosophical question. We also require this kind of practical wisdom (a virtue which is by no means the special province of philosophers) to know when one should do the opposite, i.e. when it is better for us to keep thinking, keep meditating on a seemingly intractable problem rather than stopping to join in the frenzied activities or partisan struggles that always form a part of our societies. • Another point: If my first point is that the accusations against philosophy have always been taken by philosophers as a spur to philosophy (often shaping a given philosophy), it is also worth noting, as the accusers of philosophy do not, that the accusations against philosophy often have an exactly opposite effect to their intended purpose. To explain: the person who complains that philosophy should be more useful or more “relevant” to the challenges of our lives/the twenty first century and the hitherto unfathomable challenges of the present moment in the age of globalization et cetera usually tends to make this demand in the hope that philosophy, by attending to this accusation will become more useful or more relevant to whatever it is the accuser thinks is important. But the question must be asked: what does a desire to be relevant to, say, urgent ethical, political matters actually have to do with making philosophy more “relevant” (assuming we know what this means?) Does the demand that philosophy become more ethical, more “politically engaged”, or whatever it is that philosophy is supposed to become, make it so? Put differently: are philosophers who do philosophy with a bad conscience more likely to be better philosophers – more relevant, more useful et cetera? I would like to suggest that, in fact, the attempt by philosophers (or rather by academics) to respond to these accusations actually leads not to exemplary contributions by philosophers to the most important questions of the age, but rather to something which we already have in superabundance: academics who constantly talk in the manner of curators and publishers: like people writing grant applications for the current administration or like university bureaucrats. Instead of actually being more “relevant to the world’s pressing problems” – as the accuser would like philosophy to become -- we instead find “philosophers” (again rather philosophy academics) restricting what would have been their wanderings through strange worlds into insipid and above all unconvincing protests (ad nauseum) as to the relevance of their particular academic niche to the most pressing questions of the day. Thus, instead of the ‘relevant’, world-changing, super-sexy philosophy that a focus on relevance is supposed to produce we get, as if by ironic punishment, philosophers REALLY wasting time on the kind of interminable (and ubiquitous) drivel about how their present book, article, research project or preferred Parisian Messiah really represents the salvation of our troubled world: we are the first generation ever to put thought into the service of emancipation! The first to side with the idea of genuine newness in a world of mere novelty, the first to join hands with the wretched of the earth! My point is not that any of those latter goals are in themselves bad, only that they are goals that are obviously more difficult to achieve than they are to announce. I am not being cynical here: perhaps philosophy does have the potential to achieve all the wonderful things that academics suggest that they it is capable of doing when applying for grants, or talking to publishers. I am only saying that, if philosophy is so very good, this goodness does not need to be asserted (a system of thought that saves the world is likely to garner its own modicum of approbation). And if philosophy cannot live up to its pretentions then its need to announce them seems to be of even less use than it is normally accused of being. In any case -- the rhetoric of grant applications notwithstanding – is it not the case that to be timely, to be perceived as relevant, to look like one was getting deeply involved with the present, is actually rather easy? It is much harder, I would suggest, and philosophy’s special distinction to be (as Nietzsche said) untimely. And yet to be untimely means: to risk appearing as if you are inexplicably wasting your time with inexplicable nonsense by the standards and concerns of the day. To be untimely means to assume what Badiou calls a “subject language”, to talk about things (love to the lover, the revolution to the Marxist, the Trinity to the Christian) that make no sense except to the person who acknowledges that something has happened (in life, in thought, between us) that transforms everything , even if noone (or few others) bear witness to the life-changing something that has led us to the always difficult struggle required by all thought. From the perspective of philosophy’s ‘subject language’ (that is – language that requires a level of dedication -- “commitment” in the old existentialist jargon -- in order to be registered as anything but mere noise) the constant cries of: “But what’s that got to do with anything we care about” are potentially a philosophical badge of honour. Second, if and when we find ourselves sympathizing with the accusers of philosophy: isn’t ‘relevance’ and ‘importance to the present’, something that, in fact, comes about only through a kind of Zen archery, i.e. through the person eventually found to be relevant aiming at a target other than what she originally intended to hit? To make this explicit: the thinker whose work tends to become most useful, most important for a given issue is rarely the person who set out with the intention of being relevant. Instead, the history of science, of art, in fact of almost all human enterprises constantly demonstrates, the breakthrough almost always comes from work done in a seemingly, marginal, “abstract” (or prior to the breakthrough or discovery) “useless” field? As much as the above truth, is I think, easily demonstrable, people (and especially people who want to accuse philosophy for irrelevance) persist in acting as if this is not the case. A prime example of this neglect of obvious facts can be found in the strange attitudes that people demonstrate towards the reading of long dead authors in seemingly marginal fields. Sure, says the prevailing wisdom, it’s fine to write a thesis about Foucault or Badiou: that would (apparently) be paying attention to the pressing concerns of our day and fulfilling the contemporary imperative that an academic be an activist/artist/prophet: a kind of cross between Che Guevara and God. But, if it is right and good to write on relevant, eminently political thinkers (like Foucault) what is apparently not fine is purely antiquarian, or scholarly research. Who would want – so this line of argument goes -- to spend years burrowing around in archives looking at the emergence of 17th century proto-biology? Well, Michel Foucault for one. What philosopher worth his revolutionary T-shirt would want to waste time looking at the developments in post-Cantorian set theory when he could be doing a cutting edge, radical, super-relevant project on the work of Alain Badiou? Well, Badiou, obviously. Examples could be multiplied endlessly, although I prefer to confine my own to modish thinkers for cheap rhetorical effect. But it is obvious, that we simply cannot imagine an Agamben or a Benjamin, a Heidegger, or a Hannah Arendt – without that person showing the courage (absent from his or her devotees) precisely to step away from the themes that the fashions of their day deemed most urgent. Third: I said before that there was a reason that the accusations were always for the most part the same across philosophy’s three millennia of life. This statement was almost (but not quite) true. Although, most of the accusations are as I have said the same, I have, of late, noticed a new accusation which has its basis in the idea that there is a certain demand that philosophy should meet, but that it very rarely does. This new (very strange) demand is that philosophy should affirm not only, as would have been said in Plato’s day, the gods of the city, but the life or rather the lifestyle pretensions of the average potential philosophical consumer. It as if philosophy should be so constructed that it’s main line should an implicit praise of every teenager, every would be-artist, and every student activist; as if every middle class person who engages in the occasional moments of responsible shopping were (by virtue of their capacity for self-congratulation) to be rendered infinitely above the judgment of mere thought. In other words: the most surprising, the most recent and the most symptomatic criticism of philosophy seems to me to be that philosophy does not have enough contact with (by which it seems to mean that it does not spend enough time applauding) people’s lives, or their lifestyles, their work, or their pretensions to goodness, beauty or truth. But this is the apogee of perversity, because the underlying correct democratic assumption of this accusation, is that people do not need the imprimatur of philosophy to be doing good things. But the accusation does at least perform the salutary function of revealing the paradox of authority in our age. On the one hand, we live – as Hannah Arendt has said -- in an age where the word ‘authority’ scarcely means anything to us. If this word conjures up anything at all for us today it is a series of half-farcical, Monty Pythonesque images of arbitrary power, and not at all an image of that by which power is checked. Despite this, it would seem that our age, so skeptical of authorities for both good and bad reasons, is at the same time desperately engaged in seeking authorities as if all of our apparently autonomous disavowals of authorities needed somehow to be supplemented by the self-denunciation of those same authorities. It is as if we demanded not only that we should be given the right to defy, ignore or dispense with any number of canons, traditions, laws, customs and conventions but as if we also wanted such things to undertake their own noisy condemnation. It could be argued that this is perfectly predictable: that society (like nature) abhors a vacuum and that people faced with an absence of authority in their lives will soon seek out new authorities (even where those authorities, being philosophers, are mocked for being useless as well as being asked to approve of those things for which we vociferously claim to need no approval). But today, I think, we face the paradox of authorities that are simultaneously sought out and resented. And this is relevant to the accusation of philosophical distance from everyday life, because people seem to want philosophy at once to stay away from telling us how to live (what authority could philosophy possibly have to pronounce on such things?!) and on the other hand, to ‘authorise’ what we already do: to come in and tell people that their self-conceptions are correct, that their lives really are as interesting, or as just, or as profound as they tell themselves. In this image, the goal of philosophy would be to provide authoritative sounding refutations of the things that we don’t like plus authoritative sounding echoes of our own self-conceptions (“I’m an independent thinker, an open-minded, creative, life and art loving person in a world of zombies, not only that, but Deleuze agrees!”) This is another way in which I think we can see the proximity between ourselves and some of the characters in the Platonic dialogues who most desperately sought out the sophists: we want philosophy to be at once a stern judge and a loving mother: something that can damn the world with impunity as long as it first affirms ourselves and our pretensions. I have seen this phenomenon in strange places; such as when avowed hedonists look (oddly) to philosophy for a justification of the hedonism that they otherwise (vociferously) state requires no external justification. In one sense, precisely as hedonists, as people who trust to our own ‘autonomouscreativity’, those who find themselves indignant with philosophy, officially do not CARE about philosophy. Why should they listen, after all to the puritanical denunciations that any old, dead guys might have to offer? We know we’re doing the right thing, the cool thing, the transgressive thing! But at the same time, as it is dismissed from the scene, philosophy is nonetheless sought out (in a manner that calls urgently for psychoanalysis) to give its approval of those things we have already decided are good, are fun, are sexy or worthy. This provokes both a philosophical and an extra-philosophical question: why is this the case? Why is the age at once so prone to suggest that everyone justifies herself by herself and so desperately seeking for people to give us the approval that we avowedly do not need? Can we not imagine this reaching farcical proportions -- as if we needed Deleuze or Hegel (or more likely a committee of public ethicists) to authorise every orgasm? I will end here, partially because I am out of time, but also because I would like to end on the word ‘orgasm’. I find that everything after this word seems anticlimactic. -B.C.