Monday, 4 November 2024

Aristotle's Apopsophiein

 A couple of years after the War on Terror commenced, in a paper titled 'Philsoophy and Democracy' Michael Walzer wrote this- 

The prestige of political philosophy is very high these days.

It is very low now. What changed? In 2003, we thought we'd win the war on terror. Iran and North Korea would meet the same fate as Saddam's Iraq. We would export 'Democracy'- i.e. rich kids from our new colonies would pay big bucks to come study 'political philosophy' at Ivy League and then work hand in glove with their frat buddies to loot their countries for the benefit of Wall Street. 

Sadly, we lost the war on terror. Iran and the Taliban and China were the big winners. Our politics was stupidity and our philosophy vacuous shite. 

It commands the attention of economists and lawyers, the two groups of academics most closely connected to the shaping of public policy,

This was written four years before the financial crash. Economists and lawyers were shown to be as stupid as shit. Whatever had 'commanded their attention' was mischievous nonsense. 

as it has not done in a long time.

It had been a long time since we went to war in the belief that we would make a profit.  

And it claims the attention of political leaders, bureaucrats, and judges, most especially judges, with a new and radical forcefulness.

The Rehnquist court is considered conservative. I wonder why Walzer thought otherwise. Maybe he thought 'States Rights' was 'communitarian'. 

The command and the claim follow not so much from the fact that philosophers are doing creative work, but from the fact that they are doing creative work of a special sort- which raises again, after a long hiatus, the possibility of finding objective truths, "true meaning," "right answers," "the philosopher's stone," and so on.

Religion does that. Philosophy doesn't. As Socrates observed, Philosophy is what you are doing if you can argue just as well for or against a proposition. The 'philosopher's stone' was pursued by alchemists not philosophers.  

want to accept this possibility (without saying very much about it) and then ask what it means for democratic politics. What is the standing of the philosopher in a democratic society?

It is that of Simon the shoemaker in ancient Athens. On the other hand, if you spent a lot of your time talking to young men and some of those young men were considered impious in their conduct, like Socrates, you might be executed or exiled.  

This is an old question; there are old tensions at work here: between truth and opinion, reason and will, value and preference, the one and the many. These antipodal pairs differ from one another, and none of them quite matches the pair "philosophy and democracy."

One can say that ancient Athens produced some good philosophy during a relatively democratic period in its history. One may then mention Cicero, and the long shadow he threw over the Post-Renaissance Europe before ending with salutary praise of the American founding fathers and the connection between a philosophic paideia and Republican institutions. 

But they do hang together; they point to a central problem. Philosophers claim a certain sort of authority for their conclusions;

No. Different philosophers claim different sorts of authority or else deny anything at all is authoritative. Chemists or Priests, by contrast, claim a single sort of authority.  

the people claim a different sort of authority for their decisions. What is the relation between the two?

Some philosophers criticize the popular view. Others find an arcane and erudite way to arrive at the same conclusion the vulgar do.  

I shall begin with a quotation from Wittgenstein

who had zero training in philosophy and who was too stupid to understand the revolution in mathematical logic which had occurred after the first publication of Russell & Whiteheads 'Principles'.  

that might seem to resolve the problem immediately. "The philosopher," Wittgenstein wrote, "is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him into a philosopher."'

That was what made the fool so utterly useless. He couldn't understand what Brouwer or Godel or Gentzen were doing. He wasn't part of any community of ideas. He was merely a ranter with a small personality cult. I suppose his 'private language argument' applies only to him because he wasn't communicating with a peer group. 

This is more than an assertion of detachment

it is derangement. If you don't understand and aren't understood by people in your line of work, you are a lunatic. On the other hand, I genuinely am the Queen of Iyerland and some day soon King Charles will pay me a State Visit.  

in its usual sense, for citizens are surely capable, sometimes, of detached judgments even of their own ideologies, practices, and institutions.

If they see others like themselves doing better because their ideologies and practices aint shite- sure.  


Wittgenstein is asserting a more radical detachment. The philosopher is and must be an outsider;

an odd position for a 'communitarian' philosopher 

standing apart, not occasionally (in judgment) but systematically (in thought).

e.g. thinking about cats while your colleagues are wondering if Godel's theorem could apply to natural deduction systems. The answer is yes, using hereditary finite sets. Apparently this was proved by a computer over twenty years ago. No one told me because I was pretending to be a cat and making miaow miaow noises.  

I do not know whether the philosopher has to be a political outsider.

Kant was a 'beamte'- i.e. a civil servant who could only be fired if he committed a felony. So was Hegel. 

Wittgenstein does say any community, and the state (polis, republic, commonwealth, kingdom, or whatever) is certainly a community of ideas.

Wittgenstein was a subject of the Hapsburg Emperor and returned dutifully to bear arms for him during the Great War.  It was his pal Russell who went to jail at that time. 

The communities of which the philosopher is most importantly not a citizen may, of course, be larger or smaller than the state.

Walzer is an American citizen. That's quite a big state. 

That will depend on what he philosophizes about. But if he is a political philosopher- not what Wittgenstein had in mind- then the state is the most likely community from which he will have to detach himself, not physically, but intellectually and, on a certain view of morality, morally too.

Nonsense! Plenty of political philosophers are strong supporters of the ruling party of their own State. In some countries, a Professor at a State University is automatically a Beamte or servant of it. Thus when Einstein was a Professor in Berlin he was both a Beamte as well as a German citizen by virtue of his employment by the State. That's why he was very careful about the legal requirements to shake off that citizenship on arrival in America. He had never wanted to be German and had secured Swiss citizenship. I must say, Einstein displayed greater political nous than most German Jewish philosophers. He detached himself from that country before it was obvious it would turn to shit.  

This radical detachment has two forms, and I shall be concerned with only one of them. The first form is contemplative and analytic;

you detach yourself from your country while taking a ruminative shit.  

those who participate in it take no interest in changing the community whose ideas they study. "Philosophy leaves everything as it is."

So does not doing the washing up. I suppose that makes me a Philosopher.  

The second form is heroic. I do not want to deny the heroic possibilities of contemplation and analysis. One can always take pride in wrenching onself loose from the bonds of community;

more particularly if it is trying to sodomize you.  

it is not easy to do, and many important philosophical achievements

none exist 

(and all the varieties of philosophical arrogance) have their origins in detachment. But I want to focus on a certain tradition of heroic action, alive, it seems, in our own time, where the philosopher detaches himself from the community of ideas in order to found it again-intellectually and then materially too, for ideas have consequences, and every community of ideas is also a concrete community. He withdraws and returns. He is like the legislators of ancient legend, whose work precludes ordinary citizenship.

There were no such legislators. Solon was a businessman and successful general and statesman before becoming archon. Lycurgus is credited with distant travels- even to Ind's coral strand!- but he either receives the constitution from a divine source or amends an existing model. Perhaps this nutter is thinking of Platonic guardians. But they don't feature in 'ancient legend'.  

In the long history of political thought, there is an alternative to the detachment of philosophers,

which did not exist 

and that is the engagement of sophists, critics, publicists, and intellectuals.

Which is like saying the alternative to the laboratory experiments of the chemist is dancing the can can at  the Moulin Rouge.  

To be sure, the sophists whom Plato attacks were citiless men, itinerant teachers, but they were by no means strangers in the Greek community of ideas. Their teaching drew upon, was radically dependent upon, the resources of a common membership.

If they were sophists they were not philosophers. Consider Isocrates' Antidosis. He doesn't say he is a philosopher. He says he is a dude who teaches young men how to speak well and gain a good reputation by displaying high moral character. 

In this sense, Socrates was a sophist,

There was only one sense in which you could be a plumber or a sophist or a prostitute. If you were getting paid for the service, that is what you were. If you don't charge for access to your rectum, you aren't a rent-boy. You may be a trainee accountant who has fundamentally misunderstood the concept of 'double entry'.  

though it was probably crucial to his own understanding of his mission, as critic and gadfly, that he also be a citizen: the Athenians would have found him less irritating had he not been one of their fellows.

They killed him because he was a citizen. They didn't think he was a philosopher or a necromancer or a Reki practitioner. 

But then the citizens killed Socrates, thus demonstrating, it is sometimes said, that engagement and fellowship are not possible for anyone committed to the search for truth.

Socrates was plenty engaged with fellows who liked talking to him. As for searching for truth, if you let people do it in your rectum with their dicks and don't charge for it, you aren't a rent-boy though you may be a trainee accountant who is genuinely stupid enough to study philosophy at Grad Skool. 

Philosophers cannot be sophists.

Sure they can. Teach rhetoric three days a week while doing mathematical logic the rest of the time.  

For practical as well as intellectual reasons, the distance that they put between themselves and their fellow citizens must be widened into a breach of fellowship.

Which is why Socrates was executed and Bertrand Russell was sent to jail during the Great War.  

And then, for practical reasons only, it must be narrowed again by deception and secrecy.

Philosophers are deceiving themselves if they think they are smart or that anybody else thinks they are smart. This is no secret.  

So that the philosopher emerges, like Descartes in his Discourse, as a separatist in thought, a conformist in practice

Like everybody else. The plain fact is, people conform to the law or other customary norms for different reasons. That's why, when it comes to a proposal to change existing laws or norms, 'conformists' come up with disparate new suggestions. That is a good thing. There is canalisation of behaviour but this results in the 'damming up' of more and more 'evolutionary capacitance' in terms of variation in thought, which can be released when opportune. 

The wrong turning taken by Anal-tickle philosophers who ended up sticking their heads up their own arseholes arises from Aristotle's Posterior Analytics which begins thus-

All instruction given or received by way of argument proceeds from pre-existent knowledge.

None does. It proceeds on the basis of a Gentzen (or Sequent) calculus based on partial tautologies. 'Pre-existent knowledge' refers to endoxa as the set of 'facts' which are commonly accepted. But this is an 'intension' with an unstable 'extension' and thus can't be made the subject of any logical operation because it is not subject to a law of identity- i.e. does not coincide with itself. 

All this had become obvious before anyone now alive was born. Yet in shitheads like Walzer all we can hear are echoes of Aristotle's Apopsophien- i.e. the Stagirite's fart.


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