There is an article in the Review Section of the Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 31 10 03, p.10) on philosophy that is of interest.
As an aside, how come the finance capitalists are interested philosophy? They are destroying the very coinditions for academic philosophy with their reorganizing the universities to ensure the commercialisaton of public research to benefit venture capitalists. Is it deemed that this part of high culture is good for entrepreneurs? Something they need to know something about? You cannot live on profit alone? Or do successful entrepreneurs need to be cultured? It do goes with the BMW, beachhouse and inner city penthouse?
Called 'The making of a philosopher' it is by Colin McGinn, who is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. In it he is looking back on his formation as an academic philosopher and reflecting on his life as an professional philosopher. We have met McGinn before in Tweaking the axioms.
In this article, which is from his book of the same name, McGinn makes a couple of points. One is his understanding of philosophy. He says:
"What I liked most about philosophy was its extremely non-local character. Philosophy is highly general, abstract, impersonal, and even non-factual. Not only is it about everything that is; it is about everything that might be. Physics takes in every physical object in the universe, but philosophy takes in every object - physical or nonphysical - in every possible universe. The question about objects and their properties that obsessed me at the age of 18 applies to any conceivable object of any possible type: is an object, quite generally, something made up of the collection of its properties, or is it an entity distinct from them? Such questions belong to metaphysics, the study of "being as such," as the dictionary unhelpfully says, but could just as well be called logical or conceptual questions. Philosophy is about our most general ideas and how they fit together - ideas of causality, time, space, object, property, truth, meaning, necessity, identity, existence, knowledge, self, consciousness, freedom, goodness, beauty and so on. It is not about some limited set of things; still less local historical circumstances. Philosophy tries to get to the bottom of our most basic and far-reaching categories."
“One can very easily think without concepts,” Deleuze writes, “but as soon as there is a concept, there is truly philosophy.” Yet art itself is an equally creative enterprise of thought, but one whose object is to create sensible aggregates rather than concepts. Great artists are also great thinkers, but they think in terms of percepts and affects rather than concepts: painters think in terms of lines and colors, just as musicians think in sounds, filmmakers think in images, writers think in words, and so on. None of these activities has any priority over the others. Creating a concept is neither more difficult nor more abstract than creating new visual, sonorous, or verbal combinations in art; conversely, it is no easier to read an image, painting, or novel than it is to comprehend a concept. Philosophy, for Deleuze, can never be undertaken independently of art (or science); it always enters into relations of mutual resonance and exchange with these other domains, though for reasons that are always internal to philosophy itself." (Daniel S Smith, 'Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation")
McGinn then makes another point about the existential nature of doing philosophy:
"A reviewer of The Making of a Philosopher remarked that philosophy has been, for me, the love of my life and the bane of my existence. That is not too far off the mark. I would say, in fact, that philosophy combines these two features inextricably; indeed, it is lovely because it is baneful. Philosophy is difficult, taxing, and infuriating - and these very characteristics are an essential part of its appeal. It is because it is such a struggle that it can produce exultation. Philosophical work is demanding, lonely, enervating and inhuman - but it is secretly sublime. There is probably no time in my life when I am more certain of the meaningfulness of my existence than when I am thinking about philosophy - and no time at which I am more reminded of my own inadequacy."
Creative writing is lonely. Philosophy is just a particular kind of writing. And poetry can be difficult, taxing, and infuriating. Each requires a discipline to learn the craft of writing. Each requires solitude to write.
Is not being alone a part of the urban condition of living in a modern metropolis dominated by the money economy. It is mode of metropolitan life that is distinquished by exchange values and the relentless cycle of production and consumption; one where our social life has been integrated into the logic of commodities. Do we not emotionally recoil from a life governed by instrumental economic reason, which makes everything calculable and quantifiable and measures everything in terms of efficiency and profit? Does not that destruction of older values cause us shocks?
That is standard sociology. But then analytic philosophers do not read sociology. So they reify the standard everyday experience of metropolitan modernity.
If it is the job of poets to record the experience of shocks, what then is the job of philosophy? Philosophy turns away to the heavens; away from the body to abstract knowledge. McGinn talks in terms of sloughing off mortality as he leaves the realm of the particular and local to live on the level of the abstract and universal as some disembodied being.
I think that Nietzsche captures this modern condition in a more accurate way in para. 377 of his The Gay Science:
'We who are homeless....in a distinctive and honorable sense....For their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain; it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but what avail? We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its "realities," we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin "realities"....We "conserve" nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means "liberal"; we do not work for "progress"; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future'.
Nietzsche continues in para 380:
'The "wanderer" speaks. If one would like to see our European morality for once as it looks from a distance, and if one would like to measure it against other moralities, past and future, then one has to proceed like a wanderer who wants to know how high the towers in a town are: he leaves the town.....One must have liberated oneself from many things that oppress, inhibit, hold down, and make heavy precisely us Europeans today. The human being of such a beyond who wants to behold the supreme measures of value of his time must first of all "overcome" this time in himself—this is the test of his strength—and consequently not only his time but also his prior aversion and contradiction against this time, his suffering from this time, his un-timeliness, his romanticism.'