Our sharpest break with the tradition has come with the realization of the disunity of knowledge (of thought, the mind, the world, and pretty much else that concerns philosophy). We are no longer trying to construct “a system;” we are not looking for “the foundations” of a single structure; we have abandoned the belief in completeness and in our capacity to make everything cohere.
A vivid expression of this revolt against the entire philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Hegel is due to Nietzsche who declared his “profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world” and proclaimed, instead, the “fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic.” (The Will to Power, 470) The remark provides a key to Nietzsche’s writing and thinking. It helps to make sense of his aphoristic style as well as of his belief in many perspectives. Not that readers of Nietzsche have always appreciated this point. Nietzsche himself wrote in a sketch for his last book: “I mistrust all systems and systematizers; perhaps one [of them] will even discover behind this book the system I have sought to avoid. The will to system is a dishonesty for a philosopher.”
Another expression of this same idea is found in Wittgenstein’s later writings. He asks himself there what reasons he has for trusting text-books of physics and he answers: “I have no grounds for not trusting them. And I trust them. I know how such books are produced – or rather, I believe I know. I have some evidence, but it does not go very far and is of a very scattered kind. I have heard, seen, and read various things.” (On Certainty, 600) This is, of course, not a biographical note but meant to reveal the status of our usual claims to knowledge. What we call knowledge is, indeed, of a scattered kind. Linked to this thought is Wittgenstein’s realization that the mind (or soul or self) is not a unity – a conviction that the tradition has made a supporting pillar for its belief in the immortality of the soul. (A simple substance, it says, cannot disappear through a process of disintegration.)
Michael Foucault speaks of different discourses with their own distinctive internal rules and he points out that not everything possible is actually ever said. “We must look, therefore, for the principle of rarification or at least of non-filling of the field of possible formulations… The discursive formation is not therefore a developing totality, … it is a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions.” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 119) And again, in slightly different language: “The archive cannot be described in its totality… It emerges in fragments, regions, levels…” (p. 130)
While Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Foucault agree that there is nothing uniquely foundational for philosophy to think about, they do not mean to say that it doesn’t matter what we make the subject of our thinking. Some philosophical questions are clearly more urgent than others. For us the decisive issue is now our individual, social, and political existence as human beings. The pressing issue is what it means to be human and all three, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Foucault, wrestled with that.
Do we have to be as pessimistic about the future of philosophy as you are in your latest book? I still hold some hope for the subject and believe it, in fact, to be needed today more than ever.
That said, I agree with you that the current state of philosophy is not good. You are right that philosophy as conducted in our Universities and Colleges seems to be turning more and more into a propaedeutic enterprise for future lawyers. But what we call “philosophy” has often been two very different things: on the one hand, a scholastic undertaking for schooling young minds, and, on the other, a creative form of thinking on “fundamental” issues and the latter has frequently taken place outside the educational institutions. Of the philosophical thinkers you discuss in your book only some were professors. Socrates was a public gadfly and nuisance, Lucretius a poet, Augustine a bishop, Montaigne a bit of a hermit, and Hobbes a courtier. It may turn out that the most serious thinkers of the future will not be found in philosophy departments.
Philosophy as serious thinking has, of course, never been an academic “discipline” with set boundaries and doctrines. It has always moved, as you describe in your book, from subject to subject, and for question to question, like a snake wriggling here and there, constantly shedding its old skin. Since science has changed our intellectual climate and technology our social environment, we shouldn’t expect philosophy to remain the same. I like a phrase that Wittgenstein used to describe his own work; he called it “one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called ‘philosophy’.” So, whatever it was that once went under the label of philosophy has left an inheritance; something is left over to be carried into the future; but the inheritance is dispersed; there is more than one heir. That seems to capture where we find ourselves today.
I like to believe that there will be those in the future who will continue to ask questions about all kinds of things that others are leaving unquestioned. There will be those who continue to invent new concepts and with their help recast what may already have been said by others; there will be those who experiment with new ways of looking at ourselves and the world; there will be those who attend to all kinds of details of things that others pass by; and there will also be those who test arguments for and against all kinds of sane or insane convictions. All that will hopefully go on and we may as well call what is practiced in some such a way by the old name of “philosophy.” There is surely no harm in appropriating that word for ourselves. In doing so we are waving our hand at those who have come before us, indicating to them that we are still walking on the road on which they have walked.
But if we say that philosophy as serious creative thinking is still needed, we must be clear on where and how it is. We must ask ourselves: what calls most urgently for such thinking? We have been through a period where philosophers would have said that we need to think most urgently about the foundations of knowledge, logic, mathematics, or science. I believe that our priorities must be different and here I think you and I will agree. What most calls for thinking today is our social and political existence because we can see today how fragile their structure has become. And if we can’t secure our social and political existence, then nothing else can be secured. This alerts us to the fact that our entire reality is changing dramatically and that we will therefore also need a new kind to creative thinking, one that can keep up with the changes around us. Our question then becomes, who will be able to engage in the kind of thinking that is now needed. This is where the challenge of your book really begins to bite. Of how much creativity is our philosophizing capable? There may, of course, be no theoretical answer to this. All we can do is commit ourselves to the project of serious thinking and continue to work as well as we can with what we have inherited.
Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. 2017
Professor Raymond Geuss
Raymond Geuss has made a name for himself in recent years as a critic of the abstract, normative theorizing that dominates mainstream political philosophy today and is represented most prominently by the work of John Rawls. (The kind of philosophizing that asks: What is the ideal socio-political order? What is the best form of government? What are the right principles of justice? and that proposes carefully honed theoretical answers to these set questions.) By contrast, politics, is for Geuss, a practical craft rather than the application of a theory; it is concerned with what people do rather than what they ought to do; and its actions take place in institutional contexts that change over time. Political thought should therefore be realist, practical and historical in spirit and forego the search for general normative principles; these, Geuss argues, will in any case turn out to be formulaic and politically useless. (Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008)
It is, perhaps, no accident then that Geuss has been led now to take a broader critical look at the entire tradition of philosophy. Changing the Subject consists of twelve essays on individual philosophers from Socrates to Adorno, focusing in almost every case on a single text. Geuss calls it “an intellectually relaxed essayistic introduction to some issues that I take to be of interest.” (p. xvi) Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, Augustine, Montaigne, Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lukács, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Adorno are each given an essayistic reading, but some other prominent philosophers – Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, and Kant – are all absent. But historical completeness is not Gauss’ goal. That was, he explains at the end of his book, to show us how “the questions which humans ask change, depending on the historical and social circumstances.” Most of the questions which philosophers have asked were moreover never convincingly answered and some have simply disappeared. In a final, positive flourish Geuss declares: “There are, however, questions that do not go away, even if we cannot adequately answer them.” (p. 302) It is obviously his hope to have shown in the course of his twelve essay which questions these are and why it is worth asking them in ever new ways, even when we can’t come up with conclusive answers.
But there is another worry that becomes apparent in Geuss’ conclusion to his book. He understands that “the twelve authors whose work was discussed here do not form a natural group or an invisible collegium or tribunal.” (p. 302) Why then do we call them all philosophers? What is this discipline whose questions seem to be changing over time and whose answers are never final? Geuss is convinced that there has been enough continuity “that one can pick out an identifiable configuration called ‘philosophy’.” (p. 296) But the configuration has a specifically historical character: it began with Socrates and Plato, and we should not assume that it will persist indefinitely. Geuss has, indeed, doubts that it can go on because “it is a highly peculiar social and cultural configuration which requires a highly specific set of conditions to flourish. These conditions, whatever they are, do not seem to have existed during the past forty years.” (p. 301) The conclusion suggests itself to him because he does not see any kind of originality left in philosophy, no real capacity for turning old questions into new ones. Philosophy, he fears, has lost its capacity to “change the subject.” And it is certainly remarkable how “professional” and inbred philosophy has become today, how preoccupied it has become with elaborating ever more complex theories. There have really been no philosophical writings in the last half century or so who have succeeded in opening up new issues. Such publications – from, let us, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – are by now all half a century old.
Geuss allows that, even without being creative, the discipline may continue for a while “as an exercise in running through traditional thoughts and forms of argument in pedagogical or propaedeutic contexts.” (p. 300) It may persist through mere inertia. “This is the current state of philosophy in the universities.” (p. 301) Its logical and linguistic puzzles may go on to occupy some minds as a harmless occupation and private pastime. But genuine philosophy can flourish only under very specific conditions. For it to exist “deeply rooted dissatisfaction with the state of our world must be experienced by some people who are living a life in which their basic physical needs are satisfied, are capable of focusing developed intellectual and cognitive powers on their situation, and do not think the situation is so self-evidently hopeless that there is no point in thinking about it.” (p. 299) Admittedly: “Just because nothing much seems to have happened since the 1970s doesn’t mean that the dying embers of the subject might not flare up into life again under the right circumstances.” (p. 298) But Geuss concludes despondently that “we cannot assume that as our world falls apart now in ecological catastrophe, there will necessarily be any renewal of philosophical activity.” (p. 299)
Should we agree with this dire assessment? We might answer Geuss that philosophy has previously gone through cycles of creativity and sterility, and that it has been in an unusually productive phase since the last quarter of the 19th century, one which seems now to have run its course. Phenomenology and existential philosophy, positivism and analytic philosophy all originated in this period. So one response to Geuss would be to counsel patience and see whether some new forms of philosophical thinking will eventually emerge. But what about his worry that in the face of a looming ecological catastrophe this is unlikely o happen. There are, of course, those who discern no such catastrophe ahead. But even if one agrees with Geuss on such a possibility, one might think that it is precisely what calls for philosophical engagement. Aren’t we faced with the question what it can mean for us to be human under the present conditions and why the human form of existence deserves to be preserved and nurtured? Are we justified in giving up on this question simply because the looming catastrophe may overwhelm us? Perhaps we should be saying in the words of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now under conditions that seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
