Flash
: Philosophy Repeats Itself
Geoffrey Hamilton
June 3, 2007
Last update July 8, 2007
Sometimes the best philosophers are the worst at communicating their contributions to the
understanding of existence. While they often see the same issues,
they afterwards confuse their message - not only by
their varying eras, languages and cultures, but often they try to obscure their shortcomings
in jargon and mystical assertions (as Hume similarly complained long ago).
There is only one life to talk about yet, as a kind of
copyright protection device, most philosophers from Plato to Deleuze encrypt the subject
of life as though they are our only
gatekeepers, and ride pretense into their own fantasy world.
Science, for all its faults, allows a continuity
of discussion and the 'standing on the shoulders of giants', or 'progress'.
Philosophers, instead, are continually built up as precious islands of immortality - and the
more artfully confusing and misleading they are the more
champions they seem to gain. Their fanatics then pressure readers to weigh every word (and intention)
equally (sometimes in the original) before judgement
is permitted - but this is still insufficient for them.
No one shall judge their heroes, they imply, so these
islands become unassailable Lost Worlds.
In science, at least, we are all allowed
to test a claim and discard the useless and outdated without knowing every coma that
led to it. There's no reason philosophers can't be subject to similar
standards. And, as there is only one kind of existence to talk about,
so the communications handed down by philosophers already must be assumed,
in part, to refer to the same world.
There is, if you are looking for useful philosophy, some small hope of progress
in the all the doggerel systems. In the past, a story of progress was made out of
various 'Lost Worlds' - of Socrates' turn from natural science to ethics, or Descartes 'new'
idealism, or Hume's scepticism, or Kant's redemption of it all, or the current fight
against relativism - with the adjunct story of eastern philosophies thrown in. These
stories are reasonable because each of the successive
philosophers had read and responded to his predecessors, usually quite
openly; and often one style contaminated the next. Progress is visible by such criterias.
The best of these narratives (like
David Berman's on Schopenhauer) make sense of vastly
different personalities and styles, even
when the intentions of the philosopher-subjects was to break with the past.
Despite all this, there is no reason
to assume that the response/counter-response formula indicates a sufficient criteria to
claim progress. I will make two objections. First, it is false by its own assumptions.
Many cases of 'progress' are actually
cases of amnesia and irrelevance. For example, Schopenhauer says Kant's
great contribution to thought was
adding an innate psychological frame for understanding space and time to Hume's innate frame for
causality. Actually, Kant may have just read Anaxagoras in Plato ("..the mind is really the arranger and
cause of all things", Phaedo 97D) and added to it a common innate-ness. Also, claiming an innate
structure for understanding space and time is just making manifest the implications of Hume's
innate causality, and is also a repackaging of Plato's all encompassing innate-ness.
Amnesia regarding innate knowledge and irrelevancy regarding space and time - if Kant
can be considered great and called a progressive force in philosophy, much
mind numbing
thinking is called for.
Second, the claim of progress is false because of the influence of the
rules of narration. It matters little to the narrators of philosophy
that brilliance (like Montaigne's {or even Kant's, if given a different context}) would be left on the cutting
room floor for the sole reason that they
could not fit it in - for narrators, stories need to be made, revelations don't.
A reassessment of the whole 'story' project is needed. Instead of the
wide scope that is typically the purview of philosophy there is just
one main story to look at, but it involves more of a see-saw
than a progress - that is the theory of knowledge. It is the main narrative
because if you don't believe in what you know,
nothing else matters.
Two currents mark this story: the first is the question of whether knowledge comes
before or after birth; and the second, whether knowledge is all relative
or whether some of it can be absolute. (This is an example
of what philosophy needs - more conflation and less hair splitting.)
These two currents are addressed continually (as in the Kant example given above) but,
at some point, most philosophers eventually trick themselves away from
making the best choices (i.e.
all knowledge is relative, and it begins before birth with adjustments made afterwards). These
philosophers, including the likes of Socrates, Pythagoras,
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and
most others, were self-tricked because they needed to redeem life by asserting certainty: usually a
voice or god did the trick - sometimes power, or the supposed supremacy of man could mask the relativity.
But if you follow the two
currents in many philosopher's theories of knowledge, contained in their work,
whether implied or stated, is evidence for the relativity of all meaning based
on innate structures in the human mind.
Forget the bickering and sniping they do at each other, or the absurd conclusions
their arguments contain, accidentally or not, there is
more than enough evidence to have taken the whole of philosophy
somewhere. Instead it has just been repeating itself. A separate
list of numerous
philosopher's comments
shows all this to be the case. From the most famous
to the least, from the beginning to the present time, philosophers have been
standing still replaying an issue that may have been resolved many times over
by a few observant people, like Montaigne, who saw by raw experience that
instinct and experience both have a role in knowledge and that knowledge is relative.
Of course philosophy is more than
theories of knowledge, but if it continues to cede 'progress' to its offspring science,
it will be further relegated to the anti-knowledge of ethics and science will increase
it's dominance. Knowledge needs the breadth of philosophy and a way to
avoid the mercantile rut of science.
From now on philosophers must rid themselves of their confusing synonyms and idiosyncrasies and
judge fearlessly and recklessly like scientists.
Debunkers say of magicians and faith healers: if you 'know' it's just a trick, you can
work out how it's done. That's now the task of philosophers and historians. With
an eye to the common reality that is always the subject of philosophy we can all
debunk the Aristotles and Foucaults of this world and not be anchored to their mistakes and
misservices. We are not at the mercy of some long dead mythological philosopher's integrity.
Philosophy needs to escape its self delusion and get something accomplished. It needs
to know what it has done and get on with figuring things out.
GRH
