What’s left of philosophy

In my little dreamworld the best thing this blog can do is cross-connect some questions and conversations that otherwise would miss each other. In that spirit please take a moment to visit Savage Minds, an excellent anthropology blog, to check out Chris Kelty’s post on experimental philosophy, a newish development that has some philosophers “exploring the possibility of actually talking to people.”

Philosophy used to include everything, and in its self-conception still does. In the history of knowledge-formation, however, over the last few hundred years philosophy has been getting whittled down by the spinning off of the sciences, history, law, economics, sociology, anthropology, politics, psychology and so on into separate disciplines. Each of those has some practical field of competence about real human relations in the world; indeed, it could be said (and was, by a defender of philosophy on that thread who may or may not have grasped the irony) that any time philosophy identifies a field of potentially-practical study about humans, it gets spun off into a different discipline. Cognitive science as the practical spinoff of epistemology is a recent example.

(I am being kind to philosophy here. In the last hundred years at least the sub-disciplining of the human studies has had very little at all to do with conceptual innovations in philosophy, and the reverse is increasingly true.)

What’s left for philosophy as such? Old unanswerable questions, abstractions, speculation, and no practical applications that can’t be better addressed by one or more of the successor disciplines. A playground for nerds, geeks, and bores.

Conditions

Marx was the master of conditioning imagery — the dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living, and so on — but Kant was no slouch:

“The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space” (Introduction, Critique of Pure Reason).

He refers here to Plato trying to dispense with the senses as the supporting ground of our understanding. So unreliable, yet so indispensable, our senses. The quote has a different resonance for me when I’m dealing with the sorts of radical individualism produced by modern societies. The idea that society oppresses us and holds us back is a common theme of what I’ve been calling entitlement; but as I suggested in the G.H. Mead post, there is no I, me, or us without society. It is the air in which we fly. The tension between the flight society enables and the resistance it creates is a fundamental theme of modern experience as such, so often explored and enacted in art.

I was again struck by this whilst watching Ken Burns’ documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright (listen to an interview with Burns here). Burns chronicles Wright’s creative genius but/and also his arrogant disregard for any order of things other than his own. He rejected any outside control while thinking nothing of creating environments designed completely to control the people in them. Like any cult leader he used his considerable charisma to surround himself with people who made themselves the instruments of his will, the means to his ends.

Burns captures Wright’s narcissism but completely misses his underlying anxiety, the unfillable void of anomie that Durkheim predicted for the socially disconnected modern individual. The first is evident in Wright’s posture and pronouncements, the latter in his shifty approval-seeking gaze. As Goffman said, the theater of the self requires an audience.

Reading

Mikhail at Perverse Egalitarianism, who incidentally along with his colleague Shahar has the best booze-fueled pretentious intellectual schtick I’ve ever seen, is reading a book on reading and not reading which is reminding me how odd our process of engaging with others and learning from/with them can be.

In a later comment Mikhail says

Seriously though I’ve been rather disturbed by Bayard’s book about talking about books you haven’t read – I thought it was going to be funny and tongue-in-cheek but it’s quite serious for the most part and addresses an issue I really haven’t seen in print before, that is, how we really don’t read the book we read or claim to have read – nothing psychological or super-theoretical, just the basic fact that we forget the books we’ve read in a very short time and then we read them again and selectively, so each of us has a very different memory (not just interpretation or a perspective) of the same book… In a sense, we’re all talking about a different book when we discuss, say, Kant’s first critique or Marx’s Capital.

So much for the Enlightenment! I like to own the books I read because then I can mark them up as I go. It’s like having a conversation with the author in the margin. Also the piles of them on the floor are festively decorative. When I go back to books I haven’t looked at in a while, I sometimes just take my own word for it and zero in on the parts I’ve blocked or commented on (e.g. when I’m refreshing for teaching), and then I’m usually alright. But if I actually re-read, I often find myself perplexed at why I picked out what I did, or what my train of thought was when I wrote what was clearly at the time a self-evident remark in the margin. It’s as if some stranger with different priorities and agendas had spritzed the book with his traces. Sometimes that guy was pretty smart, and sometimes he was a dead dunce.

For one thing I’m usually reading more than one book at once, seeding my environment with them, a pencil stuck in each to keep my place; so my reading ends up being an accidental conversation among me and several authors, which produces some terrific collisions but would be very difficult to reproduce, including for me later when I’m trying to explain why I think what I think. Not to mention all the ‘live’ conversations I’m having at any given time. We never enter the same stream of consciousness twice.

When I’m revered after my death little disciples will want to figure me all out and that will be funny as hell. They’d have to go back through all the books I’ve read, decode the marginalia, and dope out what order and circumstances I read them in. My head is bricolaged all the way down. Incidentally I tried to do this with Gramsci, whose personal library is preserved at the PCI archives in Rome. Turns out that because he grew up poor, with a reverence for the book, he wouldn’t have dreamed of writing in one. Bummer. But I guess we have that to thank for the Prison Notebooks.