Philosophy: Out with the New, In with the Old? (Part I)
What if so much that has been considered ‘philosophy’ since the days of antiquity is not really philosophy? What if we’ve built on a foundation of quicksand?
Can we have a do-over? Should we consider such a possibility? What would Socrates think of what philosophy has become since his time?
To Socrates, the philosophical enterprise didn’t constitute the investigation of a certain narrow range and realm of questions -- though, to be sure, one of his truest loves was delving into what the virtues amounted to, with the end of discovering new answers to that question of questions, “How should we live?”
Rather, what distinguished something as ‘philosophical’ was the way that one went about questioning, into whatever areas of knowledge one was quizzical and curious about. A method is no mere prescriptive device, but usually is woven with an ethos, a spirit, and ends. He had a method that is kindred to the scientific way of inquiry, but that can be applied to any dimension. He was the antithesis of those who are studied to death and revered in academia. (Why oh why aren’t there courses in Socratic inquiry?)
The likes of Heidegger and Hegel and Kant are still considered the cream of the crop of philosophers in modern times, and profs and their students too often, and in my view tragically, still worship at their alter, and even are permitted to write doctoral dissertations about some aspect of their work,
For instance, Heidegger’s Being and Time is gushed over by many of my philosopher friends, and I bite my lip about this. Heidegger’s work is an exercise in tortured writing and thinking, and is so poorly wrought that it can be interpreted (and is interpreted) in any way one sees fit, to mesh with one’s own point of view. One of my favorite moderns, a genuine Socratic, Walter Kaufmann, tried his best to show that this philosophical emperor had no clothes, but Heidegger is more idolized than ever. Kaufmann had a beef also with Kant, whom he agreeably called a “constipated casuist.”
Kaufmann gave a relatively free pass, though, to Hegel, perhaps because he spent so many years studying and writing about him, but Hegel too needs to be classified in the same group. There are kernels of decent pieces of writing in their excruciatingly awful writing, which is emulated by far less insightful thinkers. Many (including the director of a horrid ‘critical writing’ program in which I was once a fellow) believe Hegel’s “dialectic”of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is the gold standard for expanding the bounds of knowledge, when in fact it inhibits and even prohibits the discovery of the novel and unfamiliar. It is the epitome of Manichaean thinking.
But Socrates too, even by some of his most well-known acolytes today, often remains misunderstood when it comes to what his way of plumbing the world was all about.
Martha Nussbaum, whom I greatly admire and who considers herself a proponent of the Socratic method, characterizes it as an interplay of argument and counter-argument. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Rather, in a nutshell (a book needs to be written about this nutshell), his method is an exploration and consideration of a variety of well-supported perspectives on any given question, looking at what speaks for and against each. In many or most cases, an array of perspectives might have elements of both rightness and wrongness, of truth and lack thereof. One considers perspective, alternative perspective, alternative perspective, and on an on, rather than argument and its antithesis of a counterargument. Socratic inquiry is an endless journey, with no arrival once and for all at a destination. Even if one feels that one has arrived at a truth for all time, the love for and devotion to Socratic honesty one require one to keep testing and challenging this truth.
Socrates thought and examined and interrogated in a wide array of colors. He was by far our most colorful thinker. His best modern exemplar in the academic realm I believe was Justus Buchler (even if his writing at times is unnecessarily stiff at times). Buchler never lost his childlike curiosity and openness, and he revolutionized the way one might go about philosophizing, in the process undermining most of what constitutes philosophy today.
Alfred North Whitehead went so far as to say that “I think almost the entire history of philosophy is against such an idea” as that propagated by Buchler with his breathtaking philosophy of natural complexes (which I’ll go into in a later post), While noting Buchler’s “courage,” Whitehead has too much of a vested interest in the existing system to allow the ‘truthiness’ of Buchler’s insights to stake their just claim. Buchler was both methodical a la Socrates and systematic, while most are systematic and non-methodical (or use a method that is largely a logic-type chessgame that leads one to preconceived and foreordained ‘truths’).
I’ll write much more on this later, but wanted to post this opening salvo, to start putting down my code. I’ll also write about other legitimate ‘Socratic’ approaches, including that of the Socratic gadfly, who may not be as faithful to the Socratic method as he should -- but would be even more fruitful in his approach if he was.
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