But one of the defining characteristics of the modern world is that it will not let us understand things in the simple, untroubled way that they we once understood them. Language, thought, fate, truth, ourselves—we are in doubt as to the value and meaning of everything. We are forced to “discover” the meanings of things. But once upon a time, we imagine, people did not have to “discover” the meanings of things. Those meanings came simply and naturally to them. They had not begun to question everything.
We are all now in the position of the philosopher who cannot understand things in an ordinary way and feels driven to seek a new, a perfect, a sublime way to understand them. Why perfect? Why sublime? Because the old ways failed. They were arbitrary, superstitious, biased, unjust, wrong. We can only return to that primordial sense of certainty (we imagine) if we can produce an understanding that is impervious to suspicion, that is definitely right.
And never mind if this new conviction is an absolute lack of conviction, a dogged insistence that nothing is right and nothing wrong, nothing true, nothing false—even that is acceptable if we can be sure of it. Which is to say, despair is another form of millenarian hope; millenarian hope is another form of despair. The search for perfect truth (a project in which I would include all of the social sciences, perhaps the sciences themselves) and the abandonment of all possibility of truth are both forms of the philosopher’s malady, the dream of a new kind of certainty: they both arise from the despair of ever returning to a state of trust in things as they are. This despair is not unreasonable.
“Philosophy is homesickness,” wrote the German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis in 1798. But there was a time when we were at home everywhere, not because we were comfortable or safe, but because we knew where we were. (One useful way to understand Romanticism is as a certain response to the loss of the state of feeling at home.)
Is there any way back? Yes, in fact.
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
What is a Philosopher?
A philosopher is someone who, due to a special private deficiency, is unable to understand something that comes simply and naturally to other people; who must therefore bang his head against a wall that, to ordinary people, simply does not exist. Because he is unable to understand whatever it is in the simple untroubled way that ordinary people grasp it, he conceives the bizarre plan to understand it in an entirely different way, to understand it as an essence, a thing-in-itself, etc.. He labors tirelessly, builds a whole apparatus of infinitely subtle thought in order to grasp the secret mysterious essence of this ordinary thing— an essence that is essentially chimerical. For the thing in question does not have an essence. It is an ordinary thing, a convenient conglomeration of instances, features, parts.
But if the philosopher can become aware of his condition—if he can come to understand that the problem with which he grapples is not really a problem at all—then he may do something useful. In that case, he will not cease to struggle; the matter will not at all become simple for him; rather it will become infinitely more complex. As long as he believed he was building his great apparatus to grasp the secret essence, he was happy and could go on steadily about his business, laborious though it was, with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Now he knows that he must rid himself of this morbid obsession—but he cannot rid himself of it. He can glimpse the straightforward manner in which the thing ought to be understood, but the impulse perpetually takes hold of him to understand it differently, sublimely; to interrogate it, to make it reveal its secret nature. This impulse rises up in him like a sort of demon that must be dispelled before he can enjoy that ordinary understanding; to dispel the demon, he must appease it; it will never be appeased.
Or we might put it this way: having once begun to analyze, his only hope of being permitted to cease to analyze is to reach the end of the analysis, to prove to himself that the analysis is unnecessary. He suffers from a kind of nervous condition, in which he is compelled to begin again and again to analyze, in order to assure himself finally that there is nothing to analyze, that there is no secret essence grinning at him from the shadows between words.
Such a person will come to see Philosophy and Philosophers as his enemies. His aim will be to debunk them. If, in this, he is compassionate, it will be because he knows that he is one of them. If he is vicious and haughty, it will be because he cannot bear the fact that he is one of them.
The writing of such a person will be marked by signs of a desperate struggle, a struggle against an angel/demon, which is to say a certain kind of struggle against himself. Out of this struggle, the philosopher may wrest some special wound—a limp, say—that will forever mark him and his writing and make of it something beautiful and difficult.
(This crumb is inspired by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It is a sort of interpretation of that book—not of its substance, but of its form.)
But if the philosopher can become aware of his condition—if he can come to understand that the problem with which he grapples is not really a problem at all—then he may do something useful. In that case, he will not cease to struggle; the matter will not at all become simple for him; rather it will become infinitely more complex. As long as he believed he was building his great apparatus to grasp the secret essence, he was happy and could go on steadily about his business, laborious though it was, with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Now he knows that he must rid himself of this morbid obsession—but he cannot rid himself of it. He can glimpse the straightforward manner in which the thing ought to be understood, but the impulse perpetually takes hold of him to understand it differently, sublimely; to interrogate it, to make it reveal its secret nature. This impulse rises up in him like a sort of demon that must be dispelled before he can enjoy that ordinary understanding; to dispel the demon, he must appease it; it will never be appeased.
Or we might put it this way: having once begun to analyze, his only hope of being permitted to cease to analyze is to reach the end of the analysis, to prove to himself that the analysis is unnecessary. He suffers from a kind of nervous condition, in which he is compelled to begin again and again to analyze, in order to assure himself finally that there is nothing to analyze, that there is no secret essence grinning at him from the shadows between words.
Such a person will come to see Philosophy and Philosophers as his enemies. His aim will be to debunk them. If, in this, he is compassionate, it will be because he knows that he is one of them. If he is vicious and haughty, it will be because he cannot bear the fact that he is one of them.
The writing of such a person will be marked by signs of a desperate struggle, a struggle against an angel/demon, which is to say a certain kind of struggle against himself. Out of this struggle, the philosopher may wrest some special wound—a limp, say—that will forever mark him and his writing and make of it something beautiful and difficult.
(This crumb is inspired by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It is a sort of interpretation of that book—not of its substance, but of its form.)
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