Metacritique, Philosophy,
& the Logic of the Intellectual Marketplace

I don't think they are dumbing down rather the reverse, and this might be connected to the problem of philosophy in general you speak of below. Popular writing on inherently complex subjects, requires more expertise then academic dissertation and in this they do quite a good job. Their problem is an inability to pose interesting questions, part of which stems from their philosophical concerns and the other is that in such a format they can only expose the inner shallowness of academia as it now exists.

Hence my immediate attraction to and then swift disapproval of the magazine reflected a discovery of a lack of content, aggravated by the fact that the writers were far better than I at expressing themselves, were competently trained and no idiots themselves, they still could not find interesting subject matter to talk about. Instead they tried to demonstrate their philosophy rather than employ it.

What is more they seem to be all boxed in, the popular format actually making this more acute and obvious (I have since read another issue and find much the same thing) . . . .

I would go a step further in this. Inherently the philosophical questions are more or less completed. There are other needs in this, but the idea of resolving anything much at the meta-level is more or less over. Indeed other than education, self-education, clarifying material in filling in a small number of gaps and finding a means of presenting in coherent form a whole system of philosophy (for purposes of education and self-knowledge) I am very much in agreement with this.

That is something to think about.  While I imagine much is old and stale, I would still be interesting in checking to see what if any areas of philosophy are still advancing substantively and which are doing the same old shit.  If there is a distinction, it would be a priority to reflect it in philosophical journalism.

But I'm inclined to agree that what matters more is learning how to think through things, how to apply what we already know, than to think we are going to come up with new systems of thought.  It seems that application of philosophical concepts (I'm not talking of applied disciplines like medical ethics, which have their own issues and problems) is not very intelligent.  I thought since the last undergrad class I walked out on that's there's something about the teaching of philosophy at the introductory level that is positively insufferable, an introduction to the perennial great philosophical questions.  That's another subject for reflection.

I think the most important thing to understand about philosophy is method rather than positive assertions, and how it relates to everything outside itself (whatever the boundary might be) rather than just being self-contained.  And to grasp it necessitates something deeper than just regurgitating the statements of recognized philosophers, i.e. a form of imitation.  Philosophy as an activity is inherently an act of negation, something I was trying to explain to someone last weekend.  But this is a whole area in itself.

I don't know anyone but us who is talking about this stuff, do you?

The practical uses of philosophy however is another thing. Here I think its ability make clear relationships and steps in movement is essential. Obviously I am being anything but pluralist in this. In fact I so strongly believe that useful philosophical disputation is virtually over that I tend to see the whole question resolving around an education problem.

I have a feeling I agree with you here, though I don't know your specific points of reference.  Once again, I'll point to an essay I wrote reflecting on my problem with popular philosophy: "How to Integrate Philosophy and Everyday Life: To Think Philosophically in Life, Or Reproduce the Fragmentation of Knowledge?".

In this light I can agree very much with you the need for a meta-critique. My personal view re philosophy is that the world is simply divided into Hegelian and pre-Hegelian philosophical viewpoints and whereas the first is bound to have its diversities, I cannot see any reason for suffering what stems from the latter (it is like making a place for Creation Science besides fully developed Darwinism).

I want to make sure I know what you mean here, before I assent to it.  Is it really the case that Hegel summed up all previous achievements of Western philosophy and that his synthesis was definitive, however contaminated by idealism, and all that remained was to turn him upside down, or to sublate philosophy itself?  Is there not essentially anything new since Hegel?  I'm not sure I can believe this, but the question of the "abolition" of philosophy (and the horizons of the Young Hegelians) hinges on this.

Logic is one key area to explore, and philosophy of nature is another.  How does everyone after Hegel relate to these two areas?

Hegel was the first fully self-conscious philosopher, it seems, who didn't just do philosophy but made its practice the subject of historical reflection.  So I would agree to assertions of this type.

I am wondering at this point whether the metacritique is, in its form, analytical at all. Perhaps its critique is more purely positive. I mean by this that there is passive element in analysing existing ideological/intellectual practices which may be better materially criticised by employing better and superior intellectual practice (linking up with education as being part of the intellectual process itself).

Yes, if I understand you correctly: it returns to a point I made in one of my previous posts, not to allow one's work to be dictated to by the agenda one opposes.  Such metacritique could embody such passivity and become another routine however intelligent.  Ideology critique can go on forever and ever and become another industry.  It's worth looking at those and critiquing them too (metametacritique?).  Perhaps the knowledge industry absorbs everything?  But I agree: the goal is to open out into the future, into something new.

Your point on the "knowledge industry" is well put and I am very much agreement that this is the case of passive, naïve, reflection of a given prefiguration (directly stemming from a very non-intellectual basis). This well sums up my impression of the Philosophical magazines, which more than in any other popular form make this passivity and naiveté plain.

Good.  It's important to articulate this.  The simplest and most obvious things are always the most elusive, and people don't see them.

Good point and I would draw attention to the division in Philosophy between Hegelian and pre-Hegelian Philosophy. Hegelian is a much broader and diverse church than Marxism, and despite the various shortcomings in various schools of thought stemming from this division, we do need to break with the predominantly Kantian nature of bourgeois ideology as a whole (not just the philosophical parts). I believe Kantianism is the highest form of ideological thought, that is it is philosophy which was a huge step forward from the past, articulated the very motion of thought but thought predetermined by the "unknown" ideological world view.

I'm not certain I understand this.  Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't.

It is this threshold that Hegel crosses and I think provides the natural division within philosophical thought. I  fault current philosophical trends by their Kantian guise that is if their concerns can be encompassed by Kantianism they  are effectively of the past (even if they are new philosophies). Hence at this level of essential thought Marxism holds no special place, for the division is epochal. All that is self-limiting belongs epistemologically to the past (not without useful insight but not sufficient to take seriously on its own grounds), anything which in thought is capable of self-development (regardless of any particular errors and oversights) belongs to the intellectual arena itself—an area of serious thought and debate.

Probably nobody else conceives the Kantian-Hegel split as the epochal moment in thought. I doubt if I could ever justify it soundly in philosophical terms—but in terms of intellectual practice I find it useful and this must mean something I think. Again  the test is simple enough can a specific viewpoint explain itself entirely in Kantian logic, or does it essentially exceed these limits.

 The whole of the structuralism vs poststructuralism debates fit snugly, for instance, within the logic of the grand structuralist Kant, and none I have seen as got beyond this epistemological confine despite its deconstructionalism (an intellectual con as far as I can see).

Curious.

20 December 2002

4

Now, I am rather mystified that Justin would think I'm a pragmatist now or that either Greg or I am Rortyan in any sense, Marx help us.  If Rorty thinks philosophy is over it's because he's a subjectivist who just wants to jerk himself off in perpetuity engaging in endless conversation, as there is no objective knowledge to be gained.  Greg, on the other hand, seems to be inspired by Hegel and by the development of the Young Hegelian movement leading to the "abolition" of philosophy.  My position is different.

I need to articulate my previous statements more clearly. . . .

(1) I am not making the claim that philosophy is over, but I'm suggesting that fruitful areas of investigation be distinguished from the endlessly regurgitating the old positions.

(2) On this latter point, I was referring to debating the same old positions in a popular format, but the same could apply to academic philosophy as well to the extent that it does this.  Since I reject anti-realist philosophy, I can't see it as being productive, unless this camp discovers some new ideas, which I doubt it can.  While the clash between opposing philosophical positions can advance the state of the art to a higher level, I'm not sure how long this can go on.  In any case, I see progress as the advance of objective knowledge, which does not exclude knowledge of the limitations of knowledge.  Hence I want to know what further progress can be made.  I did not make any assertions about the dead end of all branches of philosophy; I'm leaving this as an open question.

(3) When I say applying what we already know I have two things in mind, neither of which are what I understand by pragmatism. 

   (a) My minor point is this: philosophy, like all specialized fields, has generated such a huge literature that probably nobody knows what's going on as a whole.  Academia is so balkanized that everybody gets away with footnote-whoring so that they never be held accountable for what they don't know outside of their own invisible college.  Hence applying what is already known means assessing and synthesizing what's already out there, so that we know where we stand and where there is to go.  This of course involves judgments which will be vigorously contested, but hey, we're not entitled?

   (b) My major point is this: there is the primary historical function of philosophy in coming up with new positions in general and arguing for them.  But thinking in practice involves relating abstract ideas to concrete situations.  This is a practice of philosophy, not the creation of new systems of ideas.  And I think this practice pretty much sucks, both among professionals and the lay public.  How to use what we have might be fertile ground for new ways of thinking, but this is a different angle of vision from coming up with entirely new ideas in ontology and epistemology.  My organizing principle for the 1990s was philosophy and the division of labor.  I found exactly one professional philosopher in the USA interested in the topic.

(4)  My ill feeling about teaching the great philosophical questions is not Rortyan.  It makes me sick because at the very outset I think metaphilosophically.  I struggle against the very posing of the questions and want to try my hand at problem-solving another way.  I was like this at the very beginning, as a teenager.

Also, I think my early childhood interest in science might have had something to do with this.  I spent my first money at the age of 6 or 7 on science books for children.  This wasn't philosophy of science to be sure, but I developed certain habits of thinking that made me ill-disposed to traditional metaphysics. The modern questions are not essence viz. appearance or accident (or is it substance and accident?—I can't even remember), but matter viz. sensation and primary viz. secondary qualities.  The (sub)atomic constitution of all matter and its endless motion and transformation made some of the traditional stuff unspeakably dull, and so a lot of effort must be invested in trying to get into it, let alone tolerate it.  Also, one is predisposed to be skeptical from the gitgo about a priori metaphysical arguments.  I remember the first time I read the argument from Plato's Meno (?), that all knowledge is recollection.  My reaction, as a teenager: you mean this dumb shit is philosophy?

(5) Method vs. content, regurgitation vs. negation: I mean philosophy is a constant war against the ostensible, against formulations and statements.  The learning of ideas is also learning how to use them but also to inquire into their presuppositions and to always struggle with them to see not only what they assert but how they work.  So one has to struggle with the deeper motivations, tensions, and logical connections beneath the positive statements being made.  I could read something by Spinoza, Kant, and repeat what he wrote, and perhaps even paraphrase it, but to get underneath it is a struggle that goes beyond mimicry.  As Justin says, one has to digest it.  This process of digestion is what I am trying to get at.  I have my doubts as to how good people are at this.  (I think English professors who poach on philosophy have little grasp of the ideas they're using.)  Negation is the struggle against the apparent.  First, (abstract) thought is a negation of primary sensory experience, and then philosophical method is negation of thought's own phenomenology.

And it's a problem I have with popular philosophy books, crap like Sophie's World and even worse Zeno and the Tortoise.  It's not even remotely adequate as regurgitation, but that's what it is.  You can't learn how ideas are put together and why from reading this crap.  It's all just parroting.

(6) Making philosophical practical is learning how to think about everything, what else could it be?  See my essay on the subject referred to before.  I would never recommend anyone to go to law school, which can't be good for the mind.  The paradox of my paper was that philosophy was being practical, i.e. grasping the concrete, by being abstract.  Relating to the concrete more intimately by separating from it.  That's why I view ontology, epistemology, and logic as the heart of philosophy, and ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy not really philosophy at all in themselves.  But my practical concern at the moment was my experience in Washington DC.  What philosophy is to these people is debating campaign finance reform, the invasion of Iraq, laissez-faire capitalism.  So I am an intellectual elitist, I'm told, for saying, I'm sick of this shit: can't you talk about anything else?  Do you even know what philosophy is?

(7)  How philosophy relates to what is beyond its boundary: no it's not Rortyian, or Deweyan, or pragmatic.  It's just modern.  It's been known for 200 years at least that self-contained philosophy is limited.  Modern science, Hume, and Kant put a nail in the coffin of a priori philosophy long ago; by that I mean it's long known that empirical matters cannot be deduced from abstract philosophical categories.

(8) What's new since Hegel?  I can't speak on Davidson and Kripke, but indeed there is the whole development of modern logic.  Where did it begin?  Frege?  And then there's mathematical logic and foundations, which oddly has a different provenance.  (Logicians and mathematicians seem to belong to two different cultures, though they do indeed interact.)  I can't imagine how all this would not be new. 

Philosophy of science is the other major area of importance.  The Young Hegelians were into religion and politics; they left other areas untouched, even in Hegel's philosophy, to a great extent.  Obviously ontology and epistemology come into play here.  But I imagine that advances might have occurred even without reference to the sciences, though I'm hazy on this.  Of course what constitutes an advance is open to question.

(9) The Young Hegelians & the abolition of philosophy (from Hegel to Marx):   I will take this up in a separate post.

At 01:18 AM 12/22/2002 +0000, Justin Schwartz wrote:

“I would go a step further in this. Inherently the philosophical questions are more or less completed. There are other needs in this, but the idea of resolving anything much at the meta-level is more or less over. Indeed other than education, self-education, clarifying material in filling in a small number of gaps and finding a means of presenting in coherent form a whole system of philosophy (for purposes of education and self-knowledge) I am very much in agreement with this.”

“That is something to think about.  While I imagine much is old and stale, I would still be interesting in checking to see what if any areas of philosophy are still advancing substantively and which are doing the same old shit.”

I think you and Greg are making different kinds of statements. You are talking about whether some or other areas of philosophy are still making whatever passes for progress in philosophy,in the way that, perhaps, it seemed to me that when I started in philosophy in the mid 1970s there was a lot of action in political philosophy (Rawls, Nozick, the revival of Marx), philosophy of science, phil of language, etc, but today this doesn't seem to be the case. Right now is not a creative time in philosophy—and not just in analytical philosophy. So called continental philosophy, having abandoned marxism and exhausted whatever there was in postmodernism, is also quiescent. Greg is making a grander, Rortyian point: philosophy is Over, this isn't just the usual lull, this time It's Finished. Of course that's something we can't know, might be right, but it's been said a lot for a long time. What Rorty says here might be to the point: we're just waiting, really, for a new Heidegger or Wittgenstein to come along and baffle us into activity again.

“But I'm inclined to agree that what matters more is learning how to think through things, how to apply what we already know, than to think we are going to come up with new systems of thought.”

How pragmatic of you, Ralph!

“It seems that application of philosophical concepts (I'm not talking of applied disciplines like medical ethics, which have their own issues and problems) is not very intelligent.  I thought since the last undergrad class I walked out on that's there's something about the teaching of philosophy at the introductory level that is positively insufferable, an introduction to the perennial great philosophical questions.  That's another subject for reflection.”

Now YOU wax Rortyian. After having done it lots of ways, back when I did this sort of thing. I agree with you. I decided at the end of my teaching career that the best to teach intro phil was either a great texts approach (Plato's Republic, Ari's Nich Ethics, Descartes' Meditations, Hume's Inquiry, Kant's Prolegomena or Groundwork, Mill's On Liberty, Marx's Manifesto & Theses on Feuerbach, Nieztsche's Genealogy), or focus on a particular issue like Human Nature that took in a lot of territory.

“I think the most important thing to understand about philosophy is method rather than positive assertions, . . .”

Which means what? The "method" of philosophy is just thinking. You can't separate"method" from content.

“. . . and how it relates to everything outside itself (whatever the boundary might be) rather than just being self-contained.”

You sound more and more Rortyian, or Deweyan, or pragmatic.

“And to grasp it necessitates something deeper than just regurgitating the statements of recognized philosophers, i.e. a form of imitation.”

Well, regurgitation, that's one term. But grasping what Hegel or Kant or Wittgenstein is saying and trying to work it through, that's not regurgitation. You gotta digest it to do that. Many philosophers, however, regard mere scholarship as not real philosophy.

“Philosophy as an activity is inherently an act of negation, . . .”

No it's not! Sez you! Oh yeah? . . . .

“Is there not essentially anything new since Hegel?”

Yes. Though H's expression is abstract and lose enough so that you can find Davidson and Kripke in him if you want to.

“I'm not sure I can believe this, but the question of the 'abolition' of philosophy (and the horizons of the Young Hegelians) hinges on this.”

Well, that's as they saw it.

“Logic is one key area to explore, and philosophy of nature is another.  How does everyone after Hegel relate to these two areas?”

Well, modern logic has nothing to do with Hegel's logic, which is a kind of metaphysics. And philosophy of nature died after Hegel, except in its half life in Engels-influenced Marxism. What we have now is philosophy of science.

21 December 2002

7