philosophy – GV Loewen

Refusing and Misusing Philosophy

Refusing and Misusing Philosophy (Sophia Resented but Re-presented)

There are a number of ways in which the history of consciousness is demeaned or misplaced. Some of these occur within the bonds of discursive thought itself, thereby taking their slatternly place within that same history, and less important, but still revealing of a wider antipathy and most often a willing ignorance of thinking, occurring outside of discourse entirely; in popular media or in casual conversation. Philosophy, the ‘love of wisdom’’, though ancient relative to known history, is yet very recent when compared with the tenure of an evolving human consciousness itself. It is quite likely that due to its own presentation of self – it must be studied formally by literate persons – and its own career – it has been both the privilege and purview of cultured elites more or less from the beginning – philosophy can be much more readily dismissed, not only by those deemed outside of its discursive circle, but the more so, those outside of discourse as a whole.

And this denotation comes from both the philosopher and from the non-philosopher alike. We are apt to hear, from sports broadcasts to face-to-face shills, that the ‘philosophy of this coach’, or ‘our philosophy in making pizza is’, somehow how superior to all others. Today, however, there is far fewer excuses to be made, and correspondingly, far less rationales available for such, for philosophy to be treated as if it were a permanent resident of cloud cuckoo land, with its acolytes floating somewhere above the world and its more guttural realities. All the more so because the greatest of thinkers lived in that same world, the world of humans and our shared history, and the world which is both the origin and destination of Dasein as a ‘being-in-the-world’. There is no record of any figure in the canonical history of Western thought who turned away from that world, eschewing it in search of something other, better, higher, or deeper. Indeed, the insights of these persons, at once human like ourselves and as well, persons who pushed themselves to discover their fullest humanity and for some, even humaneness, came from their engagement with said world, and not at all from disengaging from it. It is of more than mere picaresque interest to read what can be known of the philosopher’s lives, from their encounters with other important figures, to their interactions with the polis and with rulers, both positive – Aristotle tutoring Alexander – and negative – Socrates being executed by the State – or yet their daily rounds – Kant providing Königsberg with a consistent timepiece on his way to the tavern. In our own times, these vignettes are generally more gentle, but not always. One need only compare Bourdieu or Derrida’s curricular work for the French department of education and Scruton’s writing of libretti and novels with Foucault’s reckless sexual misadventures and his ultimate AIDS diagnosis and Ricoeur’s wartime incarceration in a labour camp, to be reminded that the world contains every possibility, even for the thinker.

The first thing to recall to oneself, if one is feeling some resentment against thinking in general and philosophy in particular, is that these figures were and are human like ourselves. They live in the same world, are challenged by the same travails, endure many of the same hardships and feel the same fleeting joys. There is indeed no possibility of becoming a thinker at all if one abandons one’s own humanity. The chief difference between the thinker and the one who elects to avoid most of the confrontation between the present and the past and that between self and other, is that the former makes what is already his own, his ownmost. The apical leader of the guild, Socrates, in his defense against his coming execution, famously uttered that same guild’s motto: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. This examination can, it is true, take a number of forms, but all such roads lead to an awareness which is simply unavailable in day-to-day life. Without suggesting a morality of mundanity, one can at least say that this is how it must be. The social world runs on its rails, and needs to run on them if society is itself not to falter. This is also not to say that any reflection which becomes necessary from time to time when such rails no longer function as they once did should be the sole responsibility of a few august figures, to be consulted as did the ancients their oracles and haruspices. For the philosopher is no mystagogue; she is, more accessibly and much less mysteriously, a resource person. In this way, she is no different from the plumber; a professional who has learned a body of professionalized know-how. What the philosopher adds to this contractual availability is that her skill set is not oriented to a specific task-at-hand; philosophy is not about ‘fixing’ things.

Rather, the thinker performs a number of functions which are generally outside the daily expectations we have of ourselves and others:

1. The thinker opens up the questions of the day: the general rubric here is that if everyone appears to agree on something, whatever its cultural content or political fashion, the thinker deliberately steps away from this sensus communis and says ‘are you sure about this?’. Such agreements are all too easy to find in our contemporary world, for by way of them persons and well as governments can carry the day their way. Hence the role of the philosopher in this first sense is that of questioner, doubter, critic and analyst.

2. The thinker is as well tasked with querying our shared history. For general agreement upon this and that does not only occur with reference to the living present and the worldviews which remain extant for those who live in that present. It is for the historian to interrogate the contents of history, but the philosopher must ask, more penetratingly perhaps, what is history itself? Add to this the question concerning which history is the preferred one and why so, and what are the implications of viewing history in the rather Whiggish manner of vanilla verisimilitude. Instead of this, the thinker understands the presence of the past in our lives to be the thesis in an ongoing dialectic. It is what has been and what has been done, over against the new and the very concept of the future. So, secondly, the thinker’s vocation demands that she live that dialectic in search of a novel synthesis.

3. The philosopher also clarifies what people already know and seeks to communicate this ideally limpid vision to the world. Gadamer specifically notes this third aspect of what philosophy is supposed to be doing, in view of the many sources of obscurity and obscurantism which reign mostly unchallenged; the State, media, schools, families, the church, and even what used to be referred to simply as gossip; misinformation and yet disinformation, much of it in our own time purveyed through digital media. In order to confront such deliberate obfuscation, the main challenge for the thinker is to not present more of the same! It is often a fair cop to suggest that the philosopher gets carried away by his own insights, to the detriment of being able to be both clear and indeed insightful, in a manner almost all could comprehend.

4. Given that obscurity and the deliberate narrowing of discourse also happens within the history of thought, a fourth task for the philosopher is to be constantly vigilant against the tendency of intellectuals to flaunt their apparently superior historical abilities. What she finds, in doing so, is that those who have closed off access to the history of consciousness have done so by themselves ignoring or refusing that very history. ‘Academic’ examples unfortunately abound, from the mathematically inclined thinkers and logicians declaring that ‘anything before Frege’ is irrelevant, to the ‘third-wave’ feminists who declare the same thing for male authorship as a whole, to the Marxists for whom Hobbes is the true beginning of thought, or yet the ‘modernist’ who dismisses anything written before Hume and Vico. If thinking was strictly an ivory tower pursuit, a disconnected discourse would be its result, with its practitioners overly and overtly specialized to the extent of becoming ignorant of thought both human and historical alike.

This is indeed what we see, in the majority, in the university today, where the students of even their own disciplines are often unaware of that specific discourse’s history. Psychology is particularly at fault here, but the other social sciences are close behind in their own self-willing ignorance. The humanities fare somewhat better simply due to their being understood as in themselves historical disciplines, and thus more closely related to philosophy. When Ricoeur states that ‘the history of philosophy is itself a philosophical endeavor’, this is a testament to, and an acknowledgment of, for one, Dilthey’s enduring contribution to thinking; that we must include ourselves in our studies, that the human being is not merely the vehicle for an otherwise transcendent consciousness but in fact is its home and hearth: we are philosophy embodied. The only thing that separates the human species from its animal cousins is our distinct duo of reason and imagination, the two essential aspects of thought. It matters not a whit how this uniqueness came about, only how it has enabled us to become what we are and how we utilize this astonishing ability in our own time, with a view to a collective future. In light of this, one might be tempted to add a fifth point to the philosophical star: could it also be said that the thinker’s duty is encapsulated in his reminder that each and all of us must orient ourselves only towards what may come in our shared futurity?

It may at first seem a contradiction to be so concerned about history, and about coming to know the history of thought, and yet at once state that our entire goal must be about the future. But in fact, the whole function of having a past is to allow us the perspective necessary to walk forward; the past does not welcome us back within it, for this defeats its elemental purpose as resource and as the beginning of wisdom. Philosophy is not about the past, even if, necessarily and by definition, the vast bulk of its wisdom hails from another time to our own. The philosopher reaches into the history of consciousness with her mind, on our behalf, and thereby brings back to us its enduring self-understanding. By acting at once as an historian, a critic, a voice of clarity and elocution, and as a discursive dialogician, the thinker serves his culture in the most adept manner imaginable. No other figure in the human career has had such demands, but no other has brought to them such abilities. In the end, however, philosophy is not about philosophers, and it is Merleau-Ponty who has stated its case perhaps most pointedly: “Philosophy is not a body of knowledge; it is the vigilance that does not let us forget the source of all knowledge.”

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He is a social philosopher and ethicist in the traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

On Corrupting Youth

On Corrupting Youth (its what I do)

Perhaps someone may say, But surely, Socrates, after you have left us you can spend the rest of your life in quietly minding your own business. (Plato, The Apology).

While the age range and definition of ‘youth’ has altered over the millennia, and while its current designation surrounds a more physiological conception, that of ‘adolescence’, what has remained within this phase of life are its social stakes. Youth represent an unfinished present, an unused voucher of the future, an investment as yet uncashed. And the rest of us are joint stock holders, collective stake-holders in this investment. But what is the character of the portfolio itself? In what company do we invest, and the more so, in whose company do we thus keep?

I am a social philosopher, by trade and by character, and as such, am a nominal member of a guild whose apical ancestor is Socrates, the smugly annoying interlocutor and critic who, on the charge of corrupting youth, was executed by the Athenian state. Now there were numerous philosophers before Socrates, usually referred to as, unimaginatively but appropriately, the ‘Pre-Socratics’. Most luminous perhaps of this clique were Heraclitus and Parmenides. But though tantalizing fragments of this the earliest period of Western thought remain, it was in Plato that we first meet the character who would revolutionize the arts and acts of thinking, That he did so with others, in dialogues for the most part, was also a first. And that he put first to test and thence to shame almost all of his conversation partners, representing as they did a great diversity of both popular and learned opinions on all matters and comers alike, underscored the advent not so much of a public personage – the official rationale for Socrates’ sentencing – but rather a way of being; that through reflective reasoning what passes for belief, value, and institution may be brought low, even entirely vanquished.

This was the truer reason for murdering the messenger, as it were. Since one cannot kill an idea, the proponent or even the mere vehicle for such ideas is abruptly at risk. And since young people are indeed the future of society and thus as well the future arbiters of social reality as it stands upon its majority epistemological rule, any institution, especially any State, might well be suspicious of the individual who apparently seeks to disarm and even sabotage the smooth transitioning from one generation to the next. For it is not production per se that is of the highest value, even in capital, but rather reproduction.

The status of stasis in all known human societies follows this cardinal rule. What is, is what must be, and what must be again. And though it is certainly also part of the evolutionary human character to be an innovator – at least relative to our cognitive apparatus; the toolkit, for example, of Homo Erectus remained essentially unchanged for about two million years – such inventions, improvisations, and even spontaneous actions occur by far only in the realm of the technical. Today, this for the most part constitutes the applied sciences, and with the ever-accelerating pace of technological change by itself, we cannot help but note the ever-widening gap between what humanity is capable of doing and what we are capable of being.

This sometimes gaping disconnect between the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ was noted first by those very Pre-Socratics, when the gap was so much smaller as to be almost unnoticeable. And yet, the earliest thinkers asked a simple question, which we still can ask today: “Why am I doing this?”. This is not the same question as the inventor asks of herself, “Why am I doing this, this way?”, but rather speaks to an ontological puzzle that may be spoken more starkly as “Why am I doing this at all?”. Now we can understand perhaps a little better why there is an implicit threat within such a question. For here, we are not being asked to design a better means of accomplishing the same or similar end, as the applied scientist or technician is so asked, but rather to imagine a different, perhaps better, end in itself. And when we ask this much more radical question, everything else opens right up. Not, ‘why do I have to go to school?’, but instead ‘Why are there schools at all?’, ‘What is the purpose of schooling and why this purpose?’ ‘Why reproduce what we already know?” Why be the people that we have already been?’ ‘Why believe in what our ancestors believed?’, ‘Why is our society something that must be defended?’, ‘Why do I imagine that I am superior to others?’ ‘What is the truer nature of truth?’.

There is no space within the formal social fabric wherein such questions as these even get voiced, let alone seriously discussed. It may seem a risky, even reckless, condition to be in; to promote a society or a culture that seeks only the expansion of its present guise, the reproduction of its current values, and the conversion of all infidels who might range against its destiny. But it was the same in Socrates’ day. The Athenians, and the Greeks more widely, held that they were the only culture of value in existence; that they were by default the chosen people, and all others mere ‘barbarians’. And even some of the greatest minds of the Hellenistic period following Plato kept up this charade, including Aristotle himself. The thinker is still a child of his time, yes, but by engaging in authentic dialogue and serious reflective thought, he begins to realize that his assumptions are often mistaken, especially about others to self. Young people the world over exist, momentarily, in a cultural space which is liminal. No longer children, not quite adults, ‘youth’ in all times and places since the beginning of mass civilizations experience something quite palpably that in no other life-phase is as menacing to their persons. That experience is one of doubt.

Because the only other time we experience existential doubt is while we are dying, we arrive at the space of radical doubt either too early – the teenager can do little enough to push her doubts to the level of social revolution or even social critique – or too late – one is about to become permanently absent from the human experience – doubt as a force of being must be accessed in some other manner. Fortunately, and thanks to the Pre-Socratics and Socrates specifically, we do have this other means at our disposal, if we would only use it. For it is through philosophical doubt, the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, as Paul Ricoeur called it, upshifting itself into an ‘effective historical consciousness’, as his hermeneutic German counterpart Hans-Georg Gadamer had it, that a human being can practice doubt as a matter of course throughout the life course. And it truly is a practice, not unlike some other regular set of actions taken in light of other aspects of our human health, such as yoga, meditation, or even diet. To regularly engage in reflection charged with a reasoned doubt which is not sourced in either neurosis or common anxieties, is to begin to alter one’s consciousness of not only what society is and is made of, but also about what is; that is, of our shared existence and equally so, our possible shared fate.

But to do so, and especially to do so publicly and with others is not without its patent and potent risks. And to deliberately do so by engaging young people is fraught with positive danger, as Socrates so discovered. I myself have encountered the signs of this danger. For in invoking suspicion directed against social institutions and their agents, it is to be absolutely expected that suspicion of oneself will be directed right back. Since I retired from my professorship and chairpersonship in a large university setting, I have been summarily rejected by the schools, by NPOs and NGOs that sponsor youth activities, by publishers too concerned about the commercial repute of their catalogues to publish my work, refused by a library which stated that the content of my fiction was ‘unsuitable’ for youth – even though it was written for that audience and the UK publisher itself suggested an age range of 14-24 – and no news media will publish my editorials. I have had civil servants tell me quite uncivilly that my ideas are not welcome in ‘their’ public institutions, and even had the police called on me for handing out my business card to a parent walking with her teenage child. And while I hope I am not naïve about the improbability of being assassinated by the latter-day State, at least, I am struck by the marshaling of focused forces, the circling of proverbial wagons, ‘all the king’s horses’ and so on, in the face of a lone social critic who sees himself as well as an advocate for youth.

Par for the course, you might reply. Now you know that you truly are who you think you are. On one side, being off to one side suits the sensibility of the philosopher. A part of her reimagines herself as aloof to the petty influence of unthought, immune to the ‘insolence of officials’ and beyond the ‘slings and arrows’ both. But on the other, this aspect of the thinker is her most inauthentic selfhood. For thought is in fact the birthright of all human beings, and the philosopher represents merely a portal for others to step through; an entrance, and perhaps a momentary guide, to the wider world of the history of consciousness in its entirety, no matter its source. And yet even this is too sentimental a summary of what the philosopher does, who she is as a being in the world. No, in all honesty, the thinker dares the world to think for itself. She utters the Ursprach which sounds the hollow idols and pronounces the death of gods. He tells his fellow human, ‘What you hold most dear, I will destroy it! What you know of love, I will betray it! What you feel is most sacred, I will desecrate it unto death! You will no longer know yourself after you speak with the likes of me; you will instead be confronted by a new kind of being, a novel truth, a culture from which you are the newly estranged.’

Is it any wonder then, that few people have the courage to engage in the regular practice of philosophical doubt. And this even more strikingly, given the fact that one doesn’t really need the philosopher to help with such a practice, at least, not in any consistent and continuing manner. For each of us, possessed of a consciousness which is a creation of reason and imagination alike, knows at some deep level that who and what they are, who and what they have been, is at the least not all they can be, and so their culture and so their history. All I can do, all I have done, promotes this other way of coming to grips with existence. And so I will continue to corrupt our youth in any way I can. I am a philosopher; its what I do.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 55 books in ethics, education, religion, social theory, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

This Time the Government is Good for You

This Time the Government is Good for You

Relax, I’m a doctor. Of philosophy, that is. I hold a world top-40 Ph.D. in the human sciences and partly because of this people often ask me to ‘explain’ what is going on right now. I can’t cure the virus, so my skills are not front and center. But step aside with me for a moment, and I’ll attempt to tell you why I think that this time, the government is the right pill for the right job.

Needless to say, as a thinker I am no great fan of the state. Our official apical ancestor, Socrates, was executed by the state for ‘corrupting youth’, which remains a large part of my mission. Kant was ordered by his state to stop writing about religion, a particularly delicate theme in his time even more than in our own. He ignored the order and no doubt said something that wasn’t fit to print in return. So that’s pretty much where I come from in the day to day, when times are mundane and life seems long.

But for the moment, our times are neither. I recently published a new theory of anxiety and so one thing I can tell you right off is that Anxiety, capital ‘A’, is seen by philosophers as a good thing. It’s like an early warning system, an impetus to care, which Heidegger stated was the most fundamental aspect of our beings. This ‘concernfulness’, as he put it, orients ourselves to the most pressing of issues which underlie the day to day of living on. These include the condition of others to self, the future as ‘being-ahead-of-ourselves’, and our thrown and fallen state as beings who exist in the envelope of both ‘finitude’ – existential finiteness that cannot be located at a precise time, just as we cannot know the hour of our individual deaths – and ‘running on’ – moving towards our future deaths but in no conscious or systematic manner. Large-scale crises are certainly something to work against and around, but they also serve to distract and decoy us away from confronting the intimacy of our own deaths, which cannot be shared with any other human being.

So ironically, part of our anxieties regarding COVID-19 concerns how well this crisis will distract us from ourselves, our own lives as we have lived them, and whatever regrets we may have suppressed about them. Anxiety, on the other hand, alerts us to these more intimate aspects of selfhood and does not let us be distracted by the world in any inauthentic manner. Generally, the state is part of this decoy world, issuing this or that decree that appears abstracted from our daily life, even arbitrary. The State is one of theological philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s two examples of the ‘evil of evil’ (the other being the Church). The evil of evil is defined as ‘fraudulency in the work of totalization’. What does this mean?

Traditionally, only a God was omniscient and omnipresent. As secular political life elbowed spiritual life into the margins, indeed, sometimes into the shadows, the state replaced the church as the center of social power. Even so, as a human institution, government is flawed, not at all all-knowing, and not quite everywhere at once. It often pretends that it is both, and in this it is a fraud. Many modern institutions partake in this ‘fraudulence’ as they pretend to be everything for everyone. The university is another obvious example. But with the stern demands the state is placing upon us these days it is flexing its absolute power over civil society, in part, again perhaps ironically, to keep it thus. We are reminded of Lord Acton’s now almost cliché epigram, originally in epistolary form, that ‘power corrupts’, and further ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. So we might be adding this worry to our list of anxieties and generally and in principle, we should always be concerned about limiting the power of the state, lest more governments arise around the globe that lengthen the list of authoritarian regimes.

But this time I’m going to tell you that our governments, at least, are doing the right thing. Listening to real doctors, for instance, and following their advice to the letter. In turn, we as civil and unselfish citizens need to do the same. This does not mean that we shed our individuality for automata, slough off our would-be immortal coils of freedom for slavery and obedience, or regress to the status of young children. It is a choice we make based on the best of knowledge at the time, and one that the vast majority of us, myself certainly included, could not make for ourselves. We do not become thoughtless morons by acceding to this general will. Indeed, it is thinking that has brought us to this point and it is thinking that will see us through to its far end, however indefinite this may appear to be today. At both federal and provincial levels then, we should heed to the letter the demands of the day. So relax, take two governments, and call me in the morning.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of almost forty books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades.