Sadler Aphorisms on Philosophy
Philosophy in Collapse. In contemporary Western culture philosophy is in a state of collapse. This does not mean that philosophy has altogether died and is incapable of resuscitation. If that were so, if philosophy were truly a thing of the past and had no future, then it would have been a mistake all along; at best philosophy would have had a faulty conception of itself by failing to understand that, in the end, it must be abolished, or must abolish itself, or must slowly fade from all relevance. To say that philosophy is in collapse today is to record a cultural fact, the fact that philosophy has been rejected. Philosophy is no longer a living force in culture. In modern and especially in postmodern culture the dominant attitude towards philosophy is one of incredulity. What philosophy historically maintained and what it ostensibly stood for is regarded as incredible: impossible to believe and enact. This is the way philosophy is regarded. But – and this is the point that so many contemporary critics fail to grasp – the rejection of philosophy is not the same thing as its refutation.
What Does ‘Philosophy’ Mean? It may be objected that philosophy cannot possibly have been rejected when there are today so many academic philosophers, so many intellectuals who are called philosophers, and so many books on philosophy. Yet if one has any experience of contemporary academic philosophy and intellectual culture one knows that the philosophers who now exist, and the books they write, almost uniformly argue against a ‘previous conception’ of philosophy which is the classical idea of philosophy deriving from Plato. It is now widely accepted that this idea of philosophy is no longer viable, that it is necessary to abandon this idea. This process of abandonment has been under way for some four hundred years. In the early seventeenth century the classical idea of philosophy was abandoned by Francis Bacon and Descartes, in the middle of the same century by Hobbes, thereafter by the British empiricists Locke and Hume followed by the French philosophes of the Enlightenment, followed in turn by the utilitarians, positivists, and pragmatists, then in the twentieth century by Marxists and postmodernists. The influential thinkers and intellectual currents of the past four centuries have all been abandoning the classical conception of philosophy as outdated, incredible, and undesirable. Yet these people still want something called ‘philosophy’. It is necessary to ask them why. How can it be that the thing they want is rightly called ‘philosophy’? Why have they not simply given up on philosophy and passed on to something else? What is the justification for continuing with the word ‘philosophy’?
The Paradox of Postmodernist ‘Theory’. It is at first sight a paradox but in reality it is the basis of the whole system, the ‘key’ and the ‘secret’: on the one hand, according to postmodernism, ‘there is no truth’ and no kind of ‘authority’ is binding, but at the same time there is a ‘body of thought’, a ‘discipline’ of sorts, namely postmodernist ‘theory’ as practiced initially by Foucault, Derrida and the like, now by a swarm of their acolytes, that ‘proves’ the proposition ‘there is no truth’. To be inducted into the inner-circle of postmodernism one has to show oneself an ‘adept’ at this theory, which is, naturally and deliberately, incomprehensible to the ordinary reader. It thus emerges that postmodernism rests on the most insidious form of pseudo-authority: that of the unchallengeable ‘expert’, the questioning of whom counts as perverse and bordering on criminal. What this shows is that at bottom postmodernism is not thought at all but a political act or decision, an act of power which sets itself against truth.
Modesty and Arrogance in Philosophy. What a strange combination of modesty and arrogance our modern culture exhibits. We are modest, apparently, in no longer seeking to magnify ourselves through metaphysics. We are modest in recognizing that we humans are not at the centre of the universe and that the earth does not exist for our benefit. We have turned away from everything grand and sublime, and we have called it grandiose and overblown. We have come of age in a secular culture, and as adults we have learned to stand on our own feet without the metaphysical delusions of earlier times, those long ages of our infancy. We no longer build for eternity, because we know that we are temporal and not eternal creatures. We no longer strive for saintliness, because we know that we are flesh and blood from top to bottom. And in all this knowing we also know how much we do not know. As we have become more knowledgeable so we have become sceptics about how far our knowledge can extend. We no longer believe the old philosophers who dreamed of ‘absolute knowledge’, for we no longer believe there is anything ‘absolute’ to know. We are thus modestly content with relative knowledge and relative values. We believe we have acquired the courage to face our finitude. This modesty of finitude we hold up as our dignity, a dignity represented by the ‘new philosophy’ from Francis Bacon through to the present. Yet behind all this modesty there is an unmistakable arrogance. For we who are tolerant, we who nowadays investigate and gather knowledge of other cultures and other times, we who permit perspectives and condemn as arrogant all pretensions to absolutism – we do this precisely as all-knowers who have risen above all traditional perspectives. We already have the answers because we are aware of the unavailability of any ‘final’ answers; indeed, this awareness is our answer of answers. From this standpoint we affect an openness towards everything because we are convinced that nothing we meet up with can challenge us in any fundamental way. Our finitude, it is said, is admittedly a ‘lack’ – the lack of infinitude or godliness – but at least now, having recognized what we essentially are, we are in a position, as the saying goes, to ‘affirm the lack’. Our old philosophy, our old religion, could not do this, for they reached beyond us to infinitude; and so in their own ways did every previous culture. But now, modestly reconciled to finitude, we can take the world in hand, and can even, through the instrument of modern science, bend it to our purposes. We, the most modest humans under the sun, are now lording it over the universe.
Finishing with God. After four centuries of the scientific worldview, the ‘hypothesis of God’ is proving peculiarly difficult to eradicate. In the meantime those imbued with the spirit of modernity have become irritated, and more than irritated, at the recalcitrants. Nietzsche, despite all his reservations and contradictions, was the most eloquent of these angry ones: he spoke to a generation which wanted finally to be finished with the old world-view and felt frustrated that it kept coming, kept threatening, kept refusing to admit defeat. In The Gay Science of 1882 (no. 109) Nietzsche declared that the great task of his age is to ‘complete our de-deification of nature’. Six years later, not long before his mental collapse, he wrote to his friend Franz Overbeck that in his upcoming work ‘I am bringing out my heavy guns, I am blowing the history of mankind into two halves.’ The old world-view, incredible as it seemed to Nietzsche, was still alive, and was to be finished off through a knock-out blow he would deliver himself. This kind of talk was intoxicating to many of Nietzsche’s generation and remains so in the present, with the difference, however, that another hundred years have gone by and still the knock-out punch has not been landed. The monstrosity of God, supposedly dead, keeps getting up from the ground. The spectre of nihilism has not been lifted. No way out has been found. The tension and frustration are increasing.
New Ideas of Philosophy? What new idea of philosophy is to be put in place of the old one? This is the question which not only remains unanswered but apparently needs no answer. Indeed it seems that to even attempt an answer here would be to fall back into a discredited way of thinking. Modernity does not want to answer this question and even less so does postmodernity. Instead of affirming a new concept of philosophy, the rejection of the old conception has become the hallmark of philosophical thinking. And despite all stealthy ambiguity it is the rejection that counts, and by no means the refutation. The world has moved on, culture has moved on, interests and enthusiasms have changed. It is sufficient to point to the fact that the old idea of philosophy no longer has currency. To look for refutations, to attempt to prove the case, to offer reasons and arguments – all this is taken as itself a symptom of an outdated philosophical state of mind. Philosophy in its old conception believed that it could prove things, but nowadays we are enlightened as to the impossibility of all proof, particularly (as it is said) ‘final proof’. People might be asked to look at the old idea of philosophy to see if it appeals to them. If they need assistance to make a judgement, the professional philosopher will step forward and point out that the classical idea of philosophy stood for proof, for truth, for the authority of reason, for a strict system of morality, for an ‘absolute’ standard of justice, for a ‘total’ view of the nature of reality, for a ‘universal’ definition of human nature. All this, it will be pointed out, is dogmatic; no one thinks like that anymore. To revert to the old philosophy would be to make an exit from contemporary culture, to render oneself irrelevant, to stigmatize oneself intellectually and morally. If someone looking at the old philosophy were to still ask for proof, were to ask for refutation rather than mere rejection, this will be taken as a refutation of that person.
Postmodernity and Philosophy. In the West we now live not just in modern but in what is called ‘postmodern’ culture. There is no point in protesting against this term, which has now become entrenched. The important thing is that postmodernity is not at all a negation or supersession of modernity. Postmodernity is just a late stage of modernity, its final or terminal stage. It is modernity taken to its conclusion, but it is also modernity in the throes of self-defence. Postmodernity is that stage of Western culture in which the destructive implications of modernity become so evident that they can no longer be brushed aside with optimistic gestures towards the future, in which instead one must make a decision for or against this destructiveness. As a style of thought postmodernism represents an acceptance, even a celebration, of the destructiveness of modernity. It differs from ‘modern’ thought in that it no longer pretends and hopes and half-believes that somehow, in some as yet unforeseen way, the destructive effects of modernity can be avoided, that somehow modernity can be something positive and can provide something to believe in. Postmodernity does not believe in anything except its own disbelief. But it does not want to languish passively in disbelief. On the contrary, it asserts this disbelief vehemently, proclaiming that, if only one can come to active belief in disbelief, to celebrating disbelief, to enacting disbelief, one will find that the destructiveness of modernity is not at all onerous but an ‘empowering’ condition. And so it is with philosophy. Postmodernism disbelieves in philosophy and this is precisely its ‘philosophical belief’. It disbelieves in truth, in reality, in justice, in morality, in meaning, and in reason So in this the postmodern age philosophy has collapsed.
A Culture of Doublethink. How does the modern West function, given that some standards of morality are necessary even in a culture given over to materialistic self-affirmation? An insight is provided by Nietzsche. For he recognizes that it is only half the story to say that modernity, by repudiating spirit, does not possess its own principle of unity. For while the modern West has indeed rejected the theology and metaphysics of Christianity, and much of the morality of Christianity relating to self-restraint, it has retained just enough of Christian morality to prop up the materialist social system. Above all modernity clings to the values of compassion and equality, while attempting to secularize them. These are now, as Nietzsche points out, ungrounded values, and the idea that they need grounding is fading away. The rejection not only of Christianity but of every type of religion must, he claims, mean rejecting all systems of morality other than the brutal laws of nature expressed in hierarchy and the triumph of the strong, the Supermen. Unless that transvaluation of all values is fully realised, modernity, lacking its own principle, has no choice but to live off the principle of the culture it repudiates. Modernity lives off the cultural capital, the cultural reserves, of the pre-modern civilization it scorns. In so doing it cannot escape the tension in its foundations. There is something makeshift about the values of modernity. Nietzsche lays down the challenge: either embrace the Supermen or recognize the necessity of religion and metaphysics. He rejects the equivocation at the basis of modernity. He rejects the doublethink that props up the identity of modernity.
The Enlightenment and Western Suicide. Many critics who deplore leftist political culture and view it as a culture of suicide and self-hate, identify the root problem as abandonment of Enlightenment values, understood as secular values. However, our death wish does not proceed from an abrogation of Enlightenment values; rather, from an embrace of them. This explains why the plunge towards self-annihilation continues, despite vigorous criticism of ‘extremism’ and ‘unreason’ from those who identify with the Enlightenment. In other words, the Enlightenment is in truth the ‘suicide note’ of the West. But because the Enlightenment has been culturally victorious, very few people can understand this.
The Modern West Defined by Materialism and Relativism. The Death of God is the Death of Truth, of Spirit and of Reason. But modernity cannot do without what it renounces, and so by doublethink reappropriates it in suitably modified form. Thus modernity is the age of sham religion, sham metaphysics, sham spirituality and sham morality – all freed from ‘dogmatism’ and thus from any authority that could interfere with the project of catering to the ‘immense desires’ of man. Truth is now redefined as scientific truth, but since it is admitted that not even science can arrive at ‘absolute truth’, in the end truth is reduced to pragmatism. Spirit is reduced to the mind or the brain, spirituality to elevating or entertaining types of ‘experience’, morality to feelings. Philosophy too must be redefined, or rather replaced by a sham philosophy whose central concern is to teach the Untruth of Truth, something that in practice is the same as teaching doublethink. The modern West gets by in this way, for the need for rational clarity has become attenuated to the degree that it is branded as a spurious need, indeed an authoritarian prejudice. Of course modernity is serious about its own project. Scientific, instrumental, bureaucratic rationality takes charge of society, aiming at the most efficient system for producing and distributing pleasure, which implies securing the conditions of social order while allowing sham religion and philosophy to provide outlets for the restless spirit.
The Slow-Acting Suicide Pill in Western Culture. No society can function, even for a short time, without a moral system and framework of meaning for human life as a whole. The modern West was born through the Death of God, but the liberalism that expresses this cannot, as the belief system of unbelief, contribute anything to the positive moral definition of society. Instead, modernity must live off the remnants of the pre-modern belief system, together with the distorted or secularized elements of the same. To be sure, society has not during modern times been devoid of moral principles, but has had to rely on inherited principles that do not belong to modernity. This situation is decidedly not mere cultural change, where one culture gets overlaid on another, or a fusion of cultures occurs. For in this case – in modernity – the ‘new’ culture is actually a non-culture, a negation, such that the ‘old’ culture is ‘combined’ with its own refusal, denial, disparagement and supposed refutation. This is the suicide pill the modern West swallowed at birth. But it is slow-acting. All this takes time, however, for society, wanting instinctively to survive and stand up, resists the action of the suicide pill. Even when it does not understand what is happening to it, society is slow to drain its remaining well-springs of life.
Liberalism as a Faith. It might be said that it is wrong to understand liberalism as a belief system analogous to Christianity and Islam or even to less ‘dogmatic’ traditions such as Hinduism or Buddhism. The birth of modernity, so this argument goes, is marked not by a new belief system but by the rejection of belief systems, insofar, that is, as they are anything more than the scientific worldview constituted not through ‘belief’ but evidence. However, although liberalism does not consider itself to be a belief system on a par with the traditional religious or philosophical systems, in fact it is a belief system, and even a faith. As for the scientific worldview, it is a well-rehearsed but valid point, an incontrovertible point in logic, that science, which deals with what is, can say nothing about what ought to be, thus can contribute nothing to ethics, thus nothing to a belief system. The term ‘scientific worldview’ is actually a misnomer, a self-contradictory concept, a philosophical delusion; or the term may be admitted under the qualification that the scientific worldview is not scientific. The idea that modern science provides a new worldview, discrediting previous or traditional worldviews (religions and philosophies) is one of the prime dogmatic delusions of our age, and has much to do with the catastrophe of civilizational suicide.
Finishing With Philosophy. The strongest philosophical tendency in our own time is the tendency to have finished with philosophy. But that tendency which wishes to have finished with philosophy, and thinks itself actually to have finished, also wishes to call itself philosophy and understands itself as such. This has been the situation for the best part of four hundred years. But if there is such a thing as ‘new’ philosophy, and if this has superseded the ‘old’ philosophy, what is the underlying meaning of philosophy that the two have in common? It is one thing to maintain that, in the modern period, philosophy has been replaced by something else, say by science, quite another to assert that philosophy continues in a new form. In this regard one may compare philosophy and theology. For it is the uniform opinion of the new philosophers that whatever forms theology has taken since about 1600 these still remain tainted by irreducibly ‘theological’ assumptions; these new philosophers, therefore, will not countenance any kind of theology, old or new. Why is this not the situation in respect of philosophy? Especially given that the old philosophy, from its beginnings in Pythagoreanism and Platonism, was irreducibly theological, why has philosophy not been altogether given up?
The New Philosophy Holds High the Banner of Science. The ‘new philosophy’ took its lead and inspiration mainly from the new sciences of the seventeenth century. As these sciences developed into increasingly specialised disciplines it became clear that no single one of them, nor all of them together, could really be identified with philosophy. What philosophy was left with was the method, the universal method as it was taken to be, of these sciences. At the end of the seventeenth century the matter was famously put by John Locke when he said that philosophy must forget its former speculative dreams and instead content itself with being the ‘underlabourer of science’. However, even this modest assignment for philosophy was not convincing, for as soon as any one of the sciences reached a moderately advanced state of development it invariably declared itself willing to dispense with the services of an outside underlabourer; it was, evidently, better able to do such work itself. Having disconnected from the old tradition and affirming the superiority of modern science, the new philosophy found itself without any distinct domain of investigation to call its own. It could limp along behind the new sciences and describe their methods, but such post-facto analysis by non-specialists was of little use to the sciences themselves. What remained was not so much the job of underlabourer as that of representative, standard-bearer or publicist. The new philosophy would ride on the back of the sciences, analyse their methods after the event, and hold high the banner of science. But is it not incredible that such a miserable undertaking could establish itself as the proper work of philosophy?
Uncovering Philosophy. Philosophy is covered up; it is therefore a matter of uncovering it. To get to philosophy we must first remove and clear away the covers. Philosophy, especially in the present age, is buried down deep, beneath many layers of rubble that obstruct our access to it. That this does not necessarily seem to be the situation, that philosophy can seem to be readily open to view and easily accessible, is the effect and purpose of the covering. Something is most effectively covered up when it appears not to be; this is the present situation in regard to philosophy. Something else, something that is not philosophy, currently covers for philosophy, such that it is mostly not even suspected that the real thing has been buried. Why should one dig when the thing lies handily on the surface? Why should one dig, especially when there is inscribed on the coverings of philosophy the directive not to dig? What currently covers for philosophy and mostly seems to be philosophy recognizes nothing except surfaces; philosophy is covered up all the more effectively by a cover-philosophy that teaches that ‘all things are covers’. But philosophy can be uncovered, for the reason that the digging instinct – the desire for depth, which is the truly philosophical instinct of human beings – cannot be eradicated, not by cover-philosophies, nor by anything else.
Digging for Philosophy. Let us start digging, aware, of course, that what we shall first encounter are the covers and not the thing itself we want to discover. Indeed let us initially forbear saying anything too precise about what this thing is we are searching for. It is, to be sure, philosophy itself that is our goal, and we must have some general idea of it before going to the trouble of digging it out. Since any account of philosophy must inevitably start from what philosophy seems to be, we must begin with the covers and work our way downwards. There is a difficulty here that is irremovable, that only after we have arrived at our goal, only after we have dug right down and discovered the nature of philosophy, can we properly identify the covers as covers. To begin with we must deal with the covers, in such a way that they may be removed at least provisionally, and our descent made possible.
Immunization against Philosophy. Philosophy is covered up because of what lies down there in the depths. The thing down there, this thing which challenges human beings, is both desired and not desired. It is distinctive of modern culture and of the cover-philosophies which represent it that just one side of this ambivalence gets validated. Unreceptiveness to philosophy receives confirmation on a grand scale, by culture at large and then – unremittingly – by the profession of academic philosophy. By the same token the desire for philosophy gets ‘treated’. It is admitted that the desire is there, but it is thought that by suitable adjustments it can be redirected to the surface. What a university education in philosophy generally means nowadays is immunization against philosophy. Hardly anyone is less challenged by philosophy, hardly anyone is more cured of the digging instinct, than those who have been through an academic education in philosophy, the academics themselves most of all. This has to do with the content of the cover-philosophies that form, at the institutional level of university philosophy, a campaign against depth. This denial of depth and affirmation of the surface is the content of these cover-philosophies. This disbelief in depth, however, although it wears the mantle of philosophy, is in truth an expression of the ‘repelling’ power of philosophy; it is not so much ‘disbelief’ in depth as a defensive stance towards depth.
Campaign against Depth. But it is not the case that philosophy is covered up only by cover-philosophies; these latter are not at all primary but are strictly speaking effects. The reason that philosophy gets covered up has to do, at bottom, with the nature of philosophy. It is not an accident of history that philosophy is covered up today. Philosophy has been covered up in varying degrees throughout all the ages of history. In the age of Plato philosophy was covered up; Plato’s exertions were directed precisely towards uncovering it. Philosophy never lies on the surface but must always be dug up and dug out; this is because of what philosophy is. For us in modern Western culture philosophy is especially difficult of access. This is because we live in a culture of surfaces and appearances. Modern culture does not validate the desire for depth but proclaims it to be an error. All the major schools of contemporary academic philosophy hold that the idea of depth belongs to a superseded tradition; they all teach that ‘there is no depth’, and provide, as compensation, ever greater complexity on the surface. This means that the instinct for depth is always disappointed, something academic philosophers know and have to deal with in their students. The outstanding contemporary example of this campaign against depth is postmodernism. But the campaign itself is not a recent phenomenon; modern philosophy as a whole has been campaigning against depth for about four hundred years, from the time of Francis Bacon. The spirit of modern philosophy is the spirit of the surface; it regards the desire for depth as an failure to understand. There is a distinct moral tone in contemporary warning away from the depths: to dig leads one away from the surface and away from our common dwelling place, away from our fellows, away from practical concerns, away from everything that gives sustenance and support to surface-dwellers. If one digs for too long one may entirely disappear under the surface and become irrelevant. Especially when one suspects that the digger is after a treasure that cannot be brought up and out but can be enjoyed only down there in the depths, especially then can the digger seem offensive, a standing insult to those who prefer to live, as they say, in the light of day.
The Enlightenment a movement of self-congratulation. It was not the most original of centuries. It stood on the shoulders of the revolutionary century that founded modernity, the seventeenth, the age of scientific revolution. What the seventeenth century established the eighteenth brought to a head and applied. Already in the early seventeenth century the entire previous tradition of Western philosophy was brushed aside by Francis Bacon. Thomas Hobbes provided more of the same in the middle of the century, and there was no turning back: the past was bunk, tradition was bunk, religion was bunk, metaphysics was bunk, and the future, under the banner of science, would finally realize the ‘happiness’ the human race had always longed for. The Enlightenment consolidated this attitude. It was, and as a mentality remains, a movement of self-congratulation. For people like Voltaire and Diderot, just to name the two most famous Enlightenment philosophes, the whole earth was shrouded in darkness until the rise of modern science. This continues to be the ‘enlightened’ attitude today despite all hypocritical gestures of tolerance and sympathy towards the myriad cultures and traditions of the world. For these cultures and traditions believe what they believe, that is to say they believe it to be true, and it is contempt to say to them that we shall tolerate their beliefs, and sympathize with their beliefs, but that of course we reject the beliefs themselves as ridiculous. Just this is the attitude of contemporary multiculturalists, sure as they are of their own superiority, and unwilling as they are to really learn anything from the cultures and traditions they claim to ‘respect’.
The Enlightenment’s ‘Clean Sweep’. The anti-clericalism of the Enlightenment was secondary. The Church was viewed as the bastion of fraudulent universal values and was attacked on this score. Much more was attacked than the Church, however, much more than Christendom and Christianity. Religion as such was attacked – all religion, every branch of Christianity and every traditional religion in the world without exception (although, as is also true today, a special contempt was reserved for Christianity). More than this, the whole tradition of Western philosophy from Plato onwards was dismissed, special ridicule being applied to Catholic philosophy, unifying as it did the twin ‘absurdities’ of Greek metaphysics and Judeo-Christian theology. And of course, as the Enlightenment thinkers recognized, everything in pre-Enlightenment times was bound up with these absurdities – not only morality and politics but also art and literature, the whole world of culture and practical life. In short the Enlightenment spirit was convinced that nothing less than a clean sweep was needed – one had to start afresh, free from encumbrances and prejudices. The new enlightened age was dawning – everything from the past, even if it could be valued in an antiquarian or sentimental way, had to be honestly dealt with, which meant putting it out of action.
Saying No to Philosophy. But if the new philosophy stands for nothing so much as the rejection the old philosophy, we are surely justified in asking about the grounds for this rejection. The question must be put as to whether the old tradition of philosophy has been intellectually discredited, or whether its damaged reputation in modernity has more to do with sociological facts. Has the classical concept of reason been shown to be invalid, or is it rather that this concept is not to the taste of modern Western culture? If the former, it must be possible to produce the argument to the indicated result; if the latter, the ‘refutation’ of classical philosophy can be nothing but an act of cultural self-assertion. It is true that the onus is not necessarily on the modern philosophers to disprove in definitive fashion the classical concept of philosophy. But there must be arguments against the intellectual persuasiveness of the previous tradition, arguments which are more than refusals and adamant rejections. But such arguments are missing, their lack disguised by obscuring the difference between intellectual reasons and cultural facts. This situation is inevitable, for once the classical idea of reason is rejected in favour of a narrow instrumentalist concept there is no longer any method for critically engaging with the issue. Or there is a method, but it is precisely that which has been disavowed from the beginning. How is it possible, from the standpoint of instrumental reason, to criticize a concept of reason oriented to ends and not means? As an elementary point of logic this is not possible. All that modern philosophy can do is to continually say No, but in a way suggesting that this No-saying is somehow or other a No-proving.
The ‘Absolute’ in Philosophy. The modern age, the ‘spirit’ of our own age, does not believe in anything absolute, and therefore does not believe in the traditional (classical) conception of philosophy. But it is also true that modernity does not comprehend what ‘absolute’ means in the context of philosophy, therefore does not comprehend what ‘reason’ means, nor what ‘philosophy’ means. One of the major factors responsible for the miscomprehension of these things is modernity’s scientistic and diminished concept of reason. If one proceeds from the latter, then of course the idea of the absolute authoritativeness of reason will appear as a monstrosity. However powerful an effect scientific reason has had on the modern age, however decisive a role it has played in the formation of modern culture, it is clear to everyone that it cannot be authoritative for life. For centuries now people have been thinking to ‘add’ something to scientific reason, usually ‘ethics’ or a ‘spiritual dimension’, in order that life not degenerate into a miserable calculation of material utilities. But since what is ‘added’ is something outside reason as commonly understood, it does not possess the stamp of authority so sorely longed for. Nothing is more ‘serious’, it would seem, than scientific reason, but this is radically deficient for the needs of life. What is added to reason may meet these needs to some degree, but, lacking authority, can do so only unsteadily and temporarily. Thus the non-committal, experimental, and even faddish character of so much contemporary ethical-spiritual life. In Greek philosophy the situation is different, for here reason already includes the ethical and spiritual dimension excised by the modern scientific concept. And since in Greek philosophy reason is absolutely authoritative this means an absolutely authoritative guideline for life as well as for thought.
The New Philosophy as Endless ‘Refuting’. If the classical conception of philosophy is judged to be flawed, then there are two alternatives: either one can declare the very idea of philosophy to be a mistake, or one can attempt to justify a new conception of philosophy. But after four hundred years a new concept of philosophy has not been forthcoming. Instead, entitlement to the term ‘philosophy’ has continued to depend on the critique of the classical tradition, as if to be a ‘philosopher’ in the modern period is to be occupied, seemingly without end, with the refutation of previous errors. All the mainstream tendencies of modern philosophy, for a period of about four hundred years, have been tending toward the dissolution of philosophy. It seems paradoxical that a discipline would focus so much on its own negation, so that of course the matter gets described in other ways. It is said that only a ‘previous conception’ of philosophy is negated, that only in the modern period does genuine philosophy displace the pseudo-philosophies of former ages, that we in the modern world are simply ‘incredulous’ about any premodern concept of philosophy, that ‘God is dead’ and that the untenability of previous philosophy, specifically the ‘classical’ tradition deriving from Plato and lasting through all the centuries of Christendom until the Renaissance, follows from this fact. The problem, however, is that those who seek to build a philosophy on the death of God, precisely because they reject so many defining features of classical philosophy, have trouble justifying their use of the term ‘philosophy’. Indeed a fair degree of embarrassment on this issue can be observed among contemporary academic philosophers, many of whom prefer other labels to ‘philosopher’ or who at least use the term in a loose non-binding sense, as more or less equivalent to ‘theorist’. In their positive work, modern philosophers may be called scientists, theorists, intellectuals, historians, sociologists (it hardly matters what), but it is precisely in their negative work, in their critique of the tradition, that they gain their identity as philosophers. So it has come about that modern philosophy is essentially anti-philosophical.
Science Masquerading as Philosophy. A thing is what it is and not another thing. Science is what it is and not another thing, in particular it is not philosophy. Now science does not as such claim to be philosophy or even to substitute for philosophy; these are the claims of the new philosophers. It is frequently insinuated by the new philosophers, sometimes even by scientists themselves, that the old philosophy is in some way at odds with science. This cannot be the situation, for the two inhabit altogether different realms with different objects and objectives. What philosophy (in its classical conception) is at odds with is not science as such but science masquerading as philosophy. Quite naturally, philosophy is against anything that masquerades as philosophy, but what it is against is the masquerading and not the thing itself minus the masquerade. If the masquerade becomes part of the thing, an essential aspect of the thing, even the main purpose of the thing, then philosophy will and must be at odds with it; this is why true philosophy must be at odds with positivism and postmodernism.
Philosophy in an Unphilosophical Age. All mainstream tendencies of philosophy during the modern period—the most influential tendencies which reflect and represent the ‘spirit of the age’—have turned right away from the original Greek conception of the discipline of philosophy as had survived intact until the late Renaissance, albeit for a millennium in the guise of ‘handmaiden of theology’. This turning away is not what it is made out to be by the mainstream tendencies themselves, that is, the rejection of an obsolete tradition, but is the abrogation of genuine philosophy in favour of a pseudo-philosophy oriented to the ‘relief of man’s estate’ and governed by a truncated (scientific) concept of reason. All this does not amount to the eclipse of philosophy itself. For firstly, philosophy is primarily a practice whose locus is the individual soul and as such remains a permanent possibility. The cultural validation of materialistic values and of the ‘relief of man’s estate’ as the project for humanity into which philosophy is absorbed, does not prevent individual human beings from actualizing their ‘love of wisdom’. Philosophy, in other words, does not cease to exist in the modern age but continues as ‘philosophy in the unphilosophical age’. In this the unphilosophical age, philosophy is misunderstood, while that which is not philosophy, that which is pseudo-philosophy and even anti-philosophy, is baptized ‘philosophy’ and presented to the public as such. This is so because the culture of modernity is founded on the rejection of philosophical values. Modern culture suffers from this rejection. In particular do individuals, the souls of individuals, suffer from the suppression of philosophy. But modern culture, convinced of its evaluative choices and especially of its rejection of any transcendent reference point which could provide a foundation for values, looks anywhere but to philosophy to cure its woes. Instead, it looks to more of itself.
The Call for Philosophy. On the one hand we have a call for philosophy coming from ‘somewhere’ in contemporary culture, a call made for the most part by people unacquainted with professional academic philosophy. On the other hand we have the institutional edifice of modern philosophy that replies with assurances that philosophy does exist, that those making the call may familiarize themselves with this philosophy at least in popular presentations, and that beyond this, if the callers remain unsatisfied, they should perhaps rigorously examine why, to see if they are hankering after something that belongs to the past. It would seem that the callers, the dissatisfied ones, are presumptuous, for they are ignorant of professional philosophy as it exists today. The professionals are well informed, can anticipate what the uneducated callers will say, and have numerous remedies to quieten the call. How could the callers be right in feeling that philosophy is lacking and the professionals wrong in pointing to their own imposing institution of learning? How could the ignorant be right and the learned wrong? But such is the situation. From a philosophical point of view the inarticulate call for philosophy is right and the assurances coming down from on high are wrong.
Nullifying the Call for Philosophy. From the perspective of contemporary academic philosophy the layman’s call for philosophy is an error. Of course, it would be nice to have the layman calling for what one is already doing and what one can readily provide. But no one, the academic philosopher least of all, is under any misapprehension that the layman is calling for academic philosophy. It already exists: there is no need to ‘call for’ it. The layman complains about a lack of philosophy but there is no lack of academic philosophy. For the professional philosopher, then, the layman must be in error. The layman calls for philosophy because of the ordinary connotations of the word ‘philosophy’ and because he understands that philosophy has traditionally dealt with the questions about which he seeks guidance. If the layman’s call falls on deaf ears within the academy, this must be because academic philosophy recognizes neither the authority of these linguistic connotations nor the authority of the historical tradition of philosophy. Academic philosophy cannot cater to the layman’s call for philosophy but can only attempt to nullify it. Instead of the questions the layman has in mind, academic philosophy will put forth other questions, attempting to refocus the layman’s attention on these. For there are many intriguing questions in life, are there not? Let the layman leave his unenlightened questions behind and become a student of academic philosophy. Then he will be in a position to explain to laymen that their call for philosophy is a misunderstanding.
Philosophy in the University. Ever since their formation in the twelfth and thirteen centuries the universities have consisted of a number of special faculties or departments. Originally there were three faculties: theology, medicine, and law. Philosophy was absent as a discipline in its own right and remained so until the eighteenth century; in fact it was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that philosophy gained widespread recognition as a university subject. Back in the days of the three faculties philosophy was regarded as a ‘handmaiden’, especially to theology. Only after the hegemony of theology in the medieval universities was broken as a result of the new sciences and the attendant cultural secularization of the seventeenth century did philosophy begin to emerge as a distinct academic discipline, but its progress was slow. The curious thing is that by the time chairs in philosophy began to proliferate nobody knew what philosophy as a special discipline was supposed to be. As conceived by Christian Wolff, who founded German academic philosophy from the University of Halle in the early eighteenth century, philosophy was the system of all human knowledge, crowned by theology but also embracing mathematics, ethics, jurisprudence, and all the natural sciences. On this view philosophy was a regal discipline, always threatening to step on the toes of other disciplines within the university. Wolff himself overstepped the mark with respect to theology and was expelled. Other professors might be more circumspect, but the underlying problem was that this idea of philosophy as ‘universal knowledge’ was in the end difficult to gainsay; indeed it had been, more or less, the conception of Aristotle himself. Either philosophy is a universal discipline – in which case how can it be situated alongside other university subjects—or it is, like medicine and law and everything else, a special discipline – in which case its particular subject matter should be specifiable. But specifiable it was not, neither in Wolff’s time nor in the time of Kant (who received a letter from the King of Prussia warning him off theological territory) nor in the succeeding centuries. Nobody was able to say what particular region of reality philosophy had to do with, yet everyone agreed that philosophy must be represented in universities. The solution adopted was perforce an administrative one: philosophy was placed alongside other university disciplines, with the problems posed by disciplinary boundaries being left for ad hoc resolution. This is the way things have stood for some three centuries now.
Philosophy as a University Discipline. Whether philosophy should be a university subject is an open question. Some philosophers have thought it should not – Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, who considered that philosophy of all subjects must not be institutionalized. But one can agree with Schopenhauer’s sentiments without coming to his conclusion. In regard to the health or otherwise of philosophy it is not so much a question of whether philosophy is represented as a distinct discipline at university as of whether its administrative status is mistaken for its natural or genuine status. It is one thing to say that philosophy can be a university discipline, another thing to say that it is in essence such. The latter is the position that academic philosophers themselves tend to take, implicitly and notwithstanding their vagueness about the actual subject matter of philosophy. Institutions take on a life of their own; so it is with regard to philosophy in academia. Edifices of theory grow up which spread around the world and count as the ‘current state of philosophy’. The language of these theories is for the most part recondite and inaccessible to outsiders. Academic philosophers come to think of themselves, and to be regarded as, experts similar in kind to those in other disciplines; an education in philosophy comes to be understood as a matter of acquiring expertise just as one does in other departments of knowledge. This is not to suggest that the concept of expertise has no place in philosophy; only that, when identified with a region of expertise, philosophy forfeits its authentic function and its universal character, becoming something other than true philosophy, becoming in fact cover-philosophy or anti-philosophy.
Academic Philosophy Losing its Identity. At the present time philosophy is losing its identity as a distinct academic discipline, dissolving into one or another of the social sciences or into all of them together under such general rubrics as ‘cultural studies’ and ‘critical studies’. But it has also turned out that all the branches of the humanities apparently are in need of reformation through the new philosophy, so that the defensive campaign against the old philosophy can now be found in all of them. For is it not obvious that, until modern times, literature and art and historiography and much else besides, were under the spell of the old philosophy? Must not every cultural artefact from the past be in some degree under suspicion on this score? Must not historians and art critics and literary critics, as well as their colleagues in the newer branches of social science, also in part be philosophers? Do they not require the guidance and advice of philosophers? But then, who precisely is to be called a ‘philosopher’ rather than, for example, a ‘critical theorist’ or ‘cultural critic’? At first the new philosophy, having renounced the ambition of the old philosophy to be queen of the sciences, became just one academic field among many. But so pervasive has the spirit of the new philosophy become in modern intellectual culture that academic philosophy now has trouble distinguishing itself from the other disciplines. This is the logical outcome of the whole tendency of the new philosophy, namely to disappear into the multifarious enterprises oriented to the ‘relief of man’s estate’.
Philosophy inherently contentious. Was it originally a mistake to call the new philosophy ‘philosophy’? It is true that the concept of philosophy is inherently contentious. For the most part, however, the lack of clarity today about what philosophy is does not reflect this contentiousness. Instead, it reflects the absence of contending, the tacit decision not to contend, the decision to let things ride and ‘tolerate’ conflicting conceptions of philosophy, whatever they happen to be, as long as they are at variance with the old philosophy. The concept of philosophy is unclear not because it is a live and contentious issue, but because, implicitly, decisions have already been made about what philosophy can, but especially about what it cannot, be. The will to question the nature of philosophy is lacking.
Socrates’ Principle of Criticism. What was the authoritative principle of criticism to which Socrates appealed? We know that it was the principle of reason, but to say this is by no means enough. For the decisive question concerns why and in what sense reason is authoritative. Here we come immediately to the stumbling block that ‘traditional philosophy’ represents for the modern ‘critical’ age. In his defence speech in Plato’s Apology Socrates appeals to the authority of the Delphic oracle, the mouthpiece of the divine realm, but not to this alone. In addition, he explains that his philosophical way of life had always been guided by what he calls his ‘daimon’, his inner voice which spoke to him from time to time, always to dissuade him from a wrong path of action. This inner voice, Socrates’ own personal oracle, and the place from which it spoke, was what was authoritative. It did not just advise or suggest but commanded, and in this sense was intrinsically authoritative. This voice could only be authoritative because of where it came from, which was nowhere in the ‘visible world’. The authority of philosophical criticism came from ‘outside the world’, where ‘world’ means everything that can be experienced through the senses. Philosophical criticism, the only kind of criticism which can be authoritative and thus non-partisan, has its meaning and justification in something transcendent.
What is Criticism? Is it, perhaps, that the meaning of ‘criticism’ is self-evident? Kant did not think so, expending all the labour of the Critique of Pure Reason to give a concept of it. But these days Kant’s own ‘critical philosophy’ is included among those intellectual constructions that are decried as uncritical and dogmatic. So indeed are all Kant’s successors, right through to recent times, who likewise tried to give a general concept of criticism. For, we are told by the leading proponents of ‘criticism’, to seek such a concept is already a misunderstanding. To ask after the meaning of criticism is to ask for something that cannot be had; it is to be ‘uncritical’. To be sure, Kant put forward reason as the principle, but in doing this he ultimately revealed himself as an exponent of the old philosophy. In the end Kant fell back on the ‘moral law’, which had, he said, the status of a ‘divine command’. This is the first lesson taught about Kant in modern academic philosophy, namely that notwithstanding his ‘progressive’ tendencies, in particular his critique of scholastic metaphysics, he did not go far enough: he reverted to old authority, he still imagined that human morality required an ‘absolute’ reference point, a ‘command’ even, and thus a ‘commander’. Did Kant not believe that he could prove by reason the existence of God and the immortality of the soul? The most fashionable tendencies of contemporary university philosophy call themselves ‘post-Kantian’, meaning that they have overcome Kant’s own inhibitions in acknowledging a free and open field for human ‘self-realization’. For what kind of ‘relief’ can it be to place human beings under the authority of a commander?
Philosophy and Criticism. Amid all opposition to authority it is usually forgotten that the tradition of classical philosophy began precisely with criticism. Socrates, the most critical individual on earth up until his own time, was executed by the Athenians for his criticism. Many had been put to death before him for their partisan criticism, for they had ended up on a losing side: their execution in such cases was effective ‘counter-criticism’. But the criticism of Socrates was different, for it was governed, very rigorously so, by principle. This was what Socrates, in the defence speech presented in Plato’s Apology, tried to explain to the Athenian jury. But they found him incomprehensible. Really the jury did not want to understand. They did not want to acknowledge the possibility of non-partisan criticism but were interested only in whether Socrates was on the right side. When they judged he was not, and sealed his fate, they revealed their unwillingness to accept the authority to which Socrates had appealed in his speech, that enigmatic authority of the Delphic oracle’s maxim ‘know thyself’ from which Socrates proceeded in his unrelenting ‘examinations’. Socrates was not new in ‘being critical’ but in his principled method of criticism, in his clear insight that genuine criticism can proceed only from a universal authority. This was the main lesson that Plato learnt from Socrates and became definitive for the whole philosophical tradition.
Criticism Reduced to Disapproval as Political Act. Once a general principle of criticism is disallowed there is only one thing that criticism can be, namely negativity. Then, saying one is ‘critical’ of something merely expresses a disapproving attitude towards it. Every expression of disapproval, every instance of negativity towards a person, idea, or institution, will have some ‘reasons’ behind it, but unless these flow from a universal principle it is better to describe them as ‘motives’. The degradation of ‘criticism’ in the present age stems from a blurring of the distinction between motives and reasons. Motives will be reasons for people who do not believe in a universal principle of criticism. Such people will make evaluations; they will be ‘critical’ or otherwise, depending on their motives, but these will not include a principle. They will be ‘unprincipled’. Criticism which does not bind itself to a universal principle is sectional or partisan. This is the present situation in Western intellectual culture and philosophy. The kind of criticism that is rampant today is partisan. There is an unwillingness to accept the possibility of a non-partisan standpoint of criticism; from all sides one hears the message that the idea of a non-partisan principle of criticism is a mirage left over from an antiquated authoritarian tradition. The only thing that remains is the prosecution of one’s own partisan ‘critical’ viewpoint, naturally under conditions of Realpolitik, which means all kinds of compromises where one ‘exercises tolerance’, that is, ‘refrains from criticism’.
Dispensing with Principles. Does one really need a principle in order to ‘criticize authority’? Or as our new philosophers would put it, does one need an ‘absolute’ principle, a ‘transcendent’ principle, a ‘final’ principle? Are not you and I and the next person, from our own personal points of view, or from the points of view of our class, social category, race, gender, occupation, interest group, political party, quite capable of taking a critical attitude towards this or that authority? Are we not capable of setting up our own authorities? Well, this is possible of course, and is confirmed all the time when ‘I am critical of X’ means nothing other than ‘I reject X’. And this is precisely what ‘criticism’ means in the new philosophy. In other words, ‘criticism’ is evacuated of philosophical meaning.
Principle of Criticism. Everywhere in modern intellectual culture we observe appreciative gestures towards the ‘critical’ spirit. It is philosophy, above all other disciplines, which is seen to embody and ‘represent’ the critical point of view which can then be applied in diverse spheres of intellectual endeavour. Perhaps the various non-philosophical disciplines and forms of inquiry do not have to occupy themselves directly with the principle of criticism, because philosophy itself can furnish the necessary enlightenment. But contemporary philosophy, in point of fact, does not come forward with this information. Philosophy nowadays offers many things to other disciplines and to ‘culture’ in general, things which are very willingly accepted. On this central question of the nature of criticism, however, on this question which concerns the foundation not only of philosophy but of our whole ‘critical’ culture, philosophy itself is silent.
‘Relief’ for the Intelligent Animal. The ‘new philosophy’ moved towards a radical redefinition of human needs and thus of the nature of the human. This was a purely materialistic secular redefinition. Henceforth the human being was to be understood as the intelligent animal, and although this meant that humans had ‘higher’ needs in comparison with other animals, complex emotional needs, aesthetic needs, intellectual needs, there was no such thing as ‘spiritual needs’ in the sense maintained by the old philosophy and Christianity. As the new philosophy took hold within culture it became increasingly difficult to use words like ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, for strictly speaking these referred to a non-existent realm of immaterial reality. Under these circumstance the ‘relief of man’s estate’ could consist in nothing but the progressive satisfaction of the needs of an intelligent animal: in the first place material needs that man shares with other animals, then needs connected with the peculiarities of human intelligence. Who can doubt the success of the new philosophy in this project? Contemporary culture is even intoxicated with this success.
‘Relief’ from Authority. There is, however, another aspect to the ‘relief of man’s estate’ that is not straightforwardly a matter either of primary material needs or of the needs of intelligence. This is the relief from authority, which was hallmark of the ‘new philosophy’. As Kant was to put it at the end of the eighteenth century, the modern era is an ‘age of criticism’: in a culture which had come of age intellectually, which no longer instinctively submits to venerable tradition, everything claiming the status of authority must be put to the test. That the old philosophy had been uncritical, that Christianity had been uncritical, that each had enforced an attitude of slavish submission to received authority, that neither had been open to unprejudiced inquiry, that each had appealed to dogmatic postulates rather than to argument and demonstration, that each had suppressed the spirit of freedom – such charges were inseparable from the rise of the new philosophy and are still heard as loud as ever today. The new philosophy promised ‘relief’ from this old tradition of control and restriction: relief not just from confined ways of thinking but more especially from confined ways of being, that is to say of acting, of doing, of choosing. Defining the human being from its own ‘privileged’ viewpoint, the old tradition had sought to enforce its definition on human practical life. For the new philosophy, however, there was nothing about the ‘intelligent animal’ man that dictated the moral restrictions enforced by the old system. Indeed the very idea of authoritative morality became suspect. Morality was a human thing, created by human beings and susceptible of modification by them, it was itself a means for the ‘relief of man’s estate’; it was something that humans themselves held in their hands and not anything given to them.