Notiones hominesque cano.
It may be time for philosophy to begin again.
It always does, after a major national setback—the kind that calls for a rethinking of the basic premises of an entire society. Athens went through something like that after a series of disasters: the Peloponnesian War with Sparta began in 431 BCE, plague hit in 430. Athens lost its moral authority by destroying the small and inoffensive island state of Melos in 416, finally lost the Peloponnesian War in 404, and finished it all off by putting Socrates to death in 399.
And that started the miracle: what had been a philosophical backwater produced, after Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Speusippus. Then it moved on to the Cynics, Skeptics, Stoics, etc.—still the greatest outburst of philosophical creativity in the history of the West.
Could something similar be on the horizon here? Our feckless response to CODIV19 has seen America go from “the greatest country in the world” to, in the now-famous words of Finian O’Toole, an object of pity. Its treatment of its African-American citizens has been conclusively exposed, yet again, as not only a horrible evil but one so deeply-rooted in American life as to be part of the national essence, which means that to cure it we will have to destroy and remake the country. And the whole disastrous panoply is presided over by a malignant clown whom no mature political system would have allowed anywhere near the seats of power.
Calls for a rethinking, all right. The big questions become unavoidable: What is a human being? What is the good life? Is the good life in any sense a moral life? What is America? What is a country? How can we know these things? What is knowledge, anyway?
And— can philosophy answer questions like these? This brings us to one more question: what, in fact, is philosophy?
The forty or so entries which will constitute this blog approach philosophy in terms of its history. They will demonstrate, I claim, that philosophy is much more path-dependent than most people think. Today’s philosophers believe much of they believe, and act as they act, largely because earlier philosophers (and others) did and believed what they did and believed. For nothing on earth drops from heaven, and what doesn’t drop from heaven comes from something else on earth—something that didn’t work out, or it would still be here. If we want to understand the nature and capacities of philosophy, we must look to its history.
But what if that history has been misunderstood? I will argue that it has. Understanding the history of philosophy is not enough: it must be understood rightly. These informal and un-scholarly reflections cannot, to be sure, provide that right understanding. But I hope they can instigate a search for it.
As might be expected, I too am path-dependent; but I did not choose this road. Many years ago, I decided to study the history of philosophy, in order to be sure that my own philosophical work—then still un-begun—would not reinvent any wheels. I never got out of it. First, in order to avoid the treason of translation, came a decade of drudgery learning languages. There followed eight years of sitting in a room in Toronto, making use of those languages. During that time I read the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus in Greek; Augustine and Aquinas in Latin; Descartes in Latin and French; Spinoza in Latin and Dutch. I read the other classical Empiricists in English, with some Hobbesian forays into Latin. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Habermas in German; Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou in French. And then, for the next forty-plus years, I made a career of it.
There are plenty of Europeans who get this kind of education; but as far as I know, very few Americans (outside of Catholic universities, a fact which will come up again).
I have learned some things. One is that the history of philosophy contains moments of piercing beauty, many of them. An afternoon reading, say, the letters of Spinoza is like an afternoon listening to Mozart, or looking at Cézannes. No one I know talks like this, and I sometimes think I wander through the beauty alone—as if the history of philosophy were a Secret Island hidden from humanity, like Wonder Woman’s, by eternal fog banks. Sitting in my room, in Toronto or Aix-en-Provence or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, I wander my Island. I pause at a Plotinian waterfall, or come across the ruined stoa of Aristotle (or, indeed, of the Stoics). Now I sit in a Cartesian grove or a windowless Leibnizian cottage, now I take shelter in an Empiricist gazebo from a sudden Nietzschean thunderstorm—all the while looking, looking.
That is part of what I want to communicate: the beauty and the wonder. But there is more: the danger, the evil. My philosophical Island is also like Isla Nublar, the home of Jurassic Park: we are safe from its great and ancient denizens only as long as they are separated from each other. Universities, with their emphasis on specialization, contrive to keep them so. But when you break down the fences that separate them, when you see Parmenides (for example) in connection to Augustine and Augustine in conection to Kant, they gang up on you and become scary. Not only are women and non-Europeans excluded from their number—the exclusions are the point of the whole thing. Metaphysics is not some practically-irrelevant flight into the conceptual ether, nor is it a worthy project derailed by the racism and sexism of its practitioners. Rather, from its very beginnings and throughout, it is an effort to put certain people in their place. And keep them out of our place, the “space of reasons.”
So the happy views that we were taught—that philosophy is a search for truth, a set of opinions, a mine of arguments—are, at best, seriously incomplete. The piercing beauty of the history of philosophy is terminally dangerous, and that is another reason to know about it.