Where is a Philosopher?

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.