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Continental Philosophy: ‘working in’ and ‘working on’.

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Many philosophers – and I think this is more the case as we survey younger and younger generations of philosophers – wish we could simply move past the so-called analytic-continental divide, and tend to view the whole division as a byproduct of misunderstanding, or even of a the politico-cultural situation of philosophers of a previous generation. Frankly, we disdain the division, and vacillate between wishing the distinction no longer existed and acting as though it in fact no longer did:[1] that is, we pretend to be ‘over it’.

That this is a pretense, however, is shown up in the structures governing the advancement of work that purports to promote dialogue between, or work across, these traditions.

The model followed in nearly all such attempts – and paradigmatically, in the structuring of pluralistic or continental-friendly departments – is that of attempting to achieve numerical proportionality between those working ‘on’ analytic philosophy, and those working ‘on’ continental philosophy. In some departments, the desideratum will be a 1:1 ratio; in others, 1:2; while in others, having even one philosopher working in a tradition differing from that of the majority of departmental faculty would suffice.

What is left unnoticed in these efforts is the way the manner of appropriation itself affects the reception of content.

Since Heidegger, much continental philosophy – and especially that which has grown out of the phenomenological tradition – has been deeply preoccupied with philosophical reflection on the nature of philosophy itself, and especially on the manner in which philosophy qua philosophy supposedly thinks being qua being as a mode of presence. Thus, one finds in the work of thinkers like Levinas and Derrida attempts (whatever merit they may have) to teach philosophy to think something other than the presence which has supposedly pervaded philosophical thinking until today.

And yet, at least in the U. S., hires attempting to bolster this tradition manage to be self-undermining on exactly this point. In seeking hires ‘in’ the continental tradition, advertisements are sent out for specialists ‘on’ continental philosophy. That is, instead of hiring philosophers working in the continental tradition, we hire philosophers who take that tradition, or some attenuated portion of it, as the object of their study.

Inasmuch as the tradition is encountered in the mode of objectness, it itself must become something encountered as what is present-at-hand. To ‘fit the bill’ of a continental hire, one must either work ‘on’ a figure – e.g. Heidegger, Hegel, Deleuze; or one must work ‘on’ a topic of broad interest to analytic philosophers to which continental philosophers have also made ‘contributions’ – e.g. ‘continental’ philosophy of the body (Irigaray, Henri), philosophy of religion (Levinas, Marion), or philosophy of perception (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty). In the case of working ‘on’ figures, the problem is compounded inasmuch as nearly all work in the history of philosophy is partitioned between approaches that either a) construe the object of inquiry as the thought of a thinker, and thereby psychologize it; or b) pay attention only to the ‘tenets’ of the philosopher, and taking this propositional edifice as an object of evaluation in its own right, thereby de-historicize it. While the alternative appropriation of the tradition by way of hot crossover topics falls prey to the same tendency: continental philosophy at the service of a specialization, where the ‘species’ of specialization is all-too-present, is continental philosophy as a philosophy of objectivity, and thus of objectification. Hence, a precondition for the dominant mode of appropriation of the tradition is the rejection of one of the most salient points of that tradition: the critique of any philosophy of objectivity.

In approaching the object of one’s study as that-which-lies-before, one disregards another manner in which it may also show itself: as that-which-lies-behind the inquiry that the philosopher is himself engaged in, the soil from which the very inquiry itself springs. That is, in taking the matter as object, one disregards it as tradition. I shall call the former approach working on a philosophy, and the latter working in one.

There are important differences between working on and working in continental philosophy. And to the degree that hires related to continental philosophy are hires ‘on’ that philosophy, there will be elements in tension with alternative approaches that hire ‘in’ continental. For example, a hire ‘on’ a continental philosopher, given the objectifying structure of such a hire, will rarely be as well versed in the inheritance of that philosopher that is the object as the study as that philosopher himself was. Thus, Husserl scholars will be ignorant of Hegel, Heidegger scholars of Aristotle, Deleuze scholars of Leibniz, and so on.

This is not merely to say (though it says this, too) that specialist hirees are often ignorant of the canon that their favored philosophers worked within; it is rather to say that they typically do not work within that tradition at all. To work within a tradition is to encounter the wisdom received through that philosopher as an inheritance, and not merely as an object. Doing so opens up an altogether different kind of appropriation of the matter of that thinker’s thinking: the understanding of that thought as constituting part of a history. More accurately a past, even my own past. Better, something that has passed, i.e. has passed me by, as the angel of death passed over the house of Israel in Egypt: a structural event that continues to govern the present in its passing. Not a chronology, (which is just a reduction of lived history to a mode of presence), but a history.

This subordination of the philosopher to the matter of thinking as what came before, as opposed to what comes before, is itself something deeply lacking in most work ‘on’ continental philosophy, precisely in its character as work on the tradition rather than in it. And so, in attempting to safeguard those traditions under the continental umbrella, it behooves us to shelter the questions animating that tradition itself and deepen them as part of our own inheritance.

[1] In this respect, the structure of the discourse strictly parallels (in quality, though by no means in volume or gravity) the discourse surrounding the overcoming of racism in societies that remain essentially dominated by white culture.

Does this blog post rest on a mistake?

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I received a journal alert today for the latest issue of Phil Studies, and saw that one of the articles in the issue is titled “Does empirical moral psychology rest on a mistake?” The author thinks so, and I don’t really work on the topic. So, being a collegial philosopher working diligently on his plot of philosophical space, and recognizing the need for specialized division of labor in philosophy if any decent work is to get done on a given question, I figured the most reasonable thing to do on this matter was to trust that the author is probably right.

After thinking about this for a bit, I realized that there might be scores of topics that I care about to some degree, which have also been shown to rest on a mistake – in which case, I’m wasting needless emotional energy on these matters, which probably makes me a less efficient philosopher overall. So to rid myself of this anxiety, I did a Philosophers’ Index search on “rests on a mistake?” to find out where this energy was being expended, and have, since this morning, purged myself of any interest in these topics. Here, then, for your benefit, is a list of fields and topics we can all safely stop working on.

  • Metaethics
  • Kelsen’s notion of legal normativity
  • The defense of free speech
  • Naturalism
  • Higher-order music ontologies
  • Theories of consciousness
  • Origins of life research
  • Non-cognitivism
  • Modern moral philosophy
  • Twin earth[1]
  • The Husserl/Heidegger feud
  • Philosophy of action
  • Epistemology
  • Moral subjectivism
  • Business ethics
  • The idea of niskama karma
  • The traditional treatment of enthymemes
  • Ontology (twice!)
  • The free will debate
  • An inferential role semantics (which one?)
  • Environmental ethics
  • The Grisez-Finnis-Boyle moral philosophy
  • Moral education
  • Analytic aesthetics
  • Action theory
  • Foundationalism (did you catch the irony in this one?)
  • American philosophy (should we stop, then? Or just expatriate?)
  • Liberalism
  • The Gettier problem
  • Applied ethics
  • The philosophy of induction
  • Cognitive psychology
  • The logic of preference
  • Moral philosophy (also twice! Guess the second article ought not to have been written)
  • Recent moral philosophy
  • The principle of substitutivity
  • The analysis of religious language
  • James’ ethics of belief
  • Negation
  • Modal logic
  • Traditional aesthetics
  • The neo-intuitionist theory of obligation
  • Christology

Man, I feel like a Turing machine.

[1] Note: not ‘the twin earth thought experiment’, but twin earth. So either XYZ was a really bad idea, or we’re in some trouble.

The Culture of the Manuscript and Manuscript Culture: A Case Study

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What follows is a brief description of a manuscript, followed by a metatheoretical study of questions embodied in the study of that manuscript. The aim of such an exercise is to discover something about the nature and telos of manuscript studies as it exists in those universities where it does today.

I. What we currently know about Smith 27

Smith Fragment 27 is a fragment currently housed at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript library. I begin this post with some statistics on the manuscript: first, I give some information about the manuscript that prima facie could be garnered even by a non-expert; second, I summarize the information about the manuscript which has been handed down to us by experts up to this point.
Smith 27 is a parchment bifolium, each folium of which is approximately 19 X 14.5cm. The manuscript no longer shows any signs of ruling, indicating either a) that the manuscript was originally ruled in a lead ruling that has since faded; or b) that the manuscript was never ruled at all.

The text for each page is written in exactly 24 lines in one column, centered so that the outer and lower margins are noticeably larger than the top and inner margins of the page. The text itself is a small, rapid, heavily abbreviated, northern Gothic textualis script. The area of the text block is approximately 10 X 6.5cm, which means that only about 25% of the parchment is devoted to the main text of the document itself.
There are only three marginal glosses in the text: the first is a symbol in the upper left-hand corner of the verso of folium 1; the second, a note written in a bold font on the recto of folium 2 in the upper left-hand margin; the third, on the verso of folium 2 in the bottom margin, is presumably a division of the text. In addition to these, the text contains a scant few interlinear glosses, which are not always easily distinguishable from superscript letters of the main text.

On the second folium, there are a number of C-shaped marks that are presumably an aid for dividing and organizing the text. On the recto, they are all in black; whereas on the verso, they begin in red, then alternate to black, and then back to red.

In terms of decoration, the recto of the first folium contains two initials, while the verso of the same contains one: on the recto, there is a red initial P taking up three lines of text, followed by a blue Q, with red geometrical decoration both inside and surrounding it; on the verso, there is a red U majuscule at the bottom of the page.

As for what prior research on this manuscript has handed down to us, Smith 27 is on record as 1) having been written between 1255 and 1275 in Northern France. and 2) containing philosophical content.

II. Problematizing the record

What more can we say about this manuscript? In order to answer this question, it will be useful to 1) reflect on the information given above, in order to 2) discern something about what manuscript studies as a discipline attempts to say; from whence 3) a direction for research on this manuscript can be given.

Some of what I am about to say is fairly obvious. But hopefully, reflection on what is obvious will lead us down a path that will clarify some things that are not so obvious.

The above list of information of what is known about Smith 27 is determined by certain goals of research: one cares about the number of lines on a page, but not the number of holes in it; one cares about the proportion of the writing space relative to the parchment, but not the proportion of the parchment relative to the total surface area of the sheep from which it came. In other words, there are reasons why we give the information we do in accordance with questions we try to answer instead of other information we could give in accordance with a different set of questions.

Since the information given in the above list is not arbitrarily drawn up, but in conformity with a series of questions frequently asked about many manuscripts, it follows that this list of information, in both what it provides and what it does not, can tell us something about the concerns and aims of manuscript studies as a field.

A first piece of information given above is the genre of the work. This points to a first task: to locate the work within the “intellectual space” provided by the contemporary division of the sciences. This task is most apparent when manuscript research leads to the discovery of unknown or previously lost works that may provide insights into a contemporary problem within a discipline or into the narrative identity of that discipline. The specification of this generic task is the identification of the work and/or its author. The negative corollary of the specific task is the unmasking of pseudonymous works. The negative corollary of the generic task is the present-day attempt to find works that do not fit well into the modern classification of the sciences, and therefore call that classification into question.

Second, we can consider the most characteristic piece of information given above: the location and date of the manuscript itself. It is no surprise that manuscript studies as a field has long been devoted to the cataloging of texts according to their place and time of origin. Furthermore, this essential function of codicological research largely or entirely explains the presence of several other items on our list of Smith 27’s notabilia. For instance, differences in the form of the script, in ruling, and in the number and kinds of abbreviations in a text garner their importance because of their reliability as indicators of the time and/or date when a manuscript was written. This also explains the prominence paleography has been accorded in the study of the manuscript: the study of the script gives us what is prima facie the best evidence for dating and locating the manuscript.

Lastly, we have mentioned the gloss, the marks of division of the text, the decoration, and the relation of the parts of the manuscript to each other as well as to manuscript as a whole. What do these have in common? They all provide us information about the cultural milieu of which the manuscript is a product: the glosses and textual division give us information about the hermeneutic assumptions with which a work may have been approached; the amount of decoration can indicate the economic affluence of a culture, while what is produced can indicate its artistic tastes; and the relation, for instance, of text to decoration may provide information about the literacy of the culture, or about the way that that culture viewed the relation between words and pictures more generally.

What, then, do these three tasks have in common? They are all attempts to situate the text. From this, the following thesis can be assumed: the task of the manuscript researcher is to situate the text.

How do the above attempts at situating the text differ from each other? They differ in the precise meaning they assign to the verb “to situate”: in the first case, to situate is to determine the field within which the manuscript was written; in the second, to locate within a spatiotemporal coordinate plane; in the third, to locate within a culture-world. The first endeavor corresponds to the ancient paradigm of situating provided by Aristotelian science, namely, the situating of individual entities under a species; the second, to the modern mathematical paradigm of research into material beings first made possible by the Cartesian discovery of analytic geometry; the third, to the extension of the notion of situating to the pneumatic realm.

Each of these forms of scientific enquiry remain limited by a) the notion of matter they presuppose, b) the metaphysics within which they are ensconced, and c) the notion of science they advance: the first, by a’) the Aristotelian notion of material substratum as a locus for form, b’) by the determination of all beings in terms of the form/matter distinction, and c’) by the restriction of the intelligible to the formal realm; the second, by a”) the notion of body as res extensa, by b”) the division of being into thinking subject and extended object, and by c”) the restriction of the study of material beings to what is mathematically decidable; the third, by a”’) the notion of body as outer limit of a spontaneous, spiritual-creative-vital force, by b”’.i) the characterization of the division of beings into matter and form as a conceptual distinction between passivity and activity and b”’.ii) by the characterization of beings as signs of the cultural milieu from which they came—or, more poetically put, as “mirrors of a universe,” and c”’) by the transformation of the object of study into a world, conceived of as a product of thought qua spontaneous-creative-harmonious-activity, i.e. conceived of as intersubjectivity. I will refer to the first research model as the Aristotelian, the second as the Cartesian, the third as the monadological (after Leibniz), though it could just as easily be called sociological (after Comte) or semiotic model. This third model includes, for instance, more recent attempts: to bring the study of the various parts of the codex together into a unified whole; to situate the codex itself in its broader socio-economic context; to make the study of the manuscript relevant to our world-historical situation. Research in manuscript studies at present tends to lie on the cusp between the Cartesian and monadological types.

What is perhaps somewhat surprising upon reflection is that none of the above models of research actually allows for the study of the manuscript itself as an object of research. This is because in every case, the manuscript is defined as bare materiality , and matter is identified with the realm of non-intelligibility. Hence, the manuscript is in each case studied for its ability to tell us something about something other than itself: its content, its provenance, the cultural forces which produced it, etc. In other words, the “manuscript” is constituted in its essence as a sign, i.e. as a non-essence.

Thus, the phrase “manuscript culture” names, in sequence, the medium and telos of the third research model.

On what it is to prove a prejudice

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There are two senses of prejudice: one, non-value laden, that simply refers to a tendency, even the necessity, of pre-judging certain matters. This concept, for instance, has been ably addressed in the writings of, among others, Hans-Georg Gadamer. A more restricted sense refers to prejudice in the value-laden sense, i.e. a prejudice in the first sense that is, in addition, irrational or otherwise harmful. This post is about prejudice in this latter sense.

What is a prejudice? A habit: a tendency to judge before one has adequate evidence; a tendency to judge based on non-rational motives.

How is a prejudice proven? Strictly speaking, a prejudice can rarely be proven; it usually can only be indicated (the only exceptions to this case generally being outright admissions of prejudice by the accused party himself), because a prejudice is a habit, and habits are by definition not phenomena, but the sources thereof. In other words, I cannot see someone’s habitual dispositions, but infer them as the simplest explanation for said person’s behavior. To ask for demonstrative proof, then, is to trivialize the very notion of prejudice, such that the only people who can be brandished as such are outspoken bigots. Prejudices are usually more subtle than that.

Showing that a person has a strongly negative evaluation of an individual, or even a whole class of individuals, is not enough to show prejudice. One must further show that this evaluation is mistaken. A necessary condition for evincing this latter claim is that the investigator into the charge of prejudice be able to come to an independent evaluation of the work in question, or at the very least is able to come to an independent evaluation of the validity and pertinence of the accused’s critiques thereof. When remarks against a position or concept are gravely deficient, they point to a deficiency in the one who makes those remarks.   This deficiency can be either intellectual or volitional, or (as is perhaps more usually the case) a combination of both. If the deficiency is intellectual, the one who makes the remarks is thereby shown to lack the capacity to judge the thesis that he attacks; if the deficiency is volitional, then the capacity for right judgment is usually impeded by some emotional or non-rational pull in the opposite direction, by impatience, or by the intrusion of irrelevant cares that prevent the point being made from being adequately grasped. In all of these latter cases, the judgment consequent upon said intrusions is considered to be prejudiced because it is consequent upon a failure of understanding; in other words, prejudices intrude where and only where understanding fails: either when a) adequate understanding of the position under scrutiny is not reached, and one’s natural inclinations serve as a “fall-back” option in lieu of said understanding, or b) adequate understanding of the content of the position under scrutiny is reached, but the position itself is deemed unpalatable, or irrational motives overpower those consequent upon rational understanding.

This should prompt the question, ‘what exactly are we doing when, for instance, we institutionalize mechanisms for the detection of prejudice, e.g. in simple cases like formal complaints about a grade brought by a student’, wherein the obligation to come to an independent evaluation the act or work in question is forfeited from the start? I don’t think the immediate alternative (i.e. having colleagues breathing down each others necks to create a kind of forcedly homogenous grading system) is particularly good, but the present method is clearly and essentially deficient in achieving its end. I, for one, have been struck by how insulated I am by these mechanisms from genuine complaints having any impact on me. This is surely comfortable in a rather unsatisfactory immediate sense, but ultimately, I find it deeply unsettling. Thoughts?

On the experience of time in missing another person

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Some matters are such that the act of writing or speaking about them, for want of words, can only appear as a betrayal of what is stated or written. To know such matters is to understand the privative character of truth, the a- in aletheia, the way in which handing-over-to-presence displays the abandonment spoken of in the incipit of Psalm 21. The following is, then, one of these betrayals.

Two weekends ago, I was in Chicago for a conference. While there, I managed to visit some old friends, a couple I haven’t seen in about four years. Let us call them Joseph and Mary.

Joseph picked me up, and then we drove to his house. While in the car, I described my time at the conference, making some remarks about how the environment of the conference often felt somewhat hostile, which was ironic given that the conference was thematically concerned with making philosophy more welcoming for groups it has traditionally excluded. Joe has an upbeat and jocular personality, so this prompted some jokes on his part. We also spent some time talking about matters of our faith.

Joe lives in his parents’ basement. When we arrived at his house, I was introduced to his parents, his siblings, his older brother’s dog, and his children, and Mary, his wife, who was already a good friend. I began talking with her in the same light manner that I had been talking to Joe in the car. Her demeanor caught me off guard, for it became clear that she intended to genuinely listen to the matter that I was speaking about, instead of merely joining in on the idle talk that I and her husband had so easily and unwittingly fallen into. At that time, the following words formed silently in my heart:

I missed you.

And after being ruminated on throughout the day, this thought gave way to the following:

I didn’t realize how much I missed you

When we say “I miss you” in English, we place ourselves in the position of acting, present subjects, while that which we miss is cast as the direct object of our activity. This is inaccurate. Instead of the matter itself, what the grammar brings to presence in the light of this matter are three prejudices that have sunk deep into our thinking: the reduction to the first-person perspective, the reduction of passivity to activity, and the reduction of every past to a prior present.

During all of the four years that had passed, There was never a time where I was thinking, about this friend, that I missed her. There was no pondering on my part. Rather, what the thought conveyed to me was my own past affliction on account of her having been missing from my life. It conveyed her absence, and my own relative depravity in the relative darkness of that absence. I was not the actor in this missing, but had rather suffered the lack. She was lacking, and I did not know it.

By the time the news had come to me, it came as something that had long been the case. Through long exposure, this lack had become barely perceptible, much as the noise of a jet engine becomes so after a long airplane trip. I now missed her without there ever having been a present where my missing her was the case.

Certain verbs have their roots in the past and only decline into the present. Verbs involving error or failure are often of this kind. One never says “I am mistaken” but only “I was mistaken.” To recognize one’s mistake in very moment of being mistaken is to cease to be mistaken. Missing is a failure of this kind.

(There is something that one may describe as “missing” another in the present tense, but this kind of missing differs fundamentally from that described above. Present missing usually manifests itself as longing; and though more spiritual, is analogically related to base desires such as those for food, drink, and sex – that is, it is reducible to a species of consumption).

Missing, the kind that recently came to address me, is a kind of failure: one wherein I, presently, am struck by my past present-ignorance, which in turn is a falling from a past more complete – grammatically, perfect – than itself.  The present of this recognition can only be, relative to its prior moment, a return to the perfect because it recognizes the previous present as a presence compromised – hence grammatically, the imperfect. As both a return to the ancient and a species of imperfection, presence is a coincidentia oppositorum, a species of was stuck between a had been which is also the longed for to come. Forgetfulness: an oblivion in need of being rescued by the good it does not know.

On private language and the genesis of “the literature”

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I do not wish to dispute the widely accepted view that a private language is impossible. But the ground of this impossibility has need of being named. That is what this post does.

It’s immediate ground is the notion that the primary purpose of a language is communication between subjects. This presupposes, first, a conception of the human being as a subject. The meaning of this presupposition is that the human being is the subiectum, that being in whom all other beings (i.e. one’s “field of experience”) are grounded. As most fully exemplified in the metaphysics of Leibniz, the subject stands to these other beings as their formal cause: the subject is the being in whom the world is as it is; the human qua subject has the world “in mind” – never fully, but always from a particular “point of view.” The task of understanding being thus becomes a process of collating particular viewpoints; while the orientation of the person on this way of thinking becomes one of openness towards others: the apex of truth is to be found in intersubjective harmony.

This intersubjective harmony is, everywhere, obviously, not yet realized. In accordance with this, the task of thinking must become not primarily contemplative, but practical – to bring this harmony of minds, conceived as being in its fullness, into being. First philosophy is, as Comte understood it, sociology. Only in the light of this happening is metaphysics, as the perfected recognition of beings in their unity, possible.

But there is a tension here. Ex hypothesi, the mode of being of these viewpoints is inaccessible to those who do not directly occupy it. No one has access to the “ideas” of others. This much is taken as axiomatic. So in the process of realizing the telos of this unity, the mode of being of the viewpoints materially composing it must be transformed from their intrinsic, inaccessible form to an extrinsic one: it must be concretized. Teleologically, this unity, perfected and laid bare, made flesh for all the world to see, is what specialists of all fields of learning call, glibly and unknowingly, the literature.

In the midst of this, the aim of concretizing one’s own viewpoint becomes increasingly obligatory: in an obvious case, it is used as a requirement for earning tenure. Contributing to the literature is referred to, in a quasi-religious euphemism, as “participating in the great conversation.”

Within this understanding, talk of a language whose principle or end is something other than communication is regarded as impossible, because blasphemous. Communication is simply the name for the immanent actualization of the literature, now metaphysically taken as a name for that being of beings which, since Hegel, has been thought of as nothing less than the self-realization of a god.

I do not claim any of this is what Wittgenstein had in mind when formulating his argument against the possibility of a private language. But then again, the attempt to reconstitute “what exactly Wittgenstein meant” is part and parcel of the method of metaphysics laid bare here, and constitutes an ignoratio elenchus with respect to the genuine matter of what the argument calls us to think.

Human speech is not, in the first place, communication, but invocation. This is not to draw a dichotomy between the two, place this dichotomy on a timeline and suggest that there was a first utterance simultaneously invocative and non-communicative in character. Instead, it is to suggest that the essence of communication is not itself something communicative.

To say is to call forth what is said – to “call it to mind.” The unity of the word – logos – comes from the unity of a gathering – legein – that governs its manifestations in both the exalted form of a Byzantine Liturgy and in the debased and common form of pulling up a web page.

The relation of what is said to a mind to a person, however, is not that of a content located in some faculty located inside a person, like a set of Russian dolls. To bring some matter to mind is nothing other than to bring it to minding – to bring it before one’s attention, to attend to it. And what is called to mind is not a “thought” conceived as a hermeneutical tool for grasping bare particulars, but the being of those particulars themselves – ousia as morphe as idea.

To say, to sing, to hymn – these are the primordial ways of calling to mind. The love of wisdom begins not in conversation, but in wonder. This is what the literature screams against in its constant demand for the sacrifices of production. And it is mindfulness of this ancient verity that will reduce it to silence.

I believed. Therefore I spoke.

About my posts

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Different genres of writing have different advantages relative to each other. Another way of saying this is that every genre of writing is inherently constricting. There is nothing wrong with this. In order for one kind of writing to be this kind rather than that, it must conform to certain norms regarding style, length, and even content whereby it is distinguished from other genres. Concomitantly, this means that certain matters may be more apt for certain genres of writing than others. For instance, citation-heavy work finds a better home in an academic article than a news column, even when it is treating some subject matter common to both media.

Today, the primary genre for philosophical writing is the journal article. Characteristic features of the article include its length (usually no more than 5000-7000 words), its breadth (relatively small – an article, characteristically, attempts to answer some small, manageable question that gets incorporated into a body of knowledge often oriented by some larger question or questions), and its need to be dialectically engaged with relevant and recent literature on the topic the article purports to treat.

It should be obvious that different genres lie relatively close or far from different dangers. The essay style dominant through early modernity, for instance, could easily lead to non-rigorous, superficial treatments of meaningful topics. And no one can seriously doubt that the concentration of philosophy in the form of the journal article has given inordinate attention to micro-problems (and occasionally even to pseudo-problems); that the proliferation of secondary literature on has obfuscated some topics more than it has clarified them; that length requirements have muzzled attempts to answer larger questions. If the philosophical canon consisted solely in the kind of philosophy written today, Plato’s Dialogues would be too aloof, Kant’s Critiques would be too long, Nietzsche’s aphorisms would be too baseless, and Rousseau’s essays would be too rhetorically bloated. Perhaps the only body of work that would remain intact would be the scholastic literature stretching from the 13th to the 17th century.

The posts of this page are just that – posts. This means, obviously, that they are not journal articles (you may access my articles on the my papers page of this site). Part of my aim in publishing them here has been to give voice to certain ways of doing philosophy that are very difficult, if not impossible, to do within the medium of the journal article. If what you see here is less polished than what you will find in an article, it is often more raw. If it is less connected to the literature, it is often more accessible to those who have no need for a literature. If its questions are occasionally too wide, no one will doubt that those questions are genuinely philosophical ones. My style will often rely more on personal experience and pithy observations than would be justified in a journal format. But this is just to recognize that such things have a place in philosophy, while still ceding to the article its place.

Lastly, many of the questions encountered in one way or another in these posts seek to shed light on the meta-theoretical structures governing the practice of philosophy today. What exactly, for instance, is referred to by the phrase “the literature”? What do the use of citation networks suggest about the way philosophical research is evaluated? What does it mean to characterize philosophy as a kind of “research” in the first place? For obvious reasons, these kinds of questions have no real place within the traditional media of the contemporary philosophical landscape.

That having been said, I hope that you enjoy what you find here. More importantly, I hope that it spurs you on to pay love and heed to that wisdom, forgetful though we are of it, in whose service we have been enlisted.

The Philosopher as Midwife and Aristophanes’ Immanent Critique of Immanent Critique

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To understand the telos of philosophy, it is useful to go back to its beginning.

Consider the person of Socrates. Socrates is a teacher of sorts. He teaches no particular doctrine, but he teaches his interlocutors nonetheless.

Especially in the earlier Platonic dialogues, Socrates typically begins an inquiry by starting with some particular action or belief of his interlocutor. For instance, the Euthyphro begins with the fact that Euthyphro is taking his father to court on the charge of impiety. Euthyphro eventually says that he believes that this action of his is itself an example of something pious.

Throughout this dialogue and others, Socrates disabuses his interlocutor of some particular belief based on other things that they hold in esteem. In the Euthyphro, Socrates shakes Euthyphro’s confidence in his ability to justify the piety of this action, but precisely by keeping the higher concern on which this particular action depends – Euthyphro’s concern with piety itself – in view. This is Socrates’ midwifery: to take the good that his interlocutor already has in mind and to determine it in a given direction, stripping away those elements in the confused idea with which the determined idea is incompatible.  Socratic questioning is a means of helping the interlocutor to the object of his desire, and thereby to help him to himself.

Socratic midwifery only gives as much as it is given. Abstracted from the particulars of the desire of a given individual, Socratic instruction by immanent critique of the sought good of the interlocutor has the desirable as both its principle and its term.796758-spilled-wine

The Socrates of Aristophanes’ Clouds resembles the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues far more than the sophists with which Socrates contrasts himself in the Apology in this deeply important respect: he practices the method of immanent critique. He does not, as the Sophists do, instruct his students in speeches that serve as set pieces. Hence, it is reasonable to think that the Aristophanes’ critique of the “new learning” is far more a critique of genuine Socratic philosophy than one of mere sophistry.

That which is unjust is disjointed from its surroundings; in the Clouds, the character of Unjust Speech is, in its essential activity, disjointing. Whereas the manner in which Just Speech teaches is essentially by recollection and exhortation, Unjust Speech, that speech which is out of joint, succeeds in overcoming Just Speech by unhinging the different elements of Just Speech’s speech from each other – pointing out, for instance, contradictions in the legends that Just speech holds sacred. Yet Unjust Speech does not, and cannot, put anything in its place. Zeus has been driven out, and Vortex is now king.

Socratic method comes into its own at the beginning of the modern period – in part via the break with medieval ecclesial dogmatism, in part via the newfound centrality of a concern with method itself. Desire, no longer pre-formed by a holding of the sacred in mind, begins to become its own end, though philosophy does not become conscious of this happening until the start of the 19th century. Wholly stripped of its positive elements now unmasked as relics of a dogmatic heritage, the only tasks remaining for philosophy are to help each individual to him/herself, and to coordinate this in such a way that the desires of individuals interfere with each other as little as possible. Hence the pluralism and the consequentialism of philosophy as such in its attainment of its own absoluteness.

Even today, philosophy is characterized by precisely this form of hospitality. One speaks of philosophical instruction as teaching a method as opposed to a particular doctrine: it teaches the art of arguing well, even if it knows little in the way of actual conclusions. In other words, in coming to its own, philosophical instruction has become aimless. And having gnawed away the trunk that supports its very striving, this desire itself withers away: the dominant attitude of thinking becomes less and less the arrogance, misguided yet passionate, of the early modern period (though this is still easy enough to find today), but apathy, bewilderment, stupefaction.

On journals devoted to thinkers

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In spite of their utility, journals devoted to the thought of individual thinkers by their very form do a disservice to thinking. By placing the matter of thinking under the accidental aspect of having been thought by an individual a, they abscond the matter of a genuine thinking from sight (including that of the thinker to whom the journal itself is devoted), and thus further the impression that scholarship in the humanities is about the history of opinions. In certain cases, by virtue of the major themes in the thought of that thinker him/herself (e.g. Heidegger Studies, Kierkegaardiana), an especially acute irony results.

The same can be said, on a broader scale, of journals devoted to historical periods or schools of thought. Here, history is thought as mere chronology instead of assessing it as the phenomenal weight of an age (if you do not understand what I mean here, read Joyce’s “The Dead”). Hence how the whole of the past can be, and is being, transformed into a mere toolbox for the systematician.

On the loss of unity in contemporary life

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One of the dominant characteristics of contemporary life is the dissolution of every form and grade of unity, from the banal to the sublime: with the move of music culture from large record labels and mass radio to self-produced artists and iPods, visual media from basic cable to YouTube, news from print to the blog, retail resources from overblown chains to smaller niche markets and online shopping, the passive homogeny of top-down commercial culture is giving way to a wide array of choices given to each individual singularly; the rapidity of international travel, the increasing ease of immigrating between developed countries, and the peculiar phenomenon of a trans-national culture of multi-culturalism wither away at the sense of national identity once accorded to a people by being citizens of a given state; the hierarchical arrangement of the sciences and the subordination of those sciences to broadly humanistic ideals in the University is ever giving way to a stratified system of autonomous and distinct disciplines thinly tied together by the goal of constantly proliferating new information; the coherence once given to a people by a common religion is no longer normative, and the void left thereby is largely filled by means entirely subservient to the individual—e.g. art as a form of self-expression, self-help psychology, and religion-free “spirituality.”

This loss of unity is present in philosophy specifically in manifold ways: the dissolution of continental philosophy in practice into a multiplicity of Weltanschauung philosophies, each dictated by the needs/whims of a niche audience; the dissolution of analytic philosophy into various sub-disciplines, often with different methodologies, unrelated goals, and radically different assumptions in the mainstream work done in those disciplines; the absence of works written in the last 50 years fitting into a philosophical canon not for specialists of some philosophical sub-discipline, but for all philosophers; the proliferation of “philosophy of” and “meta” disciplines as a means of buttressing the independence of the disciplines that they purport to treat; the replacement of the substantial unity of the book by the journal article qua contribution to the chaotic whirlwind called “the literature”; the rapid proliferation of different systems of logic leading to a de facto pluralism about what constitutes correct thinking.

The Common factor in each of the above

In each of the above cases, advances in technology have served as a material condition for the changes mentioned: the invention of the internet, advances in commerce, the growth of the university, etc. have removed impediments and thus made these changes possible. But technology is not the cause of these changes (except materially, and therefore equivocally).

Rather, considered finally, each of the above changes can be viewed as subservient to the augmentation of the freedom of each individual qua thinker, where freedom is defined as non-compulsion, and thought as self-expression—that is, a pure activity.

This is why soliloquy is becoming a more normative form of speech: witness the blog, the status post, the comment in online media.

This is why the metaphor of thinking as a game, with all the indifference implied thereby, is now an apt one.

This is why the breakdown of the paradigms of modern thought will likely not give way to a new unified philosophical tradition, as, for instance, the breakdown of Aristotelianism gave way to Cartesianism at the dawn of modernity.

This is why contemporary philosophy takes place in an environment in which very little is, in fact, compelling: not because the arguments are malformed or based on faulty or vague intuitions (though they often are); but because compulsion presupposes a passivity that is altogether foreign to the braggadocio of contemporary thinking.

This is why publishing practices in philosophy today prefer novelty to depth.

And this is why, while the waning of the theoretical ends of classical philosophy are reflected in the closing of many—especially liberal arts-oriented—philosophy programs, philosophers survive more and more in a transformed state by subordinating themselves to the practical goals of other disciplines: in so-called experimental philosophy; in business ethics institutes and medical programs; in the development of formal systems of logic as tools both for everyday thinking and for computational systems, and in the task of culture and creed construction for political think tanks.

In short, the loss of unity both within and outside of philosophy is consequent upon the absolute subordination of thinking qua self-assertion to the cause of the freedom of the individual. In a sense writ (very) large, I shall like to call this complex liberalism; if one seeks a further qualification, I shall call it monadological liberalism, in order to distinguish it from its incomplete[1] Lockean counterpart.  Liberalism is the cause of the fragmentation of the modern world.

Some problems reflexively posed for philosophical writing by this fact.

            The most serious problem posed for writing about this phenomenon is the self-reinforcing character of liberalism itself.

Self-reinforcement is not unique to liberalism: witness the skeptic who takes the refutation of his position as further support for it; or the religious pluralist/syncretist, who can only encounter the object of his interest as supporting his own superficial spirit of tolerance, in spite of the repugnance of that spirit to nearly every creed he may encounter.

This self-reinforcement occurs in multiple ways, of which the following are the most immediate. First, the provincialism of different philosophical sub-disciplines serves as a preventative measure against the emergence of a thinking that can alter this status quo; the fragmentation of philosophy into sub-disciplines makes it unfit to receive truth that transcends those disciplines and their characteristic concerns. Second, on the off chance that a thinker of substance does arise, any set of formulae advanced by that individual can be glibly absorbed as the doctrine of a thinker, from which a shallow discourse can be constructed about “n‘s theory of x,” or a school of adherents to this teacher’s doctrine, “n-ists” can be assembled: this a posteriori attribution diverts attention away from the real matter in that thinker’s thinking, and devalues every possible philosophical insight by giving it the prima facie label of an opinion. Third, when an insight is absorbed, it is only so absorbed as a possibility—that is, in accordance with a teleology that makes every philosophical stance purely optional.

This state of affairs has the consequence that any philosophical thinking done under its auspices is effectively sterile until it is itself understood and addressed.

[1] While Locke’s liberalism, along with those liberalisms descending directly from him (e.g. that of the US founding fathers), contains the above mentioned negative definition of freedom, it does not augment it with a clarification of thinking. This was first achieved via Leibniz’s clarification of the Cartesian cogito as a kind of force (see his New System of Nature).  Leibniz’s philosophy served to synthesize two different traditions of Cartesianism: 1) it augmented the philosophy of Newton and Locke by showing the impossibility of explaining the existence of separate, individuated unities by recourse to material atomism; 2) Against Spinoza, it regained the possibility of a formalist answer to the problem of unity while rejecting Spinoza’s monism/pantheism. This is important to the current state of philosophical research because major shifts in the organization of society over the past 100 years have proceeded along exactly parallel lines: Liberalism of a purely negative character lacked the ability to give unity and direction to human activity; hence, various forms of totalitarianism arose; since the widespread revolt against these movements, liberalism has co-opted what made them attractive by being transformed into a creed positively aimed at the maximization of the freedom of the individual, and not merely directed at curbing violations of freedom. Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz: affirmation, negation, synthesis.