extrapolating

I forgot how busy I am during the week – hence the delay.

I’m kind of embarrassed about the content at the end of the last post – “philosophers as storytellers”. Not that I don’t think it is an adequate description, it just betrays a level of sentimentality that one shouldn’t reveal when attempting to be taken seriously. Getting excited about philosophy can be dangerous – like running into a new forest, inhaling new experiences and then wanting to describe them coherently to a group of friends. How do you start? Without going about it methodically (i.e.; types of trees, types of colors, origin of the odors, noises, etc.) it is extremely difficult to make cogent sense of this forest experience. Being excited means wanting to explain it as a whole, as an experience not of the particular elements but of them smashed together. The explanation of this smashed together experience might sound like this: “it’s breathtaking!”, “it’s soothing”, “calming”, “the most gnarly sensory overload!” Not that I don’t think that these are adequate descriptions, they just betray a level of sentimentality that one shouldn’t reveal when trying to be understood by a group of friends. Alone, the exclamations themselves don’t help give a sense of what really was going on. Claiming that philosophy tells the “human story” is to shout out the first thing that comes to mind in an attempt to lump different impressions into one expression.

In Germany I can’t seem to open a philosophy book or sit in on a lecture without either hearing about Hegel or hearing Hegel’s philosophy in what is being discussed. It is more or less accepted that Hegel revolutionized the way we think – a point that isn’t easily understood after hearing it only for the first or second time. The way we think just seems to be the way we think, thinking about others ways to think is not the easiest to do. Hegel gets credited for endowing us with a historical consciousness. My study buddy, Löwith, remarks in his critique of Nietzsche that the Greeks thought of time in a cyclical manner (which he relates to Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same) as opposed to post-Hegelians who think of history in a linear manner. Thinking of history linearly leads one to think of a telos (or goal) of history or to thinking of history as progressive. The French Revolution was such a fascinating event for 19th Century philosophers because they saw it as an event that served the progress of history. Therein hides two ideas that supposedly arrived with German idealism – that one can serve history and that history is progressive.

When Rorty tells Harrison (in the interview I mentioned last post) that to decide between the reformists and the revolutionaries is to decide based on what you want for the future the first thing that came to mind was Hegel (whispy hair, large turned down nose and all). Like the French Revolution was seen (and is seen) to serve history we are told by major contemporary philosophers to choose philosophical allegiance based on how we think it will promote a history of our liking. Where does that leave the queitists and the naturalists (the other two trends in analytic philosophy that Rorty names)? The naturalists’ idea of history is that it servs “truth” as they see their knowledge as being based upon and superior to all prior knowledge – that their work should be to help knowledge move along this path of progress. The queitists are there to make fun of the naturalists by referencing Wittgenstein.

The reformers and revolutionaries don’t accept this notion of “the progress towards truth” and have differing modes of historical thought that motivates their writing. The reformers are utopia builders whose wish it is to “maximize happiness” – this is historical because it struggles to build an ethic and politic that will lead to such a society. The revolutionaries see the history of men and women as the history of self-alienated beings and it is their goal to free men and women from that which binds them. I think this is why the philosophies of the so-called revolutionaries appears to me to be more human. Although the reformers are more concerned about well-being, they talk and philosophize about ideals, not humans per se. Philosophy books from the “revolutionaries” are dialogues with the individual reader – individual challenges in intellectual and personal honesty.

So what is telling a “human story”? I think it is telling the story of our historical position (something which is possible thanks to German idealism), I think it is a challenge to individuals to analyze their lives and it is a constant critique of those forces which constantly invade our lives (the political, the social, technology, etc, etc).

Well, that’s the best I can do right now in attempting to be a little more specific than shouting “it’s the most gnarly sensory overload!”