So this popped up in my stats, indicating a mild revival of interest in something I wrote 16 (!) years ago. And my first thought is: “Who was that masked man?” (IYKYK)
I would call it the earnestness of youth, but at 55, I was hardly young. Still, matters that seemed deeply important to me then, seem now as nattering and foolish as Dawkins and Hitchens did then. (Remember when they were Titans bestriding the globe? Except they never were; they were just the idols of a handful of people on the Intertoobs who were impressed by the pairs Oxonian tones. Neither Hitchens nor Dawkins ever knew what the fuck they were talking about; not when the subject was philosophy of religion.) My position now feels like Aquinas’ famous statement that, having finished the Summa, he had a vision that made all his efforts look like straw in comparison. The absolute figure of reason had a mystical insight that changed him utterly. Except I had no mystical experience; and I never claimed to be Aquinas redux.
I don’t now, either. I’m reading the Summa, casually. I follow all the arguments. I just end up thinking what I did reading Tillich in seminary: “Okay. But who cares?” I understand the foundation Aquinas laid. I even understand I stand on it. I’m not dismissing Aquinas. I’m just thinking about Kierkegaard. What does this mean for my life? How does it help me explain my existence? Kierkegaard was attacking Hegel’s systemization of thought, his reduction of existence to an abstract system. As he put it in an example I’ll misrepresent from memory, there was a man who was so abstracted from his own existence by contemplating the teachings of Hegel, he awoke one day to find he was dead, a fact he’d missed because he’d quit paying attention to his existence.
I used to pay close attention to philosophy (and theology), in order to apply it to real life, to effectively return philosophy to its status as wisdom. That pursuit actually began to dissolve in seminary, when I learned (but didn’t quite know it) that wisdom and western philosophy had diverged almost ab initio. The Greeks focused on philosophy, while the Hebrews, even as they examined the word of God minutely and intensely (and very argumentatively), were more interested in wisdom, or Sophia. Ironic since the Greeks gave us the word “philosophy,” or philo Sophia.” A lover (philo) of wisdom. But wisdom became a hyper technical pursuit, divorced and abstracted more and more from human existence. Of course, the Greeks of Plato’s time were more concerned with abstractions and buggering boys, which they justified as being superior to base lusts of men for women. The Hebrews were concerned with the law of Moses, which focused (read the prophets) on care for the widow and the orphan and the alien among them. For comparison’s sake, consider the play “Medea.” Or that the Hebrews gave us the “Song of Solomon.” And the Greeks? Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
So is wisdom about understanding the nature of the universe? Or about living in the human condition, and how best to do that? Aristotle’s answer to resolving the human condition in one’s life was to find the most successful person in your society, and emulate them. Trump? Elmo? There’s a reason few of us strive to learn from Aristotle’s Ethics. Then again, “ethics” just means “behavior.” It has precious little to do with justice.
The Hebrew prophets were first and last, and in between, about justice. To the Hebrews, Sofia was from God, with God, and essential to justice. Sofia was even essential to creation. John replaces Hebrew Sofia with the Greek Logos in his opening Hymn to the Logos. But it’s not really a one/to-one correspondence.
The more I lived with these teachings, the more I calved away from philosophy. Not that I’ve abandoned it. I was reading a recent New Yorker review of a book about modern philosophy and Derrida. The author didn’t seem to understand much about phenomenology or even Continental philosophy, but made one point that seemed stumbled upon rather than understood. Derrida’s deconstructionism (which he had largely mived beyond after using it to create a reputation. It’s not an unusual move in philosophy or the arts, for that matter) was, the article rightly pointed out, a tool for critiquing prior philosophy. Again, something almost any philosopher or artist does. How else to establish something new, if you don’t distinguish from the old? But the argument of the reviewer was that Derrida was trying to break out of the Academy he literally spent his life in; but his arguments were so esoteric, only the Academy could understand them.
Which, ironically, is why Plato set up his Academy: so the “right” people could understand him, and think as he did. It’s an unfortunate comparison, but three people in history, three very influential people, went the other way: Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus. You will say Paul at least established house churches. True, but he never controlled them like Plato controlled his Academy. And he spent his time trying to teach them, even as he wandered the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire. In fact, maybe the central thread here is teacher, a peripatetic one. One engaging people, not other academicians. It’s not that discussions among teachers is a bad thing. Midrash is a valuable record of analysis of the Hebrew Scriptures. It’s rabbis arguing with rabbis arguing with rabbis, and that record is instructive and insightful. But rabbi, which means “teacher,” is a person in a community, not an academy.
An academy is a community, too. But it’s one most of us pass through, isn’t it? It’s not where we live the rest of our lives.
Kierkegaard published his books for the readers of Copenhagen; admittedly, a small percentage of the population (those who could afford books, and were educated enough to understand what S.K. was on about). Sartre wanted his ideas popularized. It’s why he wrote his most famous, and accessible, essay on existentialism. Being and Nothingness, on the other hand, is a very technical slog. There’s nothing wrong with that. The Summa Theoligica is not a beach read, either. And Kierkegaard presumes a lot of knowledge about Hegelian thought, as well as Greek literature.
There is no royal road to geometry, as some Greek supposedly said. Then again, geometry is techne, not sophia. We need a modern form of philotechne (a portmanteau of my own poor creation), or at least a word to explain our devotion to it (to name it is to recognize it), but more than that we need a new appreciation, at least, of sophia.
It was Wittgenstein, if memory serves, who said of his Tractatus that he meant it to serve only as a ladder that those who understand would climb and discard. IYKYK, as the kids say now. I think that’s how I came to understand, or at least conceive, that philosophy had not disserved me, but in fact had served me. And I haven’t discarded it; I’ve just moved in another direction. I’m not even sure it’s a better direction, but that’s the way it goes.
"The sense of the world must lie outside the world....in it no value exists...” Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §6.41.
