February 27, 2003
This quote shows the entrenched scientific style in academic philosophy. It is by Iris Murdoch, a women who writes novels and it shows just how far professional academc (analytic ) philosophy has lot contact with, and has repudiated, its rhetorical roots.
"Of course philosophers vary and some are more 'literary' than others, but I am tempted to say that there is an ideal philosophical style which has a special unambiguous plainness and hardness about it, an austere unselfish candid style. A philosopher must try to explain exactly what he means and avoid rhetoric and idle decoration. Of course this not need exclude wit and occassional interludes; but when the philosopher is as it were in the front line in relation to his problem I think he speaks with a certain cold clear recognizable voice."
I. Murdoch, 'Philosophy and Literature: dialogue with Iris Murdoch ' in B. Magee, (ed.), Men of Ideas, (NY, 1978, pp. 264-84).
Oh yeah? Philosophers as human beings are all mind no emotion. Only men write philosophy. There are no women philosophers? What can you say to that? That many academic philosophers go through life in a condition of delusion and denial?
Is philosophy only concerned with solving problems? Does philosophy have nothing to do with interpreting texts? Nothing to do with public debate and the conversation of civil society about public issues? Is philosophy disconnected from, and not a part of or within different traditions? Does philosophy have nothing to do with trying to live a good human life well?
Murdoch is an advocate for the hard style of the voice of a disembodied reason that is cleansed of passion. It is the voice of an academic philosophy that considers itself to be abstract, neutral and scientific---a theoretical reason; the voice of contemplation by a spectator; or the voice of mastery and control-- a form of calculating reason that seeks to seize, hold, regulate and control objects. It is the voice of the philosopher as hunter or master of the universe. It is the voice of the human being as a machine.
This is a deficient view because it is so narrow. There is a major blind spot to a form of knowing based on the experience of human suffering in difficult and tragic circumstances. This is a form of knowing that cannot be gained by the intellect alone--it is a form of practical knowing that is built around desire, responsiveness, caring, passion and imagination.
It is not the voice of vulnerable humans aware of their dependence on the luck of nature; the voice of those living in a drought waiting for the rains to come; a voice of those who have lived through a major bushfire; or the voice of those who are living downstream at the mouth of the River Murray and are dependent on the water of a salinised river that no longer flows.
Now that would be a different and more vulnerable philosophical voice. It would be one that has seen through the illusions of a complete mastery over nature, has a greater sense of human fragility and a greater openness to humans being a part of nature. It would be a more tragic voice, one that has become of being caught in a situation that is not solely of one's own making. A voice of grief, because nothing is actually being done to save the River Murray. A voice that remembers that this situation of the river and the environment has got worse over the last 30 thirty years.
It is a voice that expresses the rationality of the passions that wants to hold those in power ethically accountable for their lack of action.
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I agree with your post but i object to your use of the analytic crystal philosopher as a hunter.
A hunter has to move (their body) in appreciation of (1) their landscape, (2) their own movement, (3) the movement of their prey and (4) a connecting vector between 2 and 3.
I suspect analytic philosopher would be incapable of doing this, it is a completely different embodiment.
Analytic philosophers would require the emplyment of beaters to hunt succesfully, ...to hunt succesfully from the terrace of the big house they have been invited to in thanks for supplying the rationale for the use of neo-classical economics as an universalizing ideology