Category: Musings (Page 14 of 18)

Literary scholars don’t claim that they became novelists or poets because they studied such authors and such literature. They know what they became: they became scholars who learned to produce certain kinds of commentaries on literary works. The distinction between the works they produce and the works they study is salient and most often impossible to overlook.

Things are not that obvious in what is called philosophy. Typically, people who study philosophical authors, texts, ideas and concepts and who receive a doctor’s degree in philosophy will call themselves philosophers.

They could also, and in most cases more appropriately, be called philosophical scholars who learned to produce certain types of commentaries on philosophical authors, texts, ideas and concepts.

Has philosophy been eaten up by the study of it? There seems to be a belief that philosophy exists in the scholarly format of commentaries on philosophical authors, texts, ideas and concepts, and that philosophy thrives and develops through the development of such comments.

A problem with this learned “façade conception” of philosophy is that the great canonized thinkers, who legitimize the study of philosophy, never produced that kind of scholarly literature when they philosophized.

An even greater problem is that if you try to philosophize and think for yourself today, as they did, the work you produce will be deemed “unphilosophical” or “lacking philosophically interesting thoughts,” because it isn’t written in the scholarly format of a commentary on canonized authors, texts, ideas and concepts.

Thank God literature isn’t that easily eaten up by the study of it. No one would call a novel “unliterary” because it wasn’t produced according to the canons of literary scholarship.

Pär Segerdahl

Philosophy has an aura of pretentiousness. Philosophers seem to make such ambitious claims about the essence of everything. About morality, about mind, about language… usually without doing any empirical research!

From where do they derive their claims? Are they sitting in armchairs just awaiting “truths” from out of nowhere? Is philosophy a form of “easy science” where one goes straight to the results without doing the research work needed to substantiate them?

But there are certain peculiarities in the claims, and in the style of address, which disappear in this image of philosophy as “easy science.”

Researchers can write didactically, informing the reader about results of their research. Science writers thus typically adopt a “von oben” attitude that is perfectly legitimate, since research sheds light on states of things that are unknown to the reader.

If philosophers adopt the didactic style of a science writer, the result is comical: “My thought processes during the past ten years demonstrate that morality basically is…,” and then follows information about the essence of morality!

The image of philosophers as pretentious “armchair researchers” expresses this comedy.

Philosophers certainly make claims, but these are claims that can be questioned by a reader who thinks further than the author. Philosophical writers expect readers to make objections that possibly are as powerful as the writer’s own. This “detail” is overlooked in the image of the pretentious armchair philosopher.

Philosophical writers expose their entire thought processes, so that the reader can think with – and against – the author. Philosophical writers address readers as peers in thinking. Together, we think for ourselves.

Perhaps the claim of scientific expertise has become so dominant that we no longer hear the claim of thoughtfulness.

Pär Segerdahl

One cannot say, “I’m the humblest person in the world,” without displaying arrogance. One cannot protest, “How dare you call me arrogant? My whole life I’ve served individuals who don’t even deserve to tie my shoelaces!” without once again displaying arrogance.

Or listen to this: “Nothing is certain; here is the proof.”

Anti- and post-movements – anti-metaphysics, post-humanism etc. – display similar difficulties of avoiding comical self-contradiction. It is difficult to reject the grandiose ambitions of metaphysics to describe the world order, without trying to describe a world order that evades description.

That is to say: it is difficult to resist the temptation.

Rhetorically brilliant anti-metaphysicians compete contriving the most awe-inspiring neologisms to unveil the world’s essential evasiveness… a nomadic world of quasi-objects, hybridization and crossings of borders.

“How dare you call me a pretentious metaphysician? I know everything about the world’s inexplicability!”

Pär Segerdahl