thought – 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 Multiple Worlds

On Multiple Worlds

But to defy the world is a serious business, and requires the greatest courage, even if the defiance touch in the first place only the world’s ideals. Most men’s conscience, habits and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them. To reverse this process, to consult one’s own experiences and elicit one’s own judgment, challenging those in vogue, seems too often audacious and futile; but there are impetuous minds born to disregard the chances against them, even to the extent of denying that they are taking chances at all. (Santayana, 1954:170-1 [1905]).

Our seemingly conflicted consciousness is so because it has come into being from a combination of two distinct worlds. That there are two hemispheres, associated with specific structures and patterns of cognition, is likely more of a practicality on the part of the evolutionary brain rather than a direct reflection of the bifurcate sensorium into which such a cognition has been placed and through which it has come to be. What are these worlds, then, that have combined both surreptitiously and yet surrendered each other to their combination?

One is the world of nature. In nature we discover that which at least resembles an ontology different from our own, as expressed in a myriad of both animal and static forms all capable of being understood through the purely mathematical frames which seem to, in their turn, speak the language of the cosmos into conscious being. Nature is generally seen as discrete from culture, if not in opposition to it. This latter regard comes not from science but rather from a pre-scientific understanding of the natural world, at once the source of life and at the same time possessed of the ever-present threat of death. An animal may be eaten or it may eat me. Nature is thus presented to consciousness as itself a bicameral expression, with the living and dying played out by anonymous process and dispassionate dynamic. As such, there is nothing more nature can give to an intelligent being conscious of itself in a wholly different manner than what we can discern in nature; one that is both self-conscious and comprehending of time.

Two is the social world. Schutz’s ‘multiple realities’, from which the title of this essay is borrowed, differ from one another, often in radical ways, but they all share the absolute placement within the social reality of the world of humanity. To say that ‘nothing human is alien to me’ is also to say that what is not human might well be alien and remain so by definition. We also take the risk that our inhumanity, no matter how much we might desire to suppress it or to shove it away from us and thus into another world, might, through its own sense of counter-ressentiment, take a further vengeance upon us by devolving the social world into a lower nature, abject and petty, as if what is merely ‘red in tooth and claw’ by happenstance would itself become calculated and thus create an enduring evil.

Between the world of nature and the world of culture there exists the conscious mind. Its basic architecture, its neuro-chemistry, its autonomic and proprioceptive functions, are all products of evolutionary Gestalts. They are what remains of nature in ourselves. Insofar as we do not yet understand the whole of it, consciousness yet appears as a kind of microcosmic miracle. Nature has overleapt itself in its creation, and we need not make any kind of ideological or even customary distinction between these two loaded terms, ‘creation’ and ‘evolution’. Evolution has indeed created itself and recreated itself due to its temporal suasion, and thence may boast of creations and even to a certain extent, an unknowing creativity, in its living expressions of itself. But this is where nature leaves off and culture begins, and if there is a liminality to this moment, attested to by the sense that we will never be able to precisely identify the ‘thing’ that made our primordial ancestors differ just enough from their direct predecessors to begin the lengthy journey to modern humanity, it is not a fatal mystery to admit to ourselves that something of the sort must have occurred in any case. We have, in a word, all of the evidence we need to hoist such a claim aboard the complex apparatus of our scientific vessel.

Similarly, the heroic quest to observe the beginning of the current universe is made so only by its deeper calling; that of it also being a witness to creation. In that we cannot ever see the moment when the first proto-humans walked the earth, the ‘Big Bang’ will serve as both a grander event but also one that consciousness seeks as its ultimate birthright. And it is this specific idealization that marks culture over against nature. The one seeks the origin of the other to finally prove the difference between them, yes, but also to at least nod to the fact that nature and culture are mutually imbricated in a manner unknown to any of our ancestors, those unaccountably distant or those historical. In seeking origins, we seek not merely a genealogy of life, but rather a meaning for a consciousness which in turn seeks to go beyond its own life. And the chief manner by which this being overtakes itself is by calling not nature into question, but rather culture. Nature serves as a validation not for norms, but rather for awareness, something more than simply sentience.

But if the quest to witness creation is heroic, even noble, the assertion of one’s own singular mind against the social world, no matter how courageous, is fraught with all bad conscience as well as buoyed by good faith. The one who embarks upon this task will at first and at best tread only water. She seeks blood, even marrow, but these prizes of the thinker, artist and authentic critic alike will more than likely be bequeathed to others who follow upon her cultural quest and seek as well to build upon it. This is the truer heart so brave; that my exposition of the world of humanity will benefit me not at all, and thus cannot be called upon to either lend cantor to, let alone vouchsafe, my actions. And if the challenger seeks not merely analysis but also change, then let it be said such would be noticed only as part of the human future altered from its pastness; my germs come to fruits long after they had been sowed.

Too long? In ‘disregarding chance’, we not only interpret happenstance in the usual and mundane sense of what is more or less probable, but as well, and more meaningfully, as a kind of method by which to object to the social world, its ‘consensus’, ‘conventions’ and ‘comforting assurances’. In this everyday chapel wherein ‘society worships itself’, we have exited by the rear doors or yet perhaps a window, but we have not yet either been excommunicated or charged with arson. The church stands yet, and indeed must do so, otherwise there would be none of the social factuality needed for the revolutionary mind to call upon in evidence of her novel claims. All religion, according to Durkheim, is in fact civil religion. He makes a conscious effort to remind us that there is no other moral order than that found within the social world. Nature is non-moral, and the otherworldly but a projection and a metaphor. Even the ultimate ‘reality’ of nature must be docketed in lieu of an understanding that overtakes its human and historical sources. If we humans are the local ‘eyes and ears of the cosmos’ these senses retain their humanity, and especially so, given that the very unimaginable vastness of nature in its grandest expression is also its most anonymous, distant, and empty vista. We create meaning in the face of the void, whether that be the personal and singular outcome of my human finitude, or the uncounted firmaments to be beheld only from and within our paltry moment.

Since we cannot critique the cosmos – such would be purposeless and also baseless; nature is what it is and nothing more – all the more so may we be given to questioning what culture has wrought in its stead. By all means, the conceptions of cosmos over different eras and even epochs may be called into question, for that is part and parcel of the wider human endeavor; not only in the scientific sense of ‘have we gotten it right?’, but also in that philosophical: why is cosmos, as order and as ordered, so important for us? What is the culture of nature? For young people, this is a reasonable arena with which to begin the examined life. Not the social world entire, for we have not yet lived long enough to experience its self-expression, nor the self, which has not yet fully developed in the lights, both lurid and inspired, of what each culture has to offer its youth. Even so, the advent of critique necessitates an ever-steepening slope; from the naïve ‘why’ questions that accede to purely scientific responses, to the questioning of local norms, to the resistance against institutions, most often family and school, and then ever onwards to the impious querying of ideals and the ‘shooting at morals’ which is the penultimate duty of the thinker and artist alike. At every juncture, we ourselves are as well a target. For who, within their ‘right-mindedness’, would bring down the whole of it? The social world is the human cosmos after all.

Hence Santayana’s cautious paean to all those who are not only members of the same guild to which he belonged and to which he brought such noble value, but more generously and also more importantly, to any human being. It is our shared and collective birthright to know the social, yes, but it is equally so our enlightened human duty to question it to the point of historical oblivion, if indeed what is exposed departs from our highest ideals, as it regularly does. And while nature will always remain aloof to our entreaty and ignorant of our will, culture is of our own creation and thus possession. The social world exhibits merely the simulacrum of eternity, and even the cosmos of nature is not itself timeless. That we live inside the question of our own existence should not be seen as a too-cunning conundrum, generating only misery and angst, pathos and melancholy. Rather it is the very thrownness of being which we are; resolute in our being-ahead, caring in our anxiety, concernful in our running along. Who better to respond to such a question that, though it bears the historicity of existence alone, marks us in our essence with a history of ontology that is shared and which constitutes our specific nature.

The natural world need not answer any questions; this is its nature and its essence. And the social world cannot answer to itself, only for itself, in quotidian quota and mundane malaise. But the questioner, since she too is a social being, opens up the space wherein novel responses can be known. She is her own force of nature within the cosmos of culture, she is that which creates in the face of creation, she is the sole arbiter of the un-moralized sentiment and deconstructed structure which is society that was. We should not expect the social world as constructed and maintained by our predecessors to provide reasonable responses to the questions of the day. At most, it can cover for those who deny the questioner’s birthright and therefore suppress their own. In this, the social world betrays its cowardice in the same manner as does the questioner exhibit her courage. Shall we ourselves then hesitate when faced with such a transparent parentage on both sides? Shall we run for such cover, or shall we stand and uncover both the best and the worst that culture has gifted unto the history of the now?

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