Plato's 'Republic' was
possibly the first book of philosophy I've ever read and even to this day
strikes me as containing everything a proper work of this nature should possess
- a response to the basic question of how we should govern ourselves. His
'Last Days of Socrates' is still among my favourites - a
principled stand against dogma (wherein we witness the full force of the
elenchus unleashing itself) but most of all Socrates’ willingness to
assume the position of ignorance in order to expose fallacious thinking in
others.
Aquinas, I'm familiar with mainly through the attempt to grasp Joyce's Jesuitical background - I understand him as a supporting cornice in Christian theology successfully dispelling lingering doctrinal disputes left over from Nicaea - though clearly the grounds on which he achieved this would begun to be questioned even by Descartes time. A refined stalwart of 'Platonism for the masses', as Nietzsche would have it.
Taking quite a leap now, were I to re-read Thomas Hobbes today I would focus a little more on how his work was inextricably embedded in the English Civil War and how this may detract from some of the 'purity' of his conclusions. Also, the promotion of regnal sovereignty as an inescapable 'organic' Leviathan following ineluctable mechanical laws not only prefigures the work of Foucault on the police state but also that of Deleuze and Gauttari in Anti-Oedipus - human desires being agencies in both instances which are wont to overcome their institutional trappings.
Hegel I find to be the strongest of all philosophers in terms of expected durability and in the challenges he lays down. I take the view too that he is synthesising (quite genuinely) all schools which diverged/proceeded from the Platonic and thus we may see almost the whole corpus of Western philosophy condensed within his own, singular terms. Yet to be eclipsed I think - even by his renegade pupil Marx - who of all the thinkers since, was the one most likely to provide him with a worthy riposte, or even I suspect a congruent encore (their early dialogue being a pots and pan affair) but alas the pupil felt obliged to get his hands dirty - the logical outcome of applied Hegelianism I suppose.
William James, whose principal work I have enjoyed, "The Varieties of the Religious Experience," is an intriguing study full of useful insight, powerful cameos and impeccably dressed up in that Victorian prose which donates so much credence to the primacy of scientific rigour (an obsession shared by Freud during this time). With both of them, in their own way of course, I see an attempt to balance the demands of empiricism with a hankering to cover their plotted canvases with some of the wilder splashes of Romanticism.
The closest I've been to the 'existentialists' is a couple of novels from Albert Camus (which chimed quite nicely with my own teenage angst - Oh my God! there's no God etc.) but I will always associate Jean Paul Sartre (the school's de facto chief) with his preface to Franz Fanon's classic, "The Wretched of the Earth" - where he provides us with a withering critique of colonialism in the context of the Algerian war of independence.
Which brings me to remark how much I admire this strain in French philosophy, which was always highly charged politically, particularly from the 1920's, where even Andre Breton's bunch found a way to make surrealism attractive to the radicals. Alexandre Kojeve's lectures on Hegel were a turning point for many during this time and the trend simply mushroomed to embrace all the best ideas (psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology) emerging from Britain and the continent. By the time we get to the 1960's students in Paris are daubing the walls with graffiti such as "structures do not take to the streets" - we can glimpse a bemused Levi-Strauss, not to mention the earnest semioticians, or the otherwise conservative linguists such as Saussure scratching their heads like Victor Von Frankenstein and wondering what on earth they have unleashed. Hannah Arendt, to my shame I haven't read at any length, and Heidegger I view, somewhat narrowly I'll admit, as a type of exasperated Hegelian (much like Merleau - Ponty) oscillating eternally on a subsection of the master's discourse.
I don't think anyone nowadays disputes too much Descartes methods as once he gets started his logic is by and large impeccable - the trouble with the sceptical rabble rousers like Derrida (who have reigned supreme for over forty years now) is that they will identify from the onset the use of ambiguous 'signifiers', key concepts deployed over and over again as though their meaning were emphatically clear - but which through close textual analysis can be ably demonstrated to be so effusive of meaning that no stable/uncontested interpretation may be said to be possible.
Derrida has a remorseless go at the cogito in Descartes for instance and in this respect may lay claim to being at least an apostle of Nietszche's overman. The true Birth of Tragedy for me then is our inability to get around this trick of Derrida's (or Roland Barthes) and be unable to anchor ourselves securely in any definitive interpretation; this unveils a limitless freedom too, of course, but at the expense of downgrading, technically at any rate, the greatest works of philosophy to the same semantic level as a soap advertisement. There are other ways around it of course and Derrida himself has expounded at length on the ways in which we may "choose" to give in to this tendency (for meaning to become detached, delocalised - fissiporous) and you may ask what would happen for instance if we applied Derrida's approach to music such as Wagner's. Does it fail to become any less meaningful when we recognise it to consist of discrete packets of sound waves vibrating in our ears at a certain frequency?
Nietszche probably fits my temperament more than any of the rest - at least he's the one I find myself reading most often - and when I do pick him up I'm usually looking for a laugh and not for any supposed philosophy. I'm not particularly proud of this either; the aphorism suits the present age perfectly with its micro-second attention spans and the rejection of all these "totalising" systems. I mean, who today has the time to read Kant and Hegel, right?
Post-modernism became aligned with post-structuralism in it's admission of an interpretative malaise peculiar to the modern condition both of which gained added impetus from Saussure's theory of the linguistic sign. We may also mention Derrida's deconstructive critical practice, Nietszche's 're-evaluation of all values', Darwin's displacement of Man from the centre of Creation (to a comparatively unflattering higher rung in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom), the Freudian challenge to the self-aware Cartesian ego - where is it that the "I" now thinks, indeed whom or what is this "I"?, Heidegger's assault on being 'as presence' and of course all the uncertainties unveiled in the quantum mechanical world of subatomic processes.
Basically, it's all about our being displaced, decentred and our former rationalist and autonomous good selves being fissiparously evaporated and torn apart. Observers may notice in the humanities we hear less of 'people', and more of 'subjects' and thus of 'subjectivity', as in Lyotard's sense of being 'subject-to' the controlling narratives, (meta)-narratives or grand narratives (Christianity, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Nationalism etc) whilst being socially compacted and constrained in various discursive scenarios or 'language games'. I suppose the condition of post-modernity in this sense would be to be aware of the stresses on one's one ego of all these competing and ideologically dissonant narratives whereas to be captured or enthralled by a designated 'narrative' would be to be yet enmeshed in a precursor struggle of modernity (enchanted by all sorts of misrecognitions; of wholeness, self-presence, autonomy etc) - this of course is even more inadvisable (supposedly) as one is not at liberty to extricate oneself.
In textual criticism, following the post-structuralist reading of Saussure (by Lacan, Derrida etc), an endless deferral of meaning along the chain of signification, owing to the fundamental instability of the signifier, leaves the reader incapable of grasping at an unambiguous authorial intent, textual meanings are left contested and alternative interpretations seemingly never exhausted - we are left afloat in a world without any definitive interpretative closure. But this is supposed to be liberating as we are now free to make play with (apparently) stale, inherited forms and genres through pastiche, irony and ridicule. Those who hold onto outmoded 'humanist' or 'essentialist' concepts such as the 'true', the 'good', the 'just' or the 'beautiful' are likewise lampooned within this new "philosophy" of ‘positive’ negation - which cannot build upon itself and become a 'school' in any readily identifiable sense as such an exercise, by definition (of which there can be no exhaustive final form of course), is in itself self-defeating.
So, while positive in some respects the assault on absolutes in the moral sense has been (arguably) the most malign by-product of post-modernist thinking. The readiness to avow the existence of differing (and always, it seems, “equally” valid) moral vantage points or even the admission that amorality itself is an amusing ‘subject-position’ to momentarily (or extensively) adopt and which is henceforth as valid as any other (truth being indeterminate) is often stretched to absurd degree leading to what we might call the Generation X mega-reflex response, summed up in the immortal post-modern words; ‘what-ever’- floods in Bengal - whatever, famine in Somalia - whatever, modern day slavery - whatever; ubiquitous child starvation - whatever, all equally and likewise for whatever momentarily useful rationale (which will itself be jettisoned as another cause finds fit) dismissed as events outside our immediate and responsible causative universe.
After Derrida completed the annihilation of the 'totalising discourse' the humanities slipped into a habitual negative stance vis-a-vis the old masters. We are encouraged to adopt a "sceptical" attitude from the onset - for example, we are led to regard Descartes "cogito" as absurd as he assumes the existence of a self-conscious reflective ego that can be grasped by "reason" and from which he proceeds to erect his 'fantastic' proofs. What I find much more remarkable is that these thinkers managed to sustain their argument and their self-consistency - and how this should instead be the focus of students attention; how they were able to "construct" and build a 'positive' schema (positive in the sense that it labours towards internal consistency) and what that could teach us about our present tendencies to fissiporous self-evaporation. Loss of "the centre" will take a while yet to get over, it seems.
Indeed, Derrida’s sophistry is the minotaur that lies at the heart of Western philosophy. Our purpose clearly is to extricate ourselves from the confined misery of the Cretan dungeon - knowledge is a gift but lachrymae mundae, the tears of the world. The easy option would be to take the aerial route - ala Dedalus - and simply leave the problem of slaying the beast to someone else. But how could your conscience rest knowing that you left behind this instrument of torture? This plague upon humanity! The means must be at hand already in Ariadne's threaded work. Something common to all the masters that gives us the wherewithal to tackle this dastardly creature. I suspect Hegel via string theory but confess to being not up to the task - perhaps it is simply a case of our all too human limitations.
Yet somehow we must be optimistic; Derrida is perhaps like a necessary virus in the mainframe where things go scatty for a bit but once we develop an antidote he'll have (hopefully) done us all a favour in the long run.
Aquinas, I'm familiar with mainly through the attempt to grasp Joyce's Jesuitical background - I understand him as a supporting cornice in Christian theology successfully dispelling lingering doctrinal disputes left over from Nicaea - though clearly the grounds on which he achieved this would begun to be questioned even by Descartes time. A refined stalwart of 'Platonism for the masses', as Nietzsche would have it.
Taking quite a leap now, were I to re-read Thomas Hobbes today I would focus a little more on how his work was inextricably embedded in the English Civil War and how this may detract from some of the 'purity' of his conclusions. Also, the promotion of regnal sovereignty as an inescapable 'organic' Leviathan following ineluctable mechanical laws not only prefigures the work of Foucault on the police state but also that of Deleuze and Gauttari in Anti-Oedipus - human desires being agencies in both instances which are wont to overcome their institutional trappings.
Hegel I find to be the strongest of all philosophers in terms of expected durability and in the challenges he lays down. I take the view too that he is synthesising (quite genuinely) all schools which diverged/proceeded from the Platonic and thus we may see almost the whole corpus of Western philosophy condensed within his own, singular terms. Yet to be eclipsed I think - even by his renegade pupil Marx - who of all the thinkers since, was the one most likely to provide him with a worthy riposte, or even I suspect a congruent encore (their early dialogue being a pots and pan affair) but alas the pupil felt obliged to get his hands dirty - the logical outcome of applied Hegelianism I suppose.
William James, whose principal work I have enjoyed, "The Varieties of the Religious Experience," is an intriguing study full of useful insight, powerful cameos and impeccably dressed up in that Victorian prose which donates so much credence to the primacy of scientific rigour (an obsession shared by Freud during this time). With both of them, in their own way of course, I see an attempt to balance the demands of empiricism with a hankering to cover their plotted canvases with some of the wilder splashes of Romanticism.
The closest I've been to the 'existentialists' is a couple of novels from Albert Camus (which chimed quite nicely with my own teenage angst - Oh my God! there's no God etc.) but I will always associate Jean Paul Sartre (the school's de facto chief) with his preface to Franz Fanon's classic, "The Wretched of the Earth" - where he provides us with a withering critique of colonialism in the context of the Algerian war of independence.
Which brings me to remark how much I admire this strain in French philosophy, which was always highly charged politically, particularly from the 1920's, where even Andre Breton's bunch found a way to make surrealism attractive to the radicals. Alexandre Kojeve's lectures on Hegel were a turning point for many during this time and the trend simply mushroomed to embrace all the best ideas (psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology) emerging from Britain and the continent. By the time we get to the 1960's students in Paris are daubing the walls with graffiti such as "structures do not take to the streets" - we can glimpse a bemused Levi-Strauss, not to mention the earnest semioticians, or the otherwise conservative linguists such as Saussure scratching their heads like Victor Von Frankenstein and wondering what on earth they have unleashed. Hannah Arendt, to my shame I haven't read at any length, and Heidegger I view, somewhat narrowly I'll admit, as a type of exasperated Hegelian (much like Merleau - Ponty) oscillating eternally on a subsection of the master's discourse.
I don't think anyone nowadays disputes too much Descartes methods as once he gets started his logic is by and large impeccable - the trouble with the sceptical rabble rousers like Derrida (who have reigned supreme for over forty years now) is that they will identify from the onset the use of ambiguous 'signifiers', key concepts deployed over and over again as though their meaning were emphatically clear - but which through close textual analysis can be ably demonstrated to be so effusive of meaning that no stable/uncontested interpretation may be said to be possible.
Derrida has a remorseless go at the cogito in Descartes for instance and in this respect may lay claim to being at least an apostle of Nietszche's overman. The true Birth of Tragedy for me then is our inability to get around this trick of Derrida's (or Roland Barthes) and be unable to anchor ourselves securely in any definitive interpretation; this unveils a limitless freedom too, of course, but at the expense of downgrading, technically at any rate, the greatest works of philosophy to the same semantic level as a soap advertisement. There are other ways around it of course and Derrida himself has expounded at length on the ways in which we may "choose" to give in to this tendency (for meaning to become detached, delocalised - fissiporous) and you may ask what would happen for instance if we applied Derrida's approach to music such as Wagner's. Does it fail to become any less meaningful when we recognise it to consist of discrete packets of sound waves vibrating in our ears at a certain frequency?
Nietszche probably fits my temperament more than any of the rest - at least he's the one I find myself reading most often - and when I do pick him up I'm usually looking for a laugh and not for any supposed philosophy. I'm not particularly proud of this either; the aphorism suits the present age perfectly with its micro-second attention spans and the rejection of all these "totalising" systems. I mean, who today has the time to read Kant and Hegel, right?
Post-modernism became aligned with post-structuralism in it's admission of an interpretative malaise peculiar to the modern condition both of which gained added impetus from Saussure's theory of the linguistic sign. We may also mention Derrida's deconstructive critical practice, Nietszche's 're-evaluation of all values', Darwin's displacement of Man from the centre of Creation (to a comparatively unflattering higher rung in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom), the Freudian challenge to the self-aware Cartesian ego - where is it that the "I" now thinks, indeed whom or what is this "I"?, Heidegger's assault on being 'as presence' and of course all the uncertainties unveiled in the quantum mechanical world of subatomic processes.
Basically, it's all about our being displaced, decentred and our former rationalist and autonomous good selves being fissiparously evaporated and torn apart. Observers may notice in the humanities we hear less of 'people', and more of 'subjects' and thus of 'subjectivity', as in Lyotard's sense of being 'subject-to' the controlling narratives, (meta)-narratives or grand narratives (Christianity, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Nationalism etc) whilst being socially compacted and constrained in various discursive scenarios or 'language games'. I suppose the condition of post-modernity in this sense would be to be aware of the stresses on one's one ego of all these competing and ideologically dissonant narratives whereas to be captured or enthralled by a designated 'narrative' would be to be yet enmeshed in a precursor struggle of modernity (enchanted by all sorts of misrecognitions; of wholeness, self-presence, autonomy etc) - this of course is even more inadvisable (supposedly) as one is not at liberty to extricate oneself.
In textual criticism, following the post-structuralist reading of Saussure (by Lacan, Derrida etc), an endless deferral of meaning along the chain of signification, owing to the fundamental instability of the signifier, leaves the reader incapable of grasping at an unambiguous authorial intent, textual meanings are left contested and alternative interpretations seemingly never exhausted - we are left afloat in a world without any definitive interpretative closure. But this is supposed to be liberating as we are now free to make play with (apparently) stale, inherited forms and genres through pastiche, irony and ridicule. Those who hold onto outmoded 'humanist' or 'essentialist' concepts such as the 'true', the 'good', the 'just' or the 'beautiful' are likewise lampooned within this new "philosophy" of ‘positive’ negation - which cannot build upon itself and become a 'school' in any readily identifiable sense as such an exercise, by definition (of which there can be no exhaustive final form of course), is in itself self-defeating.
So, while positive in some respects the assault on absolutes in the moral sense has been (arguably) the most malign by-product of post-modernist thinking. The readiness to avow the existence of differing (and always, it seems, “equally” valid) moral vantage points or even the admission that amorality itself is an amusing ‘subject-position’ to momentarily (or extensively) adopt and which is henceforth as valid as any other (truth being indeterminate) is often stretched to absurd degree leading to what we might call the Generation X mega-reflex response, summed up in the immortal post-modern words; ‘what-ever’- floods in Bengal - whatever, famine in Somalia - whatever, modern day slavery - whatever; ubiquitous child starvation - whatever, all equally and likewise for whatever momentarily useful rationale (which will itself be jettisoned as another cause finds fit) dismissed as events outside our immediate and responsible causative universe.
After Derrida completed the annihilation of the 'totalising discourse' the humanities slipped into a habitual negative stance vis-a-vis the old masters. We are encouraged to adopt a "sceptical" attitude from the onset - for example, we are led to regard Descartes "cogito" as absurd as he assumes the existence of a self-conscious reflective ego that can be grasped by "reason" and from which he proceeds to erect his 'fantastic' proofs. What I find much more remarkable is that these thinkers managed to sustain their argument and their self-consistency - and how this should instead be the focus of students attention; how they were able to "construct" and build a 'positive' schema (positive in the sense that it labours towards internal consistency) and what that could teach us about our present tendencies to fissiporous self-evaporation. Loss of "the centre" will take a while yet to get over, it seems.
Indeed, Derrida’s sophistry is the minotaur that lies at the heart of Western philosophy. Our purpose clearly is to extricate ourselves from the confined misery of the Cretan dungeon - knowledge is a gift but lachrymae mundae, the tears of the world. The easy option would be to take the aerial route - ala Dedalus - and simply leave the problem of slaying the beast to someone else. But how could your conscience rest knowing that you left behind this instrument of torture? This plague upon humanity! The means must be at hand already in Ariadne's threaded work. Something common to all the masters that gives us the wherewithal to tackle this dastardly creature. I suspect Hegel via string theory but confess to being not up to the task - perhaps it is simply a case of our all too human limitations.
Yet somehow we must be optimistic; Derrida is perhaps like a necessary virus in the mainframe where things go scatty for a bit but once we develop an antidote he'll have (hopefully) done us all a favour in the long run.
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