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The caves of Cappadocia

Cappadocia in the southern corner of Turkey is a region of unearthly beauty, far removed, so it seems, from the currents of modern life. But it has a turbulent past and perhaps even a message for our own day. Syria and the Kurdish areas of the Middle East are close by. Cappadocia was once a crossroads for conquerors, Hittites, Persians, and Romans, Seljuks and Turks. Early Christianity took roots here but eventually was forced to hide away in the caves that pockmark the region.

Coming from Ankara, one travels for hours on a plateau of rolling hills that shimmered in all kinds of colors from the freshest green to a deep golden brown. Remarkably, there were almost no trees to be seen apart from those newly planted along the roadside. As for animals, we saw a few herds of sheep, one or two cows, and almost no birds in the sky. Humans seemed just as scarce: no towns and only some distant villages. Far away, snow-covered mountains peaked through the morning haze. The sense of peace was certainly overwhelming after London with its restless millions and after the endless high-rises and crowded freeways of Turkey’s polluted capital.

Then, suddenly we reached the edge of a sandstone ravine and faced a mysterious landscape of rocks looking like giant witches’ hats punctured with the dark shadows of cave entrances, valleys filled with columns of stone sculpted into fantastic shapes by wind and weather. Human beings have lived here for thousands of years. There used to be entire cave cities, some of them lived in till the 1960’s.

Some of the caves turn out to be dwellings that reach four or five stories up and or four or five stories down into the ground. It is easy to see why our forebears dug them out. They provided shelter from rain and storm and the summer heat. They were solid and their hard floors could be easily cleaned. They provided protection also against wild animals but, more important still, also against hostile humans. Why live in a rackety makeshift house somewhere openly on the plain, when you can hide from marauders deep in these caverns?

The caves were, in other words, the nuclear shelters of antiquity. They tell a story of how dark and dangerous life can become, of warfare and cruelty, and how much it takes in the struggle for human survival.

 

 

 

London in April: the quandaries of modern individualism

There were two hundred or so of us all united for a moment by our common desire to get to London as quickly and comfortably as possible. But as soon as we landed at Heathrow, we each went our own way, modern individuals propelled by diverging interests and purposes. From where comes this individualism that motivates and propels us? Have we achieved a richer and more unique form of human life than our forebears? Have we got to a higher understanding of what it is to be human? Or are we, with the whole baggage of our modern individualism, only the unwitting products of new circumstances, ready-made and type-cast by a newly individuating reality?

Material conditions may not strictly necessitate the ways we think and act. But the outer, material conditions of life make certain kinds of thinking and acting easy and plausible. We slip into them and find them natural and true. And the natural truth that our material conditions engender in us is that of modern individualism: we have come to believe in ourselves as free, independent, autonomous, self-governing beings. We see ourselves as freely choosing between different goods, with our own individual values, as free members of a free society.

But the realities of modern individualism came home to us as soon as we stepped out of the airplane and found ourselves in a labyrinth of walkways and escalators, guided by blinking signs and cooing announcements, made to walk here but not there, following hundreds of bewildered others to the exit, to passport control, to baggage recovery, to a connecting flight or to ground transportation. The entire gigantic structure spoke of options and choices but it also controlled our every move. It divided us into cohorts, streamed, directed, and regulated, allowed and prohibited, searched and cleared. And we would have it no other way for without this elaborate mechanism we would have been lost, helpless, and utterly insecure.

London itself was bathed in a warm Spring sun when we finally reached it through another labyrinth of barriers and rules, pressed together in a train taking us to its determined stops. The inner city was bustling with tourists, consulting their maps, led about by guides, gawking at all the well-known sights, out shopping in the established emporia, or just lounging with many others in the afternoon sun. Their pursuits and pleasures all had their own possibilities and constraints. Could we have entered the city as an army of pilgrims or as conquerors on horseback or as wandering minstrels or as shepherds, or shamans? Perhaps, we could have imagined ourselves in these terms but, I assume, none of us travelers from San Francisco was likely to have been attracted to these options. And even if anyone of us had been, it would have been merely a private fantasy and nothing in the reality of the modern airport and the modern city would have matched it.

We like to think of ourselves as freer than our ancestors. But what truth is there in this? Yes, we have new and never previously imagined freedoms, but we also face multiple new constraints that go hand in hand with those freedoms. Our freedom is the freedom of the labyrinth; and that labyrinth is our prison.

Reading Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the leading philosophical minds of the twentieth century and his thought remains of live interest. But he is not easy to read. Not  that he writes long, complex sentences with obscure philosophical terminology. On the contrary. His prose is simple, straightforward, and exemplary. But his texts are so condensed that it often becomes difficult to follow the course of his thinking.

Twenty years ago, David Stern and I published the Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein which was intended to help readers along. The volume became eventually one of the bestsellers in Cambridge University’s companions to philosophers series. We have now brought out a second edition of this work, Some of the contributions to the first edition have stood the time and are reprinted in this new one. But we have also added some great new pieces and included a completely updated bibliography. The volume contains, among others things, now a lucid essay by Kevin Cahill on Wittgenstein’s reflections on ethics and a brilliant piece on Wittgenstein’s concept of seeing an aspect by Juliet Floyd. David Stern has contributed a new essay on Wittgenstein’s changing thoughts in the 1930’s and Joachim Schulte has tackled the topic of “body and soul.”

Apart from a new introductory essay, I have written a piece on time and history in Wittgenstein for this second edition. Wittgenstein’s thoughts on these topics have not yet been fully explored. My goal in this essay is to find a new way of looking at Wittgenstein’s writings. Another aspect of that same project is a lecture on Wittgenstein’s conception of the world in the Tractatus. The power point file for this lecture is available on this website. Click here

“The Owl of Minerva” – Where are we right now in philosophy? In need of a revolution.

Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva starts its flight at dusk. He meant to say that philosophy, far from being avant-garde, is, in some ways, always behind its time. For first comes reality and only then, belatedly, comes our understanding of it. Our words and theories are always chasing after the facts.

But it appears that our philosophizing is now more seriously falling behind reality. We have entered an age of profound technological change. And this is affecting, in turn, our entire social and political reality. No aspect of human life is any longer stable. The tremors are passing certainly also through the academy. The humanities that were once at the center of academic life seem to be losing their footing. But our philosophers feel and see nothing. They are living in their homespun cocoon of familiar questions and topics and are happy when they have one of their papers published in a professional journal with a minute and diminishing readership.

This has not always been so. Both the “analytic” and the so-called “Continental” tradition in philosophy – the two movements that are still the main sources of our current philosophizing – had once a vitality and importance that is now sadly lacking. They related directly to the most pressing issues of their time: the crisis of mathematics and natural science that began in the late nineteenth century, the shaking up of our traditional conceptions of consciousness and the mind due to  psychology and linguistics, the cultural, moral, and political upheavals of the twentieth century. I often think that there was once a heroic age in analytic philosophy in which Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and others in their company systematically changed the contours of the subject. Similarly, we can make out a heroic period in the broadly differentiated field of Continental philosophy. From Nietzsche, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Sartre and Foucault (and again others in their company) these thinkers grappled with the most difficult issues of their time.

We may be too much in awe of this singularly creative moment in philosophy that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and lasted till the last quarter of the twentieth. But we are already half a century beyond that point and our reality is no longer the same. We are undergoing a revolution in all dimensions of our existence and we need a revolution in our thinking, too.

This is a good and a bad moment for philosophy. Good, because it gives room for adventurous spirits. Bad, because such spirits may not turn up and the subject may dwindle into scholastic irrelevance. Not all the great philosophers of the past have been academic teachers. It is always possible that the most productive philosophical thinking will once again take place outside the academy.

There is, surely, something presumptuous in trying to tell others how they should conduct themselves philosophically. It is also useless. If we want philosophy to take a different course, we have to take it ourselves and, perhaps, others will do the same. The best I can do is to say in a few words, how I myself mean to proceed at this point.

  1. Say “No” to the formalism that holds our thinking in such a straightjacket. We need to overcome our preoccupation with the Kantian conception of philosophy as a “purely conceptual” inquiry. This must be our objective, in particular, in ethics and politics – a move away from abstract normative theorizing into a diagnostic form of ethical and political thinking.  Even logic and mathematics may be thought of in concretely natural terms as a human and historical practice. Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics can provide us with clues. Why should we think that a late eighteenth century thinker can be our major philosophical guide in the twenty-first century?
  2. Practice a determined realism – by which I don’t mean an attachment to metaphysical realism but keeping a philosophical eye on the actual, concrete, historical facts. That kind of realism will also be aware of the limits of our understanding of our reality- particularly when it comes to history, society, and politics. Think of varieties of localized skepticism as realistic options.
  3. Develop a philosophy of technology. It is technology that is changing our world. We need to think about the technical instruments but also of the techniques of their use. We need to look also at the social and political effects of technological change. We need to study how technology affects and changes the distribution of power, its dispersion and concentration. We need to have an eye on the destructive potential and side-effects of technological development both in the natural and the cultural domain.
  4. Make politics your first philosophy. We must conceive political philosophy as a comprehensive inquiry into human existence and look at all aspects of philosophy in a political manner. But this requires a broad conception of politics, one that treats politics and ethics as distinct but connected strata.