As I have recounted in previous posts, I had a rather schizophrenic experience in my philosophical trainng. As an undergrad at Ohio State, I was trained in both the analytic and Continental traditions; and, in fact, most of my 116 hours of course work in philosophy was in analytic and Anglo-American philosophy. Although I found a great deal of value in this style of thought, I often found myself dissatisfied as the problems this style of philosophy dealt with often struck me as remote from the sort of “existential” concerns that first drive one to philosophy. Consequently, when I began looking for graduate schools– and deeply in the midst of an addiction to all things Heideggarian and Foucaultian –I looked for a Continental program that also had a healthy dose of Anglo-American philosophers in its faculty. As a result, I finally decided on Loyola of Chicago, where I would get to study with philosophers of mind like J.D. Trout and Moser, philosophers of science like Blachowicsz, Kantians like Paul Abela, and Continentalists like Thomas Sheehan, Patricia Huntington, Andrew Cutrofello, Adrian Peperzak, and David Ingram. Loyola also offered an excellent grounding in the history of philosophy which I believed vital to any philosophical education.
When I got to Loyola my coursework quickly became focused on Continental thought. I must have taken six courses with Peperzak, ranging from Kant, to Hegel, to Heidegger, and Levinas, whose mannerisms I still remember with great fondness and a slight smirk. I took a number of seminars with Cutrofello on Deleuze, Foucault, Kant, and Derrida. I took a number of courses with Huntington on postmodern feminist theory, Heidegger, and various existentialists. However, in the mean time I was reading a great deal of biology, physics, complexity theory, and neurology. I’ll still never forget the look of horror on the faces of my peers when they found out I was reading Dennett, Dawkins, and Gould. “Why”, they exclaimed, “would you possibly read that?” “What are you thinking reading Paul Churchland?”
Although I worked heavily on Deleuze throughout my five years in graduate school, the best description of my philosophical orientation at this time would be phenomenological. I think, maybe, I’m one of five people in the world that actually devoured Husserl’s various texts and lectures with delight. I suspect that means I’m cracked in some way. It is certainly a good thing that I eventually entered analysis with Bruce Fink. I delighted in the work of Merleau-Ponty. I thought Levinas was perhaps the most beautiful stylist of all the philosophers who had ever written. I shivered with pleasure at Jean-Luc Marion’s discussions of givenness. I ravenously read the work of Ed Casey. I guiltily read Sartre throughout, believing him to be gauche at that time, but still secretly loving his work. For some reason I had largely lost interest in Heidegger, wondering why I had been so enchanted with him. Perhaps it was his style. At any rate, my friends would joke that I was living in a permanent “transcendental epoche chamber”.
read on!
However, while I delighted in all of these things, I nonetheless felt a deep fissure in my thought. On the one hand there before me was all of this fascinating science. On the other hand, in the world of academic philosophy, there was the new dominant variants of correlationism in the form of the Linguistic Turn, phenomenology, and the semiotic turn. How to reconcile these two things?
Rather than taking a stand on realism and anti-realism on epistemological grounds, perhaps it would be better to evaluate these competing positions on pragmatic grounds. That is, since Kant effected his famous Copernican revolution, what have we seen in Continental thought. While there are certainly always exceptions, the exception does not make the rule. When we look at the two reigning orientations of thought in contemporary Continental philosophy– phenomenology and the linguistic turn –we notice that they are almost entirely mum where the developments of the last 300 years since Galileo are concerned. Here we are living in the midst of some of the most profound upheavals in our understanding of what we are as human beings, of our world, of the nature of our social relations as a result of post-Galilean science, the new technology, the transformation of communications, the advent of capitalism, etc., and the most dominant orientations of Continental thought hardly reflect on these sorts of things at all.
Why is this? Were historians to discover the most significant works of Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, Levinas, Marion, even Lacan and Badiou two thousand years from now– were it these works alone that they discovered –would they be able to discern of the impact that Darwin, neurology, genetics, quantum mechanics, relativity, capitalism, and technology had on our age? Would they even know that these things had taken place based on these texts? One can protest that these things are not the proper domain of philosophy, that they fall outside of philosophy. Certainly Sokal and Bricmont have us all running scared these days, and we have enough research to do as it is without having to make forays into entirely disciplines.
However, there is something internal to the key presuppositions of Continental thought that seems to prevent, a priori, any engagement with the most significant historical transformations of our time. Despite all that phenomenology has done in teaching us about the nature of our relation to the world, our affectivity, our bodies, and our relation to others, the methodological operation of the phenomenological reduction and the focus on the given and givenness largely excludes any deep or sophisticated engagement with these things. The suspension of the natural attitude and the reduction to pure givenness is nothing less than the exile of causality. As a consequence, the findings of biology and neurology can’t even make it past the door as they’ve already fallen before the reduction. To discuss these things is to regress back to the natural attitude and, by extension, dogmatism.
The Linguistic Turn carries out a “reduction” similar to that of the phenomenological reduction or epoche, but with respect to texts, signifiers, and language. Having learned the lessons well of how it is language that precedes the referent, how language produces its referent, one is guilty of the worst sort of naive dogmatism if they continue to speak of the referent or claim that we can have knowledge of the referent. As a consequence, we must instead restrict ourselves to an endless engagement with texts, whether to deconstruct them or to engage in the hermeneutic work of retrieving them, bracketing anything to do with the referent. Not only does it become impossible to take a position within such a framework as we only have competing texts, but all of science is bracketed out of existence as a sort of naive dogmatism that does not recognize how it constructs its referent through the play of the signifier.
These, I think, are high prices to pay for the sake of critical rigor. It seems to me that one of the primary vocations of philosophy is to think the essence of its time. It is not by mistake that philosophy seems to arise in periods of profound upheaval– whether that upheaval be political, scientific, or technological –and that part of the social and cultural role of philosophy is to navigate and articulate the newness of that which is in the process of being born. Yet through the decisions made by Continental thought within the last three hundred years, we have created a series of blocks and inhibitors that prevent philosophy from engaging this world. Even if realism proves to be an epistemically unsupportable position– and I don’t think that’s the case –there is nonetheless a case to be made for realism as a regulative ideal within philosophical discourse. Such a regulative ideal at least opens philosophy to a much broader range of issues and topics, giving it the means to reflect on its time.
April 23, 2009 at 9:50 pm
I hope you never had a chance to hear him speak, the man is a horrible bore – I mean out of your mind bore!
April 23, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Dr Sinthome I must say that my experience studying psychology in a completely different place on the map, Belgrade namely, was identical. Psychoanalysts kept themselves in a kind of a religious coven, which the mathematically oriented psychologists and statisticians observed with great paranoia. The result was a clubbing mentality of nearly comic proportions, which ultimately disappointed me so that I left the whole damn business to pursue another career. However I think the parallel presence of behavioral and psychoanalytic psychology opened my mind to the perspective of a combination, which guys like you are right now putting into practice, and this should be applauded. Universities should keep those different options running at the same time, otherwise they create dogmatic robots.
April 23, 2009 at 11:54 pm
As I stand dejected at the locked gates of JSTOR, it’s good to know that there are advantages to being an outsider :)
April 24, 2009 at 12:21 am
One of the interesting things about philosophy is that it’s never really practiced in philosophy departments, which is why, excluding a class on logic, I’ve never taken a single “philosophy” class in undergrad (the most annoying comment is always the, “You must be a philosophy major!”). Instead, *real* philosophy I’ve found only in places like the German and comparative literature departments. Still, the reduction of philosophy to literary criticism is really problematic and all sorts of subtleties and difficulties at the level of actual theory get glossed over and ignored. That’s my problem with things as they stand from my position, and the reason why I will never apply to either Philosophy or Complit grad programs, barring some very particular set of circumstances.
Really I think it speaks to the strange status of philosophy as such, where real philosophy is always a kind of “part of no part,” located in the critical space proper. If you aim at it directly/positively, in the most visibly obvious places, the results will inevitably be disappointing. Instead, you have to really search for the kind of place, usually overlooked or of a peculiar status itself, where the discipline hasn’t been territorialized, so to speak. That’s always much more elusive, and hence more difficult to find.
April 24, 2009 at 12:41 am
Bryan,
That’s a really interesting observation. In line with your thesis of philosophy as a “part of no part” (which I agree with), I wonder if part of the issue also is that philosophy is without an object. One of the things I’ve struggled with for years is the question of what exactly I’m supposed to be doing as a philosopher? What is it, that I as a philosopher, am studying or investigating? The answer to this question doesn’t strike me as being at all self-evident and I suspect that this might be because philosophy is without an object. Rather, philosophy always seems to draw its object from elsewhere in a way that is variable with different historical settings. I find it striking that many of our greatest philosophers were people that weren’t philosophers in any sort of professional sense. We get folks like Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Locke, Nietzsche, Marx, etc. Their philosophical work seemed to arise not out of the discipline of philosophy, but rather out of necessities pertaining to their other occupations. This isn’t, of course, the case with all philosophers, but even in the case of academic philosophy the greatest periods of philosophical flourishing seem to arise not from within the discipline of philosophy itself but with respect to transformations taking place culturally (is it a mistake that we get this concentration of great French philosophers around the time of ’68?), and with respect to transformations taking place in other domains of knowledge. Deleuze and Guattari strike me as having a strong take on this with respect to the relationship they draw between concepts, affects/percepts, and functives pertaining to philosophy, art, and science respectively. Each, they contend, grasps the world in a particular way and provokes the others in particular ways.
April 24, 2009 at 2:30 am
“The suspension of the natural attitude and the reduction to pure givenness is nothing less than the exile of causality.”
But isn’t the dismissal of the hegemony of causality (instrumentality, principle of sufficient reason) precisely that which is most exciting about modern science? Here is perhaps where the discussion (on this blog?) about vitalism as the rejection of reductionist theories of reality is handy. The ‘return to reality’ or neo-materialism emerging today seems to me to be the realization that our understandings of causality are far too narrow to explain the emergence of complex entities, etc.
April 24, 2009 at 3:48 am
Levi writes:
>This isn’t, of course, the case with all philosophers, but even in the case of academic philosophy the greatest periods of philosophical flourishing seem to arise not from within the discipline of philosophy itself but with respect to transformations taking place culturally (is it a mistake that we get this concentration of great French philosophers around the time of ‘68?), and with respect to transformations taking place in other domains of knowledge.
Transformations is perhaps too soft a word–I would go so far as to say ruptures. But yes, definitely, and it’s just as interesting that many of the philosophers after ’68 have concentrated so much energy on ideology critique. In a way I think it’s similar to what happened to Leibniz’s metaphysics after the Lisbon Earthquake. After that event, no one could seriously describe things as the “best of all words,” and so it isn’t surprising that the young Kant wrote a number of essays on the Lisbon earthquake (one of the first to argue that they were the result of natural, as opposed to supernatural, causes). So I think there is a certain affinity there. One might even say the same for Marx and Freud (new kinds of intense economic crises resulting from the development of industrial capitalism and the crisis in Victorian feminine subjectivity). Philosophy and crisis/rupture for sure seem to be intertwined (my undergraduate thesis argued this point apropos Lacan–that the breaks/shifts in his thought were linked to psychoanalytic institutional crises).
April 24, 2009 at 4:08 am
“In line with your thesis of philosophy as a ‘part of no part’ (which I agree with), I wonder if part of the issue also is that philosophy is without an object. One of the things I’ve struggled with for years is the question of what exactly I’m supposed to be doing as a philosopher? What is it, that I as a philosopher, am studying or investigating? The answer to this question doesn’t strike me as being at all self-evident and I suspect that this might be because philosophy is without an object. Rather, philosophy always seems to draw its object from elsewhere in a way that is variable with different historical settings.”
I liked how you explored this theme in your recent post about Badiou and “thinking the present.” It reminds me of a very powerful passage in Dogen Zenji’s essay, “Genjo-koan”:
If philosophy is without an object of its own, or an identity, how can the philosopher have anything to say about itself?
April 26, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Bryan, I apologize if this is disrespectful of me to say but it seems to me that if you say “excluding a class on logic, I’ve never taken a single “philosophy” class in undergrad” and “[philosophy]’s never really practiced in philosophy departments” you’re making a really big claim based on an inference from way too little evidence. I did loads of philosophy in philosophy classes as an undergrad, which is why I majored in it. Philosophy departments are definitely not the only place to get philosophy – I was introduced to the subject in another class outside the philosophy department – but I can’t imagine what you mean by “no one in philosophy departments really does philosophy.”
LS, if you don’t mind the personal curiousity, when were you living in Chicago and whereabouts? My wife and I lived there for a few years, moved away I think 4 years ago and still miss it a lot. We lived all over the city, our last apartment was very close to Loyola – we got married in a very small private ceremony at Standees right by the granville red line stop.
cheers,
Nate
April 26, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Wow Nate, sounds like you were right by me. We were on Morse Ave on the Lake side. I spent a lot of time at Panini’s and the Oasis. That’s a hoot about Standees!
April 27, 2009 at 5:13 am
Neat. And a little sad, like ships passing in a cliche… :) When were you there?
April 27, 2009 at 12:52 pm
I moved about four years ago.