Over at Object-Oriented Philosophy Graham has an interesting post up raising the question of who might be the most overrated philosopher of all time. There are three rules to the game: First, the overrated philosopher must be recent. Sorry, if you don’t like Hegel that’s not grounds for claiming he’s overrated. He’s earned his place through his influence on subsequent philosophy. Second, the philosopher must be rated by many as being one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Note, this criterion need not imply consensus. It can refer to how fan clubs rate philosophers. And finally third, the most overrated philosopher will probably not be completely worthless. That is, he or she will have made some genuine contributions.
Graham hasn’t stated who his choices are and doesn’t plan to, but some of his readers have suggested Sartre, McDowell, Derrida, Sellars, Kripke, and Russell. I don’t think Sartre fits the bill because first off, there are hardly any Sartreans about these days, and second I do think the Sartre of Being and Nothingness and The Critique of Dialectical Reason gets a bum rap. Sartre somewhat got clothes-lined by the existentialist movement (which he partially brought on himself with essays like “Existentialism is a Humanism”), but he is, in my view, a much richer philosopher than people give him credit for. The time is ripe for a re-evaluation of Sartre’s thought. I just don’t know enough about McDowell to say one way or another (I have Mind and World, but have never read it). Derrida definitely fits the bill of overrated philosopher in my book. I actually wrote my masters thesis on Derrida and desperately wanted to find something groundbreaking in his thought, but I could never escape the impression that Derrida is a one trick pony that created three or four concepts (differance, supplementarity, and trace) that he then monotonously repackaged with different terms in text after text from there on out. I’ve just never gotten the obsession some have with Derrida, even if I do think his deconstruction of metaphysics is valuable. I don’t know that anyone has ever characterized Sellars, Kripke, or Russell as “greatest philosophers”, so the issue strikes me as moot with them. These are modest thinkers, rather, that each created a handful of concepts and lines of arguments that were extremely important, but not much beyond that. In other words, they’re not what I would call comprehensive philosophers, but by and large were restricted to very specific problems and questions. By a comprehensive philosopher I have in mind a philosopher that develops not only an epistemology and metaphysics, but also a moral, political, and aesthetic philosophy. Think Kant or Sartre.
My vote for overrated philosopher actually kills me because he’s been such an influence on my own thought and I encountered him at exactly the time I needed to encounter him: Badiou. When I first picked up Badiou’s Ethics and Being and Event both texts hit me like a gust of fresh air. At the time I was in a general malaise, feeling as if philosophy was dead and had been reduced to semiotic analysis of texts and armchair sociological meditations. Badiou dared to do philosophy again and opened a whole new field of thought for me. However, when you get into the nuts and bolts of his thought I somewhat feel that there just isn’t a whole lot of “there there”. Badiou certainly fits the bill of being a “comprehensive philosopher”, but I just don’t get the sense that his concepts are a fecund source of inspiration for generating new research and thought in other philosophers and people in other disciplines outside of philosophy.
One of the ways in which I measure the greatness of a philosophy is not by the content of the philosopher’s work itself, but rather by what a philosophy is able to engender in the work of others. Thus, for example, if Husserl is a great yet underrated philosopher, this isn’t necessarily because of his own work. Let’s face it, Husserl’s own work is often monotonous, repetitive, and obsessional in character (the grounding of the ground that needs to be grounded through yet another reduction that will be more rigorous than the last). The greatness of Husserl lies in broaching an entirely new style of philosophy that engendered research for hundreds of thinkers spiraling out in thousands of different directions: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, Marion, Henry just to name a few. I don’t get the sense that Badiou’s thought has this sort of generative power. Rather, we seem to get a repetitive schema that endlessly repeats being as multiplicity, event, truth-procedures, subject without broaching entirely new fields of thought or research. By this criteria, I would probably rate Derrida higher than Badiou just because of the impact Derrida has had on so many other research orientations, and often in ways far more interesting than Derrida’s own work. But who knows, perhaps I just need to return to Badiou and read him again with fresh eyes.
Larval Subjects . 
February 26, 2010 at 2:25 am
Probably the wrong crowd to mesh with your perspective, but I found it interesting that in a poll of mainly Anglophone philosophers, Wittgenstein was the only 20th-century figure to make the “top 20 of all time” list at all, and therefore it seems the only candidate for being overrated (by them).
I think you’re right on Russell not being generally considered a top-of-all-time and therefore not really a candidate; if he were to make a top-of-all-time list in any audience, it would be that one, and he didn’t.
February 26, 2010 at 2:52 am
Wow, for some reason Wittgenstein didn’t even come to mind, even though I’ve spent a lot of time with him. It’s interesting that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard rate so low, whereas Frege rates so high (#9!). I suppose this is one reason discursive communities need to be specified when addressing these questions.
February 26, 2010 at 3:02 am
[…] 26, 2010 Whereas I withhold my own “overrated” list, the fearless Levi OFFERS HIS IN PUBLIC. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment […]
February 26, 2010 at 3:43 am
What about Zizek? Does anyone think his dialectics to be a alchemic marxist-lacanian spectacle?
February 26, 2010 at 4:18 am
I’ve had similar feelings about Badiou. On the one hand there is something genuinely exciting and refreshing about him but I feel almost like he tells you too much. There’s a certain elegance to his system, for instance the idea that philosophy is axiomatic and founded on other concerns. I’m sympathetic to that idea generally but then he says “Oh there are only four conditions by the way, all thought is exhausted by them.” Reading his book on St. Paul I kept wondering how exactly this was meant to be “political” or about “love” and NOT about, you know, revelation. If he wouldn’t say so much, if he wouldn’t seemingly impress upon the system his own biases, I feel like I could be very excited about it. His whole model of subjectivity is similar; on a certain level I agree with him but again, I feel like he says too much and should have left some mystery to it, allowing for a model of subjectivity that is inherently reactive, that is, conditioned on something other than itself, without then limiting what those conditions can be.
That being said, I’m not sure if Badiou is popular enough to warrant being the most overrated. Are there that many people already naming him among the greats (besides himself)?
February 26, 2010 at 7:32 am
[…] Apart from all that, what has he done for us? Levi Bryant has a great post up responding to the go-round on overrated philosophers. I would agree with him about Badiou. I think, […]
February 26, 2010 at 7:41 am
[…] Just a quick follow-up to the last post on Levi. He writes: “I could never escape the impression that Derrida is a one trick pony that created three or […]
February 26, 2010 at 11:28 am
I find that Grahams list of what characterizes an overrated philosopher is a good starting point, but Michael’s comment on Zizek as an “alchemic marxist-lacanian spectacle” points towards something important that hasn’t been mentioned yet: The work of an overrated philosopher is often nothing more than a mash-up or mixing of concepts already developed by earlier philosophers. I respect Zizek in a number of ways, but he hasn’t really contributed to philosophy as far as new concepts go (you can find most of it in Hegel, Marx and Lacan, even Adorno). Leaving the question of whether or not Zizek is overrated, my point is that the overrated philosopher often fails because of lack real originality. While his contribution might feel fresh and original at the time, it is in my opinion often due to a new way of applying old concepts from the history of philosophy (in a way that might be analogous to sampling). Of course, this way of looking at the question instantly turns almost every single philosopher into an overrated philosopher because everyone learns or borrows or redevelops from earlier material. Nonetheless, originality and absolutely new ways of thinking occasionally emerge in philosophy (some have for instance mentioned Bergson as such a philosopher, Freud’s contribution to philosophy might be of the same calibre, one immediately wonders “From where did he get this?”). The overrated philosopher often just blends together whatever is in the kitchen.
February 26, 2010 at 11:38 am
Reading Grahams post again, I’m not sure if what I just wrote is different from what he writes or just a way of rewriting the whole point.
February 26, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Most overrated yet influential philosopher = Augustine
February 26, 2010 at 6:18 pm
same again, with improved spelling…
Let’s not beat around the bush… Badiou’s bizzare application of algebra to political history, in order to prove that there has been an ‘event’ under his own terms, as the ‘count of one’ – an odd and irreducible rupture in a multiplicity of being – is nothing more than the mathematization of the obvious. Hoe anyone could be astounded or interested has beat me for years. At first I thought I just didn’t get Badiou. Now I know I do (and did) and I think it’s clear that Badiou is simply obsessed by maths, and thinks he’s on to something as a result (much like art obsessives see art everywhere, and bang on about it saving the world, ditto internet freaks). And the rest of us must suffer… No more!
I’m also pretty sure that he isn’t taken off his pedestal more often just because he is so ‘powerful’. There’s normally one big living guy at the top that people are scared to criticize. It’s not a good thing for philosophy though. Zizek’s nearly in the same position. What’s worse is that so many people commit themselves to their causes.. so then it’s like they become not just difficult to critique for their ‘political’ clout, but because, like banks – apparently -they’ve become ‘too big to fail’. If we pointed out just how pathetic all some of our ‘best’ thinkers are, would the whole tower of cards come tumbling down?!
Honestly, I think most of the best philosophy is written by diligent hard working and camera-shy types, like
Duttmann (ignoring the fact he’s my PhD tutor, which means I’m maybe biased… but then I’M NOT) and Brassier (even though I disagree with him). You see, if someone is not out to make a huge name for themselves they are more likely philosophically reliable (diligent, and coherent, driven towards seeking truth, etc). When people start writing to please an audience then the quality suffers… especially when they won’t renege on faults made in earlier works.
That’s not to cuss Harman, because I think having a blog is a whole different kettle of fish to wantonly seeking stardom. And Harman does score very well on the ‘reneging’ front. He’s not a ‘system’ philosopher, or one of those types that thinks they might just be able to save the world, if only they could stop being struck by such intellectual brilliance… LIKE: ‘In my other life I was a prophet… but there’s no time for that now kids… I’ll just bang on about Hegel, and you can pick up the pieces…’
Anyhow, that rant aside, I’m fully expecting Harman to surprise us and tell us that the most overrated philosopher is Heidegger. He has hinted at some loss of faith in Heidegger recently, and casting him as overrated doesn’t clash with his interest in him anyhow. Failing that, Sartre, or he may over stretch himself and say Adorno (I say over stretch as I’ll then have to mount a strong counter argument for the sake of my thesis and first book. This is complete conjecture… I am not sure what Harman thinks about Adorno). My money is on Harman to say ‘Heidegger’.
February 26, 2010 at 6:49 pm
@Levi Yeah, Frege is surprising, though he goes up or down a lot depending on how many points you award for influence on mathematics and computer science. The work of, say, Peano, Gödel, and Church is in large part extending or responding to essentially Fregeian problems and concepts; but then one needs to decide in turn how to rate their work.
February 27, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Sometimes mathematizing the obvious is useful as in Don DeLillo’s oft-repeated aphorism in Libra: “Zero in the system.” Which, come to think of it, is what Carl was clumsily dancing around last August when he said:
“It’s also important to remember that from a larger perspective the legitimating function of the academy as a symbol of the open society depends on supporting academics to think our critical thoughts as we see fit – safely sealed off in our little disciplinary harems, of course. We are not paid off to shill directly for The Man because we are part of a system that shills much more subtly and effectively if our critical voices are both enabled and marginalized.”
Not only is one individually “zero in the system,” but the system in which academia operates is also “zero in the system.” 0+0=0
If this has been nagging at me for lo these many months, I bet Levi’s been puzzling over how to move really good ideas (like all of Alain Badiou’s) from the margins to the center. My money is on this post as a reverse psychology ploy, the oldest trick in the book, to get everyone to drop all the important things they’re working on and spend as much time as they possibly can this weekend watching all of Badiou’s talks and interviews on youtube and sending the links all over the place to all who could possibly make use of them in their pedagogical practice and everyday discourse.
Well, I’ve got news for you, Levi. I’ve already watched them and they’re fabulous!
February 27, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Is Deleuze such an obvious answer that no one’s even going to bother? Or is he now underrated and thus due for a (don’t-call-it- a) comeback?
February 27, 2010 at 11:29 pm
[…] The discussion on this has generated some really interesting replies, such as Levi Bryant’s here, […]