The Idea of Philosophy I

(Fragments)

(taken from EHS on Philosophy Document)

Ted Sadler

 

 

 

 

1. Age of Faith and Age of Reason. Standard accounts of the history of philosophy report that in the seventeenth century a transition was made from the ‘age of faith’ to the ‘age of reason’. Undoubtedly this was the propaganda of the time. There was much talk of beginning anew, of breaking the shackles of theological authority and reaching for the first time in human history a genuinely autonomous intellectual stance. Great hopes were held out for reason, not just in the advancement of science but in society and politics generally. Instead of ecclesiastical dogma there would be reason, instead of a society founded on irrational custom and arbitrary political authority there would be a society based on reason, that is on genuine knowledge – scientific knowledge – of the nature of man as a social and political animal. In all this talk of reason, however, it was never made clear how reason was supposed to apply outside that single context – science – where it had proved its credentials. The age of science it certainly was. Certainly the sciences were advancing and in important respects were changing the picture of the world. But there was a naïve belief that the steady accumulation of scientific knowledge could itself justify belief in a new ‘age of reason’. Francis Bacon had not been so carried away; he had wanted both faith and reason (science) because he saw that science itself could not provide ‘wisdom’. When subsequent thinkers wanted to do away with faith altogether, when they saw no room for faith in the age of reason, they were confronted with the problem of the values reason was supposed to serve. To this question reason itself gave no answer.

 

2. Philosophy, Wisdom, Science. The campaign against philosophy, more precisely against the old conception of philosophy which had reigned for two thousand years, began in earnest four hundred years ago. At that time Francis Bacon made a radical proposal for altering the meaning of ‘philosophy’. What Bacon proposed was that this Greek word ‘philosophy’, which literally means ‘love of wisdom’, should no longer be understood as having anything to do with wisdom. Instead, philosophy should henceforth mean a system of learning, especially scientific learning. As for wisdom, Bacon maintained that this belonged not in philosophy but in religion. In other words, Bacon’s thought was that wisdom was not capable of intellectual support, not capable of support through reason, nor was wisdom reason itself. Wisdom was simply faith, which for Bacon meant the Christian faith, in fact the Protestant Christian faith which was based on the Bible. In the seventeenth century people doing straightforward scientific work came to think of themselves as and were called ‘philosophers’. Galileo and Newton were ‘philosophers’. The Royal Society published its scientific papers in a periodical called ‘Philosophical Transactions’. There were some difficulties in this usage however. For while the spirit of the time very much approved of people giving up on the old philosophy and turning to science, there was nothing in science itself which sanctioned this attitude. There was, evidently, still a need for philosophy of a kind, namely for a philosophy which would license the rejection of the ‘old’ philosophy. The fact that science came suddenly on the scene and made such rapid strides in diverse areas was not itself enough to banish old ideas. Some people were under the impression that you could embrace the new sciences of the day while still clinging to the old philosophy. They did not see that the two were incompatible. So that this could be seen, John Locke, at the end of the seventeenth century, wrote his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This book attempted to demonstrate that apart from what is known in science there is nothing else to know. This was so, according to Locke, because all knowledge comes from the senses, and it is science and nothing but science that has competence in dealing with sensory materials. Philosophy henceforth would be the ‘underlabourer of science’, content to clear away the obstructions to understanding which would otherwise inhibit the development of science. With Locke philosophy became the ‘theory of knowledge’, ‘knowledge’ being understood exclusively as scientific knowledge. Philosophy as a discipline became the study of why the previous tradition of philosophy was no longer credible.

 

3. 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, as impossible to believe and as impossible to 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. Philosophy has been rejected but it has not been refuted.

 

4. What Does ‘Philosophy’ Mean? It will be objected that philosophy cannot possibly have been rejected when there are today so many academic philosophers in existence, 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 that now exist, and the books they write, almost uniformly argue against a ‘previous conception’ of philosophy which is none other than 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 the Marxists and postmodernists. The most influential thinkers and intellectual currents of the past four centuries have all been abandoning the classical conception of philosophy as out-dated, 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, as they have moved on from theology, astrology, and alchemy? What is the justification for the continuation of the word ‘philosophy’?

 

5. What Philosophers Do. If one looks at the positive work that philosophers do these days one finds a bewildering variety of things. Some of these people look like scientists, others like literary critics, others like political commentators and still others like historians. Often it seems that in order to qualify as a philosopher one need only speak at a sufficiently high level of abstraction and abstruseness – it hardly matters on what subject, if indeed a ‘subject’ is discernible at all in a tangled web of self-referential discourse. There is no clear positive definition of what philosophy is supposed to be these days, at least no generally agreed definition. Various schools and tendencies do what they do, and they may call what they do ‘philosophy’, but despite superficial polemics the attitude which prevails is one of live-and-let-live. It is only through its negative views that contemporary philosophy gains its identity. And all these negative views, all the No-saying of those who call themselves and are called ‘philosophers’, are focused on one point and one issue, which is the classical idea of philosophy. In contemporary culture the philosopher has become someone who contradicts, discredits, unmasks and undermines what philosophy formerly was. This is the all-pervasive message, the one matter of general agreement. Anybody outside this orbit of thinking is considered an oddity and part of the problem.

 

6. Dwelling on ‘Old Errors’. It is strange that after four hundred years it is still necessary to be contradicting an old line of thought; stranger still that a whole profession is necessary which agrees on nothing else except this contradiction. Contemporary philosophers admit that it is difficult to completely expunge the traces of an age-old tradition. But notwithstanding the worthy work of their predecessors from Francis Bacon to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, philosophers in the present day still find much expunging to do. Nothing, it seems, must be left to chance. It is not enough to simply state the errors of the classical idea of philosophy and pass on to something else. It is necessary to dwell on these errors in all their variations and to point out how they surreptitiously survive in modern-looking thought. Since the big names of the classical tradition will not go away, it is necessary to demonstrate, over and over again, that the admitted virtues of these authors are overlaid by and intermingled with characteristic pre-modern errors, above all that their idea of philosophy is unacceptable.

 

7. 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 an old 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 appearances to the contrary, 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; it is enough to endorse the predisposition to reject the old philosophy. 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 out-dated 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) any ‘final proof’. People are asked to look at the old idea of philosophy and to see whether it appeals to them. If they need assistance to make a judgement the professional philosopher will come forward. 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 at variance with the spirit of the age. To revert to the old philosophy would be to make an exit from contemporary culture, to render oneself irrelevant, to stigmatize oneself as a fossil intellectually and morally. And if someone looking at the old philosophy were to still ask for proof, were to ask for a refutation rather than a mere rejection, this will be taken as a refutation of that person. For look, it will be said – cannot you see that the old philosophy believes in these absolute standards, these final judgements, this overarching authority of reason? Seeing this, can you really give any credibility to this old tradition?

 

8. 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 to realize, however, 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, modernity that has become florid with its convictions, but it is also modernity in desperate throes of self-defence. Postmodernity is that stage of Western culture where the destructive implications of modernity become so evident that they can no longer be brushed aside with optimistic gestures towards the future, where 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 unforseen 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 with vehemence, proclaiming that, if only one can come to active belief in disbelief, to celebrating disbelief, to living 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.

 

9. Modesty and Arrogance in Philosophy. What a strange combination of modesty and arrogance does this our modern culture exhibit. We are modest, it seems, in no longer seeking to magnify ourselves through theology. 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 grandiose and overblown. We have come of age, we humans, in modern secular culture, and as adults we have learned to stand on our own feet without the comforting delusions of childhood. We have come to terms with the world as it is and with ourselves as we are in fact. 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. We are also modestly content with relative values, for we realize that, by reaching out to heaven, we shall inevitably miss the mark – for there is nothing there – and so shall neglect our own finite selves. In modern culture we humans have gathered up the courage to face our finitude. This, the modesty of finitude acknowledged and celebrated, is held up as our dignity, a dignity represented by the new philosophy from Francis Bacon through to the present day. Yet behind all this modesty there is an unmistakable arrogance. For we who are tolerant, we moderns who nowadays give all cultures and past ages their due, we who acknowledge the integrity of every point of view and are constantly criticizing the arrogance of 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, even towards the old tradition of philosophy, because we are convinced that nothing we meet up with can challenge us in any fundamental way. We are curious about all ages and cultures, we pile up ever more historical information, we display everything in museums for our enjoyment, we revive defeated cultures and extinct languages, and we take pride in the fact that it is we moderns who do all this and can do it on account of our liberated intellect. 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 to ‘affirm the lack’. The old philosophy could not do this, for it dreamed of infinitude; so did Christianity, and so in one way or another did all previous culture. But now, modestly reconciled to finitude, we can take the world in hand; we can even, through the instrument of modern science, conquer the world. We, the most modest humans that the sun has ever seen, are now lording it over the earth. Have we really become too modest for the old philosophy? Or are we, on the contrary, too arrogant for it?

 

10. What Can Philosophy Be? What can philosophy be today? What can philosophy be in this our modern culture after four hundred years of science and enlightenment and secularization? Someone of a genuinely modern mentality may be forgiven for thinking that philosophy is by now revealed as a lost cause which will go the same way as theology. For who believes in theology nowadays? And was not philosophy, from the beginning of its history in the Greeks, ultimately a kind of theology? Was this not the reason that Christian theology found Greek philosophy so congenial? Do not theology and philosophy have in common the superseded idea of transcendental reality? Was it not necessary, for the human mind to come of age, to renounce this idea, thus breaking the shackles of both philosophy and theology? Was this not already achieved in the seventeenth century, by such eminent thinkers as Bacon and Galileo and Descartes and Hobbes? Must not the impossibility of philosophy be, henceforth, the presupposition of all serious intellectual endeavour?

 

11. Philosophy and Modern Culture. This culture of ours, this culture which is now so needy of philosophy, is something we ourselves have created. And the way we have created it, the way we have created ourselves as cultural beings, is such that we now find ourselves with a deficit of philosophy. We have created a non-philosophical culture and have become beings of this culture. And yet, if this is so, what is it in us that calls out for philosophy? Is it something that has escaped the processes of cultural formation? If so, can it be the origin of a genuine need? Can we in modern culture possibly admit that modern culture is not itself the criterion of everything genuine?

 

12. Finishing With Philosophy. Philosophy’s strongest tendency in our own time is the tendency to have finished with philosophy. But that which wishes to have finished and thinks itself actually to have finished with philosophy also wishes to call itself philosophy and understands itself as such. This has been the situation for the best part of four hundred years. And if there is such a thing as the new philosophy, and if this has in some sense superseded the old philosophy, we are entitled to ask what the underlying meaning of philosophy is 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 novel forms theology has taken on in 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 also in respect of philosophy? Especially given that the old philosophy, from its beginnings in Pythagoreanism and Platonism, was irreducibly ‘theological’, why has the concept of philosophy not been altogether given up?

 

13. 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; there are many obstacles, many layers of rubble that obstruct our access to it, much dead weight that has been laid down on top of 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 can only be found underneath. 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.

 

14. Digging for Philosophy. Let us therefore 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. All we can do to begin with is describe the covers, in such a way that they may be removed at least provisionally, and our descent made possible.
15. Philosophy Must Be Dug Out. 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 itself. 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 greatest 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, by way of compensation, ever greater complexity on the surface. This means that the latent instinct for depth is always disappointed, something academic philosophers have to deal with in respect of their students. The outstanding contemporary example of this campaign against depth occurs in 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 takes the desire for depth to be an objection. There is a distinct moral tone in contemporary warning away from the depths: to dig leads one away from the surface and thus 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 become invisible; one may entirely disappear under the surface and become irrelevant. Especially when one takes into account that the digger is after some kind of treasure, a treasure that cannot be brought up and out but that 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.
16. Why Philosophy is Covered Up. Philosophy is covered up because of what lies down there in the depths. The thing down there, this thing which is a challenge on human beings, is desired and also 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 – how unremitting it is – 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 then it is thought that by suitable adjustments it can be redirected to the surface. This is what a university education in philosophy generally means nowadays: an 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, the most external covering of philosophy. The campaign against depth, the denial of depth and affirmation of the surface, just is the common content of these cover-philosophies.. This disbelief in depth, however, although it wears the mantle of philosophy, is in truth an expression of the ‘repulsive’ power of philosophy; it is not so much ‘disbelief’ in depth as a defensive stance towards depth.
17. Philosophical Masquerade. Many academic disciplines are nowadays involved in philosophical masquerade. Especially in the social sciences is the philosophical masquerade running wild. Already in Comte ‘sociology’ was the crown of philosophy, the proper successor to the old philosophy. It is not necessary, however, for a discipline to objectively masquerade as philosophy, that it should subjectively intend to do so. As long as it implicitly takes itself (together, perhaps, with other disciplines) to occupy the place formerly assumed by philosophy, the masquerade is the objective effect. This is the general situation today. Philosophy is covered up because it is assumed that it is present in and represented by the whole complex of disciplines that belong to modern ‘learning’.
18. The Old and the New Philosophy. For Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century the day was dawning when Western civilization could start seriously attending to the ‘relief of man’s estate’, meaning the betterment of man’s material and social circumstances. The old philosophy, he considered, had not properly sighted this task, or to the degree that it had, employed faulty instruments for the purpose, it had, for example, been captive to fallacious pre-scientific models of knowledge. There had not been any tangible progress in the old philosophy, which had become instead a field for abstract hair-splitting and contentiousness. After the initial breakthroughs in physics and astronomy, by the middle of the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes was trying to demonstrate that the same advances in knowledge could also occur in human studies. Physical science was the model, and it was a matter of discovering the principles which had led to such startling advances in this area. The relief of man’s estate would be secured through the progressive extension of scientific principles into all domains, so that the traditional idea of philosophy as universal knowledge, the idea that had been merely a pious wish within the old philosophy, would be vindicated. But there were many aspects of the old philosophy which could no longer, on this way of thinking, be given any credibility at all. Foremost among these was the idea that philosophy studied ‘supersensible’ reality and could even make contact with a higher sphere of ‘divine’ truth. This belief, so the new philosophy considered, was the result of a failure to understand the nature and limits of human knowledge: in essence it was a superstition. After two thousand years of the old tradition, it could not be expected that its ideas would die out overnight. But an unequivocal rejection of lingering associations from the past would henceforth be the index of a truly modern understanding of philosophy.

 

19. The New Philosophy and the Sciences. The ‘new philosophy’ took its lead and inspiration from the new sciences of the seventeenth century, as these sciences developed into increasingly specialized 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 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 itself from the old tradition by 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 or standard-bearer. The new philosophy was to ride on the back of the sciences, analyse their methods after the event, and hold high the standard of science. But is it not incredible that such a miserable undertaking could establish itself as the proper work of philosophy?
20. Bitterness of the New Philosophy. The one thing that all variants of the new philosophy have in common is their opposition to the old philosophy. Why are they so bitter? It is because the old philosophy, both on its own account and in its alliance with Christianity, held out such grandiose promises for humanity. Instead of the realizable goal of bettering material circumstances, the old philosophy, absurdly and pretentiously, promised participation in the divine, eternal absolute truth, and salvation of the soul. Such arrogance, such presumption – so the new philosophy feels – is an insult to modern culture and a dangerous distraction from the real tasks of today.
21. The Rearguard Campaign. Rearguard campaigns are conducted in order to advance or consolidate on another front. What then, in the case of the new philosophy, is this other front? As stated, it is the front of the sciences, of all the sciences together, of the physical and chemical and biological and social and political and economic sciences as they have developed since the time of Francis Bacon. But the new philosophy does not so much carry out positive scientific work as ‘represent’ the spirit of science within modern intellectual culture. Since such representation mainly takes the form of a rearguard campaign the charter of the new philosophy is in essence negative: its job is to keep the old philosophy at bay, to limit its opportunities, to suppress the instinct for it and to discredit it. That this is the situation, that the new philosophy has taken it upon itself to be the policeman of modern intellectuality, is shown by the fact that it has no results to call its own: it is the sciences themselves that produce results. Ask the new philosophers what, after all this time – it has been four hundred years –  they themselves have come up with, and you will be told that they have demonstrated more definitively, more comprehensively, more incontrovertibly, that the old philosophy is untenable.

 

22. 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 (like astrology or alchemy), 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. This sounds paradoxical, that a discipline would focus so much on its own negation, and of course the matter gets described in other ways. It is said, for example, that only a previous conception of philosophy is negated, and that, as a matter of fact, it is only in the modern period that a genuine idea of philosophy comes to displace the pseudo-philosophies of former ages. It is said that we in the modern world are simply ‘incredulous’ about any pre-modern concept of philosophy. It is said that ‘God is dead’ and that the untenability of previous philosophy, in particular what may be called the ‘classical’ tradition of philosophy deriving from Plato and lasting through all the centuries of Christendom to the Renaissance, follows from this fact. The problem, however, is that those who seek to build a philosophy on the death of God, just because of their vehement rejection of so many defining features of classical philosophy, have great 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 this latter term is a loose non-binding sense, as more or less equivalent to ‘theorist’. 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. 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 in an essential sense an anti-philosophy.
23. Modern Philosophy as Anti-Philosophy. 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 in essence anti-philosophy.
24. 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 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 precisely 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 be at odds with it; this is why philosophy must be at odds with positivism and postmodernism.
25. The Campaign Against ‘Nostalgia’. As for when enlightenment on this particular matter was properly attained, there are different opinions. The general tendency has been for each successive philosophical tendency to claim that only with its own distinctive insights has the genuine breakthrough and ‘breakout’ from traditional philosophy occurred. Rival schools contend with one another about whether old prejudices have really been overcome, about how much from the tradition must be jettisoned and about what precisely (if anything at all) is worth salvaging. Philosophy is continually being put on a new footing by an ever more ‘critical’ searching out of ‘nostalgic’ residues and an ever more ‘resolute’ facing up to the ‘genuine challenges’ of today.
26. Philosophy in Dissolution. The widespread disavowal of ‘previous philosophy’, together with the vehement rejection of all pretentions to ‘first philosophy’, has left academic philosophers with no clear field of inquiry to call their own. At the same time as academic philosophers have striven to establish their professional credentials and as philosophy itself has become increasingly a field of specialization worthy of representation alongside other specialized studies, the identity of philosophy has become ever more doubtful. In this sense the ‘current state of philosophy’ is a state of disintegration, a state of floundering ad hoc defensiveness, where academics attempt to shore up a discipline they are unable to define, with a history they are unwilling to defend.
27. Philosophy in an Unphilosophical Age. What I have been maintaining is that all the 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 this had survived intact until the late Renaissance, albeit for a millennium in the guise of ‘handmaiden of theology’. And I have also maintained that this turning away is not at all what it is made out to be by the mainstream tendencies themselves – namely the rejection of an obsolete tradition in favour of genuine philosophy  –  but is on the contrary the abrogation of genuine philosophy is 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 it remains a permanent possibility. The cultural validation of materialistic values and of the ‘relief of man’s estate’ as the grand project for humanity into which philosophy is absorbed, does not prevent individual human beings from actualizing their ‘love of wisdom’ and ‘caring for the soul’. Philosophy does not cease to exist in the modern age but continues as ‘philosophy in the unphilosophical age’. This is the situation on the whole. It is even the overwhelmingly dominant tendency. In this the unphilosophical age, philosophy is for the most part misunderstood and unrecognized, while that which is not philosophy, that which is pseudo-philosophy and in a certain sense even anti-philosophy, is baptized ‘philosophy’ and presented to the public as such.  That this is so does not reflect any kind of conspiracy. What it reflects is the culture of modernity, which 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 as it is of its evaluative choices, especially of its rejection of any transcendent reference point which could provide an alternative foundation for values, looks anywhere but to philosophy to cure its woes. Instead, it looks to more of itself.
28. Philosophy and Pseudo-Philosophy. This much stated, let me now add that this modern philosophy which I have called pseudo-philosophy does contain much that genuine philosophy has an obligation to ponder. Philosophy, as the love of wisdom, is insatiable in its desire to learn and in its eagerness to identify something worth learning. The modern sciences for example, are not philosophy, and yet they give much for philosophy to understand, much that can contribute to philosophy’s self-understanding. And even when these sciences are misunderstood and misrepresented as philosophy itself, even in scientific philosophy (a type of pseudo-philosophy) there is much grist for the mill of philosophy. For philosophy learns from everywhere, not indiscriminately of course, but guided by its mission to ‘know thyself’, meaning knowing reason ever more profoundly and comprehensively. Philosophy is not insular; it does not want to ‘avoid the world’. Philosophy is the most open of all human activities. But this does not change the fact that philosophy wants above all itself, and is very strict in evaluating everything from this point of view. In modern times, due to the collapse of the concept of philosophy, things are approached differently. Everybody acknowledges and appreciates the ‘contributions’ of everybody else in this or that area, but nobody asks any searching questions about what all these add up to. Genuine philosophy is very strict in insisting on just these searching questions. It is not content to register that X (perhaps a so-called ‘philosopher’) has produced a ‘valuable study’ of Y, but wants to establish whether the work of X serves philosophy. Contemporary taste finds this an arrogant attitude, but then, seriousness has always been misunderstood in this way. Socrates, we might remember, was put to death for his ‘arrogance’.
29. Incredulity Towards ‘Meta-Narratives’. An influential contemporary author, Jean-François Lyotard, has defined the present postmodern era in terms of ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’. Philosophy in its Platonic conception is for Lyotard the exemplary ‘meta-narrative’. Human beings in all ages and cultures have told stories to themselves, but philosophy wants to be the story of stories. We can no longer believe in such a glorified story. Instead, we wish to retain many and diverse stories, we are ‘incredulous’ at the suggestion that any single story should be authoritative. It is not just postmodernism in the narrow sense that takes this attitude. Rather, postmodernism is just the outcome of four centuries during which, often under the name of philosophy, the very possibility of philosophy has been indignantly denied. Ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century we have been becoming progressively more ‘incredulous’ towards philosophy.
30. Incredulity Towards Philosophy. What then is the reason for this contemporary ‘incredulity’ towards philosophy? In addressing this question the first thing to be noted is the ambiguity of the word ‘reason’. Does it mean ‘cause’, or does it refer to intellectual grounds? What are the arguments here? What are the insights? What discoveries took place early in the seventeenth century which showed that philosophy was untenable? What intellectual advances have since occurred to confirm this view? We must ask these questions, for when all is said and done, incredulity alone just means non-acceptance, unwillingness to accept, resistance to acceptance. But we are asking about the reasons and grounds for non-acceptance. What does modern and postmodern philosophy have to say on this score?
31. What the ‘Incredulous’ Ones Say. Just here, however, right at the beginning of our questioning, we encounter a peculiar obstacle. For in asking about reasons and grounds we are appealing, so we are told by the ‘incredulous’ ones, to the very ‘meta-narrative’ that is in dispute. Incredulity towards philosophy includes incredulity towards final reasons and grounds. We may of course ask for opinions as to why philosophy is unacceptable today, but to weigh these opinions according to philosophical standards of reason is to impose an authority where none can be recognized. Any call for reasons and grounds, for explanation of arguments and discoveries and insights, meets with no response. We are presented instead with facts. In the seventeenth century, Bacon and Hobbes put forward the fact of modern science, which fact became, and remains to the present day, the foundation of every version of positivism. Postmodernism presents different facts, for example the interests of sundry social groups. Incredulity towards philosophy is founded on attachment to these facts. Bacon asserted that modern science existed for ‘the relief of man’s estate’ and that this was a purpose to which traditional (Platonic) philosophy could make no conceivable contribution. He therefore redefined philosophy to mean modern science. Postmodernism asserts that ‘theory’ exists for the advancement for socio-political interests and that traditional philosophy is useless in this area; it therefore redefines philosophy to mean ‘theory’. But more than this, both the positivists (proceeding faithfully from Bacon) and the postmodernists claim that philosophy in its traditional form actually inhibits their goals, that it is ‘the greatest danger’. Thus the mainstream tendencies of modern ‘philosophy’, while positively pursuing their programs, while energetically building up scientific knowledge or fervently advancing political causes, also have to fight on a defensive front, constantly having to fend off and discredit the ‘vestiges’ of a now ‘superseded’ philosophy. And in truth, it often seems that this defensive front is even the main area of campaign.
32. Reasons and Grounds for Philosophy. Of course, the opponents of philosophy can easily turn the tables, demanding that philosophy itself give reasons and grounds for turning human life upside down. One thing is sure, however, which is that any reasons proffered will not be acceptable to those who are ‘incredulous’ to begin with. At this point, strangely enough, our positivists and postmodernists suddenly become very ‘rigorous’, pointing out that philosophy is incapable of doing anything else except restating its own convictions. And in the end, philosophy must admit it. For how is it possible to give grounds and reasons for insisting on grounds and reasons? Further, how is it possible to give reasons for the value philosophy places on truth, justice, and goodness? Philosophy must admit that it cannot justify itself except through itself, that it cannot tolerate anything external to philosophy being brought forward either to defend philosophy or to criticize it. But philosophy will not acknowledge any foundational weakness on that account. If philosophy wishes to turn human life upside down, if it does in reality turn human life upside down, this is not because, from some other perspective, such a thing is advantageous. On the contrary, such an overturning, such a reversal of magnetic polarities, is not ‘advantageous’ at all for those who are outside of philosophy and will always be seen by the likes of Lyotard as an ‘incredible’ idea. About twenty-two hundred years after Socrates, another philosopher would speak in similar language. Philosophy, said the Platonist Hegel, is an ‘inverted world’, where the south pole becomes the north pole and vice-versa. The two poles, self-interest and justice, exert equal and opposite magnetic attractions on the individual human being. Outside of philosophy, the pointer of the soul is directed with iron necessity towards the pole of self-interest, while within philosophy it is the pole of justice which exerts an irresistible force. It is no good, of course, trying to persuade a magnetic needle around to its opposite pole, for its abhors nothing so much as this single point. Only through a magnetic reversal can the pointer of the soul turn right around to its opposite pole, an unnatural happening we might suppose, even a ‘supernatural’ and thus impossible happening.
33. The Fuss About Philosophy. It is a strange thing, but when one asserts that a particular discipline, or a particular school of thought, or a particular theorist, is not doing philosophy, the reply is most commonly that they are nevertheless doing something worthy and beneficial. There is a miscomprehension here that is indicative of the low level of philosophical consciousness in modern culture. People do not know what all the fuss is about. They are producing theories, they are building up knowledge, they are producing useful instruments for diverse purposes, they are ‘advancing the discussion’ of various problems. But all this is not the issue. The question is whether they are doing philosophy or something else, a question that can only seem irrelevant once the real meaning of philosophy has sunk out of sight.
34. The Call for Philosophy. On the one hand, then, we have this call for philosophy coming from somewhere within 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 philosophy that replies with assurances that philosophy does indeed exist, that those making the call may familiarize themselves with this philosophy at least in its popular presentations, and that beyond this, if the callers remain unsatisfied, they should perhaps more rigorously examine why they are this, to see if they are wanting something belonging to the past. It would seem that the callers, the dissatisfied ones, are presumptuous, for they are ignorant not only of professional philosophy as it exists today, but, we may assume, of the whole history of philosophy. The professionals are well informed, can anticipate what the uneducated callers will say on all relevant matters and have at hand numerous remedies to quieten the call. How could it be suggested that the callers are in the right when they say that philosophy is lacking and that the professionals are in the wrong when they point to their own imposing institution of learning? How could the ignorant be right and the learned wrong? But such is in fact the case. From a philosophical point of view the inarticulate call for philosophy is in the right and the assurances coming down from on high are in the wrong.
35. The Call for Reasons and Grounds. Let us look a little more closely at this call for philosophy. It is not a call made by the learned and so does not express itself in learned terminology; precisely for this reason is it so easily ‘refuted’ by professional philosophers. The call for philosophy is invariably a call for guidance on questions fundamental to human existence. That these questions are felt, irrespective of the precise manner of their articulation, to be primary questions, is what occasions the call. It is not idle curiosity that prompts these questions. They are questions of practical life and may be summed up in Socrates’ question ‘How should I live?’. The lives of human beings, in a way not true of non-human animals, depend on decisions; at both an individual and collective level humans are constantly confronted by valuational choices. The call for philosophy comes from the feeling that these choices should not be arbitrary but must in some way be grounded. To where can one turn for guidance on these choices, so asks the caller, other than to philosophy?
36. Deflecting the Call for Philosophy. Now it may be suggested that these questions concerning value and meaning are religious questions, and that anyone calling on philosophy for guidance in this area is really asking philosophy to perform the function of religion. This kind of response is characteristic of a certain type of professional philosopher. But religion is for many people today no longer a possible resource for answering the questions that most deeply concern them, which is why they call for philosophy instead. The professional philosopher may make this very point, taking it to prove that there is something wrong with the typical questions about value and meaning. That such questions are really religious in character, he may say, just goes to prove that they are superseded. If religion has been discredited, then surely philosophy should not be lumbered with its misconceptions and false promises. Does this mean that the professional philosopher will just reject the call for guidance, saying that no such thing is to be had in religion, philosophy, or anywhere else? This, admittedly, is not exactly what happens. The professional will likely say that questions of value and meaning must be reformulated, that the expectation of ‘absolute’ answers must be overcome, and that, provided that the necessary reorientation towards such questions is achieved, the inquirer, the caller for philosophy, will indeed find many useful resources in contemporary academic theory. That there can be no ‘ultimate’ answers only indicates that, after considering all the available resources, individuals will have to make their own personal decisions. This does not mean, our professional will add, that philosophy is now something less than it used to be. After all, to cast off pretensions is not to be diminished. Philosophy, he will say, now promises less but by way of compensation can achieve more. For is not a little of reality worth more than a lot of illusion?
37. Common Meaning of ‘Philosophy’. Our caller for philosophy, we are assuming, is asking for guidance about fundamental questions of value and meaning. He does not wish, let us further assume, to turn to religion for guidance. Why does he think that philosophy can help? What leads him to put his questions and problems and doubts precisely to philosophy, perhaps with all the ‘unreal expectations’ regretted by contemporary professional philosophers? What does the layman, unacquainted with academic philosophy as it exists today, understand by the word ‘philosophy’? To be sure, this word has somewhat vague connotations in everyday speech. Perhaps its most common occurrence is in such expressions as ‘he reacted philosophically’, meaning that he took bad news with composure and self-control. Political parties speak of their ‘philosophies’, alluding to the system of ‘values’ they represent. The layman will be hard put to define the concept of philosophy, but will understand that, traditionally, philosophy is associated with questions of fundamental import for human life, questions which are not resolvable in a straightforward or technical way. This is the reason that the layman calls for philosophy rather than for something else. He knows that the questions that disturb him most fundamentally are unlike the various mundane questions of life. Further, the layman knows the difference between the questions he brings to philosophy, the questions for which he seeks some guidance from philosophy, and other questions whose answers he may seek in the sciences or in some other area of specialized expertise. He knows all this merely from his own experience and from the everyday meaning of ‘philosophy’. And he knows this despite the fact that philosophy as it presently exists in academic institutions would prefer not to admit the genuineness of his questions, would prefer to fob him off in fact, would prefer to explain in a long-winded way that he has unreal expectations of philosophy and that he would be better to adjust his questions to the ‘current state of philosophy’.
38. 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 is complaining about a lack of philosophy but there is no lack of academic philosophy. For the professional philosopher, then, the layman must be in error. But we said that the layman calls for philosophy because of the ordinary connotations of the word ‘philosophy’ and because he understands that philosophy has traditionally dealt with just those 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.
39. 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 nineteenth and twentieth 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 whatsoever, crowned by theology but also consisting of 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 promptly 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 realistically 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 simply 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.
40. Philosophy as a University Discipline. Whether philosophy should be a university discipline 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 general 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 administratively imposed 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 are 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 be seen 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. Again I am not suggesting that the concepts of expert and expertise have no place in philosophy; only that, when identified with a region of special expertise, philosophy forfeits its authentic function and its genuinely universal character, becoming something other than true philosophy, becoming in fact what I have called cover-philosophy.
41. How the Rearguard Campaign Works. If the supersession of the old philosophy is the main doctrine presently taught to university students of philosophy in the Western world, it is noticeable that students do not appear to have fully imbibed this message prior to their encounter with the academy. From the connotations of ‘philosophy’ in everyday speech, connotations which reflect the old tradition, their teachers often find a hankering after something rather more ‘grandiose’ than what philosophy currently is, that is to say the new philosophy. In their first lectures students will begin to be disabused of the ‘inflated’ conception of philosophy which belongs to the past. It will be explained that philosophy was formerly connected with religion but that this is no longer the case; instead there is at best ‘philosophy of religion’, where people who happen to be ‘interested in religion’ can look at it from the point of view of the new philosophy. Students will be told that the claim of the old philosophy to possess some ‘privileged’ vantage point on human existence and the world as a whole, some kind of authoritative truth which would judge all claims to knowledge, has not stood the test of time and is now uniformly rejected by modern thinkers. As their studies progress, students will encounter this same lesson over and over again in ever more complicated forms. They will be introduced to a series of new philosophers who are exemplary critics of the typical errors made by the old philosophy. Mixed in with this will be a little social science, which will demonstrate how it is possible to proceed once one has overcome the old philosophy. Students will be instructed as to the existence of reactive tendencies in culture which would like to roll back the advances made by the new philosophy; they will be trained to spot the characteristic marks of the reactive mind and will be equipped with techniques for discrediting reactive arguments. All this will be the foundation of their education in philosophy. Upon graduating, they will go out into the world as ‘carriers’ of this attitude, or will proceed further along a professional path, to take their places among the full-time discreditors and demystifiers.
42. Academic Philosophy Losing its Identity. At the present time there is an unmistakable tendency for philosophy to lose its identity as a distinct academic discipline, dissolving into one 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 are in need of reformation through the new philosophy, so that the rearguard action, 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 at least 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 indeed is the logical outcome of whole tendency of the new philosophy, namely to disappear into the multifarious enterprises oriented to the relief of man’s estate. Was it not, perhaps, originally a mistake to call the new philosophy ‘philosophy’?

 Within the academic mainstream today, the term ‘philosophy’ has no clear meaning. It is true, of course, that the concept of philosophy is inherently contentious. For the most part, however, the lack of clarity 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 may 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. This lack of will to philosophy, this unwantedness of philosophy, is a fundamental feature of contemporary Western culture.