Over at the sublime Frames/Sing, Kevin has an interesting post up on philosophical dialogue. I have been hesitant to link to this post as I’m directly implicated, but I think his observations are worth posting here as they go straight to the heart of what I would describe as a sort of philosophical sickness or disease. Kevin writes:

In the comments section of Larval Subjects attempt to deal again with Kantian normativity, 8&$@## [name redacted as a gesture of friendship] repeats the authority of his reading of Kant, after the claim that someone simply is an embarassment:

You either don’t get it, or your pretend to not get it – you don’t understand such simple matters as “form” vs. “matter” in Kant’s philosophy in general – are you serious? For such a great reader of Kant, you seem to be spewing nonsensical readings of him right and left, I mean you’ve become a joke around the pub with “Have you read this latest comment by Levi about Kant?….I interpret my Kant the way most of Kant scholarship does, I’m not a genius with innovative ideas, I’m dull and boring – if you knew your Kant, you would see how regular and annoyingly mediocre my views are.

It is not particular to Kant that I want to speak, but to simply the way that philosophy is discussed. I suppose we all feel this way. If someone disagrees with us (or “us”), they simply do not understand us (it is not that we are wrong). When they show us that we were wrong, if ever, we realize that we didn’t understand us. We all grow frustrated when disagreement cuts to the very roots of our suppositions. And the same may be said when it cuts the very roots of a thinker we greatly admire.

Personally, I find it difficult though, in the particular case of the Kant Krew at *#$$%##$# [redacted out of friendship], is that the appeal is ultimately to a kind of “you are an idiot”, “you don’t even understand the very basics of Kant” when Kant is criticized to the root. All this, while they also fall back upon the idea that they themselves are not even Kantians, that they are just telling the world the orthodox position of Kant, in fact regurgitating it in a fashion. It is not so much the entrenchment of such a position I am troubled with (”I am simply repeating Kant Orthodoxy to you, if you question it it is merely that you do not understand him”), but the unengaged nature of this kind of talk. It is as if one is no longer even actively thinking about Kant, taking a critical view, pulling the threads apart, running it through your fingers. If the thought is dead in your hands, and one is simply repeating Orthodoxy stuff you read in commentaries (and how much of philosophy is done like this, wherein one talks like one knows because one repeats what someone “who knows” says), what is the point?

I think Kevin is right on the mark here in his analysis of why this mode of discourse is so troubling. Somehow every contestation of a philosopher’s position is transformed into a misreading or misinterpretation of that position. In a manner not unlike how Torah is read, the text is treated as unquestionable, and instead we are required to engage in endless acts of interpretation with respect to the text. As a result, what you get are “competing species” in Continental philosophy where one sides with the Deleuzian text or the Foucaultian text or the Husserlian text or the Heideggerian text, etc. We have all of these various textual ghettos and the rule is that none of these texts ever directly confront one another.

read on!

In this connection, I remember my experience of graduate school. Now undoubtedly graduate school was one of the happiest times in my life. When else, in your life, are you given the opportunity to congregate with brilliant, interesting people, take three courses a term, and spend your days doing nothing but reading while getting paid for it? Such is a truly blessed state. However, while grad school was a blessed time of intellectual discovery, it was also accompanied by a profound sense of disappointment and loathing of academic philosophy.

I had first discovered philosophy some time between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. As many of these stories go, my discovery involved a woman or broken heart, coupled with a period of deep personal upheaval where I failed a year of school, became heavily involved in drugs, and was homeless. Philosophy literally saved me and gave my life an entirely new direction. Where prior to this I had thought school to be some grand ideological conspiracy, I now found a value in what I was pursuing. If I turned to philosophy it was because I wished to discover how I should live my life, what is worth pursuing, what is right and wrong. However, I did not think these questions could be answered without first knowing my own nature, the nature of being, and the nature of the social world. It was Spinoza, in his Ethics and Theologico-Politico Treatise who first pointed the way for me, even though Husserl’s Ideas was the first work of philosophy that I ever read.

However, here’s the deal. In studying these philosophers– by the time I had graduated I had read Being and Time, James’ Pragmatism, Husserl’s Ideas, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, The Critique of Pure Reason, Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Spinoza’s Ethics and Theologico-Politico Treatise, Schopenhaeur’s World as Will and Representation, various works by Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno, and many more works besides –my aim was not to understand these philosophers, but the world. I was interested in these philosophers not for their own sake, but with respect to how they could help me to understand the world, my self, society, and what the “good life” might be.

I think this, in a nutshell, is the problem with Continental academia. While it is certainly an eminently reasonable proposition that we must understand a philosopher to critique that philosopher, continental philosophy programs never seem to get to that moment of critique. The very idea of evaluating a text in terms of its truth claims is a scandal, and any disagreement with a text or philosophy– so long as it’s coded as “continental” (the continentals know all those Brits and Anglo-American philosophers are just batshit crazy insane and wrong) –is scandalous. But at the end of the day, did we begin studying philosophy and pursue studies in philosophy to understand philosophers? Or are the great philosophers rather fellow travelers who might help us to understand the world around us but whom, the study of which, should never be an end in itself? At a certain point it seems to me that we should be able to cease the work of interpretation, agree that there are certain root claims and positions, and that these root claims and positions are susceptible to critique and disagreement without being based on misinterpretation. I cannot help but feel that 90% of the time, charges of misinterpretation are, in fact, an acknowledgment that one does not have a counter-argument, but still wishes to maintain their position. Socrates is turning in his grave.