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| ISBN-13: | 9780253110503 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 399 KB |
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Reshaping Reason
Toward a New Philosophy
By John McCumber
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 John McCumberAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34503-5
CHAPTER 1
Historico-Philosophical Prologue
Explaining Philosophy
Everything we do — every act, utterance, or omission — fits into something ongoing and therefore is in part a response to something. To understand why, we need only to recall that acts (omissions, utterances) are events, i.e., alterations in the state of the universe, and so cannot come to be without some previous state of affairs to be altered. When an event not merely alters the state of affairs which preceded it but does so intelligently, it can be called a "response" to that state of affairs. Understanding the intelligence of such an event — indeed, deciding whether it is intelligent at all — thus requires understanding just what it is a response to. This is not often an obvious matter. Even a bare and provisional understanding of this aspect — even of this aspect of the intelligent events which we cause, of our own acts — is very rarely achieved. But attempting to understand what we are responding to when we act (omit, utter) is necessary to living a human life; to what degree can you be yourself if you do not understand yourself?
This all holds, in particular, for philosophy. The present work of philosophy, like all philosophy, is a congeries of acts, omissions, and utterances. It is produced by a human in such a way as to claim intelligence, and so is a set of responses. It is responsive not just to the various facts and phenomena it seeks to understand and which are contemporaneous with it, but to larger historical trends as well. Some of these trends are philosophical in nature — various developments in the history of philosophy which it tries to carry forward, evade, or stymie.
But the "history of philosophy" is never just philosophical. It is inextricable from the history of philosophers, and so from the stories of the communities which these philosophers form and in which they work. I have traced some aspects of the institutional history of recent American philosophy in Time in the Ditch. Here, I want to focus on the philosophical level of the overall situation, the state of the logos just before the intervention of this book — the state of philosophy to which it responds, its pro-logos.
The tale told in Time in the Ditch is, essentially, a story of decline: fewer departments, fewer tenure lines within departments, fewer journals, fewer publishers, an aging professoriat. That such institutional and social problems correspond to an intellectual crisis, indeed that philosophy's institutional and intellectual problems are two levels of a single crisis, may seem tendentious. Many philosophers, after all, have been trained to think that philosophy begins only when we negate all institutional considerations. Institutions, after all, are English, American, French, or German, while philosophy (we learn) is on a different level. To put the matter linguistically, philosophy deals not with "snow is white" or "Der Schnee ist weiß" or "La neige est blanche," but with what is common to all these.
Hegel called such scurrying to the universal shooting the Absolute "as if from a pistol" (PhS 26/16), but it is really we philosophers who are shot, into some unchanging and so abstract realm where even our shadows are lost. The trajectory is as old as the Presocratics — Thales' abstract realm was water, and Anaximander's was "the indefinite."
Though such unchanging realms have historically been important for philosophy, they are hardly necessary for it. Restricting philosophy to them was for millennia regarded as unphilosophical. It was Socrates who, as he declares in the Apology, turned from the investigation of nature to examining himself instead, and thereby turned philosophy, at least in part, into an investigation of self. In so doing, he placed philosophers under an obligation that no one, philosopher or not, could ignore — the demand that, even while trying to scurry to the universal, they pause and explain themselves. Poor Euthyphro, who was assuredly no philosopher, had to explain to Socrates why he was prosecuting his own father for murder — and why should anyone, especially a philosopher, think herself better than Euthyphro?
We (philosophers) must therefore explain ourselves, and we must do so in English, French, German, etc. — for we obviously cannot do it in "what is common to all these." We must do it, moreover, to people who are not philosophers. To refuse this task is to take the stance that philosophy is either a special taste whose merits cannot be explained to outsiders — or not worth doing at all.
Both stances are philosophical, because they make important statements about the nature of philosophy itself. But both are untenable. The latter leads obviously to a tu quoque, to refutation by "you do it too"; if philosophy is worthless, why are you doing it? The former stance is as self-contradictory as advocating universal lying. If, tonight at midnight, everyone on earth stopped telling the truth and started lying, there would be no way for new members of our species to learn to talk, and language itself would eventually die out. If I advocate that something like that should happen, I am using language to push for the destruction of language, which as Kant pointed out is a practical contradiction — another tu quoque. Similarly for philosophy. If it is to survive, philosophers, even those who populate its most abstract realms, must explain themselves at least to those who will, perhaps, one day become philosophers. And since no one can tell just who those people are, philosophers must be ready to explain themselves not just to each other but to non-philosophers in general. If they do not do that, no one will become a philosopher, and philosophy will eventually die out. To do philosophy without explaining to non-philosophers why you do it is thus to do philosophy in a way which guarantees its extinction — another sort of practical contradiction.
Any philosopher must therefore hold that philosophy is an activity which is worthwhile and whose merits can and must be explained to outsiders. Such explanation is a Socratic task, for it means explaining ourselves as philosophers. Perhaps it is the philosophical task par excellence. Yet the apparent institutional decline of philosophy within the university suggests that it is not going well. If philosophers were making the case for philosophy, if they were explaining to others why they do it and why it should be done, more resources — if not, perhaps, many more — would be allocated to it.
That philosophers cannot explain themselves to nonphilosophers may be a philosophical failing, then; but it is a philosophical failing with institutional consequences. To ask why it is occurring is to reach the point of intersection between the institutional and intellectual levels of philosophy's crisis. That crisis, I suggest, is aporetic in nature.
Philosophy's Aporia I: A General Account
An "aporia," as I will use the term, is a situation in which two sides disagree but cannot resolve their dispute because it presupposes a hidden, but mistaken, agreement. In the present case, the two sides would be philosophy which claims to study the various changeless and abstract realms into which philosophers have traditionally escaped, and philosophy which seeks instead to explain the lives they and others lead.
This aporia, which opposes philosophy's atemporal intellectual orientation on the one hand to its changing institutional circumstances on the other, is nothing new. Plato was caught, there too, unable to explain the relation of the eternal Forms to the world we actually live in with anything more than a word — and, as Aristotle points out, a metaphor at that (methexis: Metaph 1.9 991a20-23). As Plotinus pointed out in turn, the problem hardly goes away when the relation between unchangeable essences and the beings of which they are the essences is restated in terms of Aristotelian forms-in-matter (Enneads VI3.4ff).
To dissolve the aporia, we need a more specific account of just what the disagreement is between the two sides, and of the common mistake they have made. Helpful in this will be an outline of the basic structure of the aporia as it arises today, and I will approach this from two directions. First, I will give a basic, general sketch of the kind of aporia that I think philosophy currently exhibits. Then I will give a broad-brush historical account of how an aporia of that type could actually have arisen within philosophy. Each approach should have some plausibility on its own. The general sketch should match with what philosophers see with their own eyes as they practice their discipline, and the historical account should resonate with what they learned, early on, about the history of the field. The convergence of the sketch with the account will increase the plausibility still further. Though the aporia I am about to state is a product of interpretation, then, there are reasons to believe that the interpretation is a plausible one.
It is this aporia to which this book offers a conscious response. As will become evident, however (I hope), the kind of philosophy I am proposing has other merits as well, and can be accepted or rejected independently of its success in resolving the aporia at hand.
We can begin the general account by considering philosophy loosely, as a way of doing certain things, a way, and several or many things (just which way, and which things, will be explained when I move to the historical level). When a way of doing things no longer works, we must either find a new way or stop doing those things. But what happens when those things are great and important and have to be done, and no new way turns up? What happens when that bind persists for a couple of generations? We might expect two sides to develop:
One side still adheres to the old way, even though it no longer works. Since the original goals of the "old way" can no longer be achieved in that way, those goals must be redefined; otherwise the old way itself must be abandoned. Those who refuse to abandon it therefore cut back their goals to match the old methods, but that still leaves them with the uncomfortable memory of the great goals they once had. One way to suppress that memory is by sealing themselves off from everyone who could call it up. If the goals were great and the memory widespread, this may eventually require excluding everyone but themselves. Cut off from its original tasks and goals, what was once only a way of doing things now becomes an island unto itself, peopled with things that were originally the mere artifacts and tools of a greater project but which now have been left with the status of brute, and so primary, realities. Those so-called realities are, however, really only fantasies, i.e., beings originally thought up by people for specific tasks that have now vanished. The unchangeable, universal realm has now become a sort of Fantasy Island, and I will call this wing of the general aporia the "Fantasy Island" approach.
The other side abandons the old way — but since no new way shows up, it merely struggles. After some time, its practitioners accept that no new way is going to come along and that their confusion is permanent. At that point, this approach ceases to be a mere phase leading toward something else and becomes — like Fantasy Island — a goal in itself. This struggling is both honest and worthy of pursuit, i.e., good. But all that can make it good is its distance from Fantasy Island, for there is nothing else by which it can measure itself. So it holds its confusion to be not only honest and good, but (because it increases the distance) liberating as well. It is a liberation which departs from the old ways without settling into any new ways, and so is a form of subversion. I will call this second wing of the aporia the "Subversive Struggle."
It is tempting to apply this to contemporary philosophy by seeing Fantasy Island as the domain of analytical philosophy, with its timeless ficta of absolute truth, purity of reference, and validity of argument. It is also tempting to see the Subversive Struggle as postmodernism, priding itself on liberating us from the binary oppressions of metaphysics (e.g., True and False, Valid and Invalid, Right and Wrong) without installing any new fantasies in their places. Tempting — but wrong; Fantasy Island and the Subversive Struggle are not merely two different schools of philosophy, to one or the other of which every would-be philosopher must declare allegiance early on. They are, first and foremost, two tendencies that wrestle within each of us and produce, in contemporary philosophers, a complex family of feelings.
One moment we find ourselves pursuing traditional goals which we know we cannot reach — if only the most ancient and general philosophical goal, that of coming up with an argument that will convince everybody that our thesis is wholly right. At other moments, we find ourselves trying to slither free of the whole thing, fooling around with ingenious but suspect thoughts that lead only to more dissatisfaction. This, I suggest, is because — as in that particular type of aporia which constitutes an "antinomy"— each approach incites the other. As we crawl around Fantasy Island, seeking new things to say about its fixed repertoire of primary beings, we twist and bend our thoughts and finally thought itself, struggling to come up with something new — until we have challenged things so basic that we find ourselves off the Island, struggling about in a dark ocean. And when we swim forth into that ocean, all we have to bring with us is our memories of what we are escaping from, which grow dimmer and more misleading until they are just abstract fantasies themselves.
Philosophy's Aporia II: A Historical Account
If an aporia of the general type sketched above has in fact arisen in the case of philosophy, here is how that could have happened. Fortunately, the terms of the philosophical history I am about to recite are well-known, and so my recitation can be short. It begins by asking what the "old way" was, the one which no longer works.
Socrates was a skeptic, but his faithless young friend Plato propounded that we can arrive at important truths just by arguing about them. This view was basic to philosophy for thousands of years. The rise of science threw it into doubt; for while argument is necessary to science, it is so only in the service of empirical investigation. Hence Hume, discerning that mere argument could produce nothing but tautologies, abandoned philosophy altogether and became a historian. Kant claimed to have discovered a realm for which mere argument sufficed, but this "realm" — the universal, ahistorical faculties of the human mind — was such an embarrassment that it is roundly ignored by some of today's best Kant scholarship. When it comes to ascertaining the truth about the nature we live in, including our own natures, the action is all in science.
And so the old way stopped working. Philosophy ceased to be a quest for the "great truths" and settled down in the ambit of things it could deal with by argument alone — first and foremost characteristics and outcomes of argument itself, such as sentential truth, reference, and rational decision. These things ceased to be what they once were — means to larger ends — and became primary topics in their own right.
Those who did not accept such restrictions could not return to the old style of doing philosophy, for science was all around them and its superiority to mere argument in the matter of producing truth was beyond challenge. So they sought to philosophize without arguing, referring, saying true things, or deciding anything — a hopeless struggle if ever there was one.
Philosophy's Aporia III: The Path to Resolution
The devotees of Fantasy Island and the Subversive Struggle are thus opposed on the issue of whether unaided argument can yield important truths about anything. The Islanders hold that it can; since this goes against the evidence of history, they eschew history. The Strugglers hold that it cannot — but such a truth, clearly an important one, could be philosophically established only by argument. Eschewing argument, they eschew justifying themselves as well. Neither side can explain itself, then. The Islanders cannot do so because that would require taking into account things that happen off the Island, for we can only explain ourselves by referring to the histories that make us what we are. The Strugglers cannot do so because they can only struggle.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reshaping Reason by John McCumber. Copyright © 2005 John McCumber. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
| Preface | ix | |
| Acknowledgments | xvii | |
| List of Abbreviations | xix | |
| 1 | Historico-Philosophical Prologue | 1 |
| 2 | Enlarging the Philosophical Toolbox | 57 |
| 3 | From Metaphysics to Ontologies | 104 |
| 4 | The Edge of Ethics | 161 |
| Epilogue | 232 | |
| Notes | 235 | |
| Bibliography | 249 | |
| Index | 259 |