Commentary: Who are you to study philosophy?
By Andre Ye
In the opening to his final book What is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze writes these
heavy words:
“The question ‘what is philosophy?’ can perhaps be posed only late in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely. It is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness, at mid-night, when there is no longer anything to ask. It was asked before; it was always being asked, but too indirectly or obliquely; the question was too artificial, too abstract. Instead of being seized by it, those who asked the question set it out and controlled it in passing. They were not sober enough. There was too much desire to do philosophy to wonder what it was, except as a stylistic exercise. That point of nonstyle where one can finally say, ‘What is it I have been doing all my life?’ had not been reached.”¹
Four years later, on November 4th, 1995, Deleuze jumped out of his Parisian apartment to his death.
Well, I think the time — or at least, a time — for speaking concretely has come for me. I am at the end of one of my lives — I’m a senior, finished with my course requirements for a bachelor’s in philosophy and nearly finished for one in computer science too. I am seized by Deleuze’s question “What is it I have been doing all my life?” but just as much seized by the question “What is it that I will do with the rest of it?” And insofar as philosophy has been central towards understanding and living my life, from that moment of quiet midnight restlessness surges the question “what is philosophy?” My aim in this commentary is to provide some thought on this question by connecting this question to a difficult and even hostile question: “who am I to philosophy?” That is, what is my relation to philosophy? — how does philosophy “look upon” me? — why do I turn towards it? — why do I care about this particular form of inquiry called “philosophy”? — am I a “philosopher”? — what right, rationale, or claim do I have to philosophy? — what purpose will I use it for? — could I live without philosophy?…
I only request the reader to acknowledge that my thoughts are partial and not whole, that I write from my own philosophical experience primarily to reflexively reflect upon it, and that I do not claim to preach a higher wisdom about the “true nature” of philosophy towards anyone else, even though I hope that what I have to say resonates.
Who am I to philosophy? How neurotic and hostile this question can come off as! It’s confrontational, as if to stick a hand in the budding philosopher’s chest and lash: “Why do you think you belong to philosophy? What right have you to invoke the name and body of philosophy? Justify your claim to enter the realm of philosophy or thou shall not pass!” This seems to be an ugly sentiment to pin at the heart of philosophy. The philosophers that are most celebrated in the canon of philosophy appear never to doubt that they are “philosophers,” portrayed as cool-headed, self-confident individuals piercing through intellectual cloudiness towards clarity and truth: Socrates bringing down fortresses of mistaken beliefs with friendly interrogation, Descartes throwing away the entire uncertain world to begin with his certain pure consciousness, Nietzsche boldly painting the portrait of the Overman who will reject slave morality… It feels that Socrates, Descartes, or Nietzsche never really asked that question “Who am I to philosophy?” in a serious, existential, anxious, crippling way, where upon inquiry one might discover that the answer is “nothing at all; there is no relation.” It seems that even as they brutally dissected the most fundamental assumptions in understanding the world, that they were never seriously anxious that they might not be “real” philosophers, that perhaps their “philosophizing” was not needed or important. When enthusiastic students of philosophy enter its classrooms, they often (are taught to) emulate this image of the Greats: everyone can be a philosopher; everyone has a claim to philosophy; philosophy is so fundamental that its tentacles extend everywhere you can think and perhaps even beyond that; as philosophers, we question everything, but not that we can be or are philosophers. That is sacred. The philosophical community is supposed to be inclusive, universal, warm. If someone feels anxiety about whether or not they belong to the philosophical community, then it seems that philosophy has done something wrong by failing to be inclusive. Philosophical education repeats from Matthew: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
When serious, anxious inquiry into that dirty question, “Who am I to philoso-
phy?”, is repressed, the budding philosopher becomes a caricatured canonical Socrates, Descartes, Nietzsche. They have taken their position within/belonging to philosophy for granted, and now go to work cutting up the world and breaking its joints: engaging in abstract, indulgent, highly intellectual philosophy, pursuing thoughtful discussion striving towards “truth” formed by knowing and deftly wielding lots of names for philosophical positions, appealing both towards the aesthetic of sophistry (getting into the fray of things, making cool-headed and sharp arguments, convincing the masses) and the integrity of Socrates (thoughtfulness, respect, concern for truth or truth-adjacent values). Call this approach “Classroom Philosophy.” By suspending the question “Who am I to philosophy?” by designating everyone a philosopher no-questions-asked, Classroom Philosophy has room to be respectable, to hear out everyone’s arguments and concerns, to excite people about the interchange of ideas and arguments. And this is excellent. I love Classroom Philosophy; it’s the context in which I entered philosophy, where I learned so much, which makes pedagogical sense as the way that introductory philosophy education is structured.
But there is trouble brewing in paradise. Consider Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan’s insight about the production of documentaries:
“The documentary tradition is one that gives voice to the victim. For a long time, I have wondered about the function of the victim and to what extent facing the victim is, in fact, a redeeming act. I would say it’s almost a Christian situation, where you have a victim that is suffering for you [the spectator] and through his suffering he redeems the spectator and more: He says, you are human because you feel my suffering. So it comforts the spectator, [affirming his] position of being the “good one”. However, I am interested in interrogating the spectator, to ask him the question: What would you do? What are you?”²
I see a strong resemblance between the “Christianity” of the documentary tradition Sivan speaks of and the warm inclusion of Classroom Philosophy. Classroom Philosophy gives voice to the “victim-philosophers” who bleat out their ideas while redeeming the student for hearing them out and reconstructing their arguments, while (unintentionally) repressing the problems facing the student — What would you do? What are you? Who are you to philosophy?
The problem with Classroom Philosophy is that repressing the question “who are you to study philosophy?” also represses the answer: “...because I am a troubled human with problems to solve.” Classroom Philosophy requires a theater performance of debate and discussion, in which students play roles and re-enact narratives of how canonical philosophy plays out — e.g. as Socrates and as his interlocutor (victim?), as Aristotle against Plato, as Rousseau against (with?) Hobbes against (with?) Locke. When we are interpellated into the roles of Classroom Philosophy, we tend to lose attachment to our visceral, situated, lived, restless-at-midnight problems.
These problems can be existential — what am I doing with my life? What will I be when I die? How should I make X decision? They can be ethical — should I vote for Washington Initiative Measure No. 2066? What should I do, if anything, about the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza? Should I feel bad when I eat meat, and should I stop? What do I do with the homeless people living on the street below my window? The problems can be about language: we’re trying to talk about an issue but seem to keep on talking “past each other,” how can I get you to understand my meaning? What is meaning? I was called a slur; what should I do about it? And what really is a slur anyway? They can be about science: how can we be sure about our scientific knowledge? It feels like scientific progress isn’t progressing; what exactly is scientific progress? But I don’t think we can replace, for example, the ethical question of what to do about Israel/Palestine, about abortion, etc. with the ethical questions of why I should save a child drowning in a lake, the trolley problem, and the other such problems that analytic ethics have offered. Certainly, they may be useful tools to help us think about our visceral, restless-at-midnight problems. But shouldn’t we be more preoccupied with why these tools are useful to our problems, like Philippa Foot was when she introduced the trolley problem to think about abortion, than with the tools themselves? Shouldn’t we investigate if these thought experiments really do generalize to the ethical situations that we care about, before we invest our time and cognitive effort into them? (I suspect they often do not). Otherwise, debating thought experiments becomes another instance of Classroom Philosophy, “redeeming” and “comforting the [student-]spectator” — perhaps useful for making us better actors and sophists, but not for addressing our problems.
On matters of ethics, I appeal to British moral philosopher Iris Murdoch, who lucidly describes how we might move beyond our voyeuristic obsession over dilemmas of choice in moral thought experiments (should I pull the trolley lever or not? would you choose to enter Nozick’s experience machine? are you obligated to save a drowning child if at minimal cost?) towards “moral vision” and “moral freedom,” an approach to ethics more situated in our problems:
“[T]here are ‘moral facts’ in the sense of moral interpretations of situations where the moral concept in question determines what the situation is, and if the concept is withdrawn then we are not left with the same situation or the same facts. In short, if moral concepts are regarded as deep moral configurations of the world, rather than as lines drawn round separable factual areas, then there would be no facts ‘behind them’ for them to be erroneously defined in terms of. There is nothing sinister about this view; freedom here will consist, not in being able to lift the concept off the otherwise unaltered facts and lay it down elsewhere, but in being able to ‘deepen’ or ‘reorganize’ the concept or change it for another one. On such a view, … moral freedom looks more like a mode of reflection which we may have to achieve, and less like a capacity to vary our choices which we have by definition.”³
On matters like philosophy of science, philosophy of language, etc., shouldn’t we first become deeply acquainted with the problems that give rise to these fields — e.g. experience the struggle of introductory physics, the (in?)congruence between classical and quantum mechanics, trying to learn another language, getting called a slur/misgendered/verbally harassed — and then read Popper, Kuhn, (Wimsatt), Frege, Russell, (Butler)?
So let our philosophizing be about the freedom for reflection, in Murdoch’s words, with attachment to our problems, and not solely or even primarily the indulgent autopoietic debate over capital-F Facts and recapitulation of capital-T Theories. As Deleuze writes in What is Philosophy?: “When Foucault admires Kant for having posed the problem of philosophy, not in relation to the eternal but in relation to the Now, he means that the object of philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal, nor to reflect on history, but to diagnose our actual becomings.”⁴ When we come across a choice between philosophical positions, let us ask the methodological question “what is the deciding criterion immanent to the problem?” and never forget nor cease revising our answer to the question “what is our problem?” We just might realize, as I have many times in the past, that this kind of consciousness resolves many distinctions without differences (relative to our problems), and reframes conversations in much more productive directions.
As such, I follow many “pragmatist” philosophers — Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, William Wimsatt — in their emphasis on knowledge as dynamic, truth as practical, and inquiry as social. But I also follow Deleuze, who is a pragmatist in one sense but also declared himself a “pure metaphysician”: my pragmatism is not one which makes philosophy into a purely reactive self-help drug injection to make our problems go away as fast as possible, as in a caricature of pragmatist philosophy. Philosophy innovates new concepts, new modes of existence, new ways of seeing and thinking for our problems — our being (“I”) and our time (“now”). Hegel’s suggestion that “the owl of minerva flies only at dusk” is often interpreted as a lament that philosophy (the owl of minerva standing for wisdom) only gets to work after the event has occurred and the problem has manifested. But perhaps we should interpret it this way: we only know that it is dusk when the owl of minerva sets flight — we only discover the problem, see it in a full and clear light, when we philosophize. Therefore, while this commentary’s reorientation of philosophy around problems has rendered it reactive (to problems) in one way, it has a new active role to play in understanding the problems we had all along, in creating new modes of existence, and in introducing important problems into our lives.
If I do not have a problem X, then do I really need to philosophize about X? Hume appears to suggest that we do not: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”⁵ We do not always need to philosophize: if there is and will be no dusk on the horizon, then there is no point in the owl of minerva taking flight. Philosophy is not the frame by which we need to approach all things in the world, or even all problems. Read some history, study some physics, travel and experience the Other, be merry among friends. The lurking Socratic-Platonist in us may look suspiciously at this view and spits, “these are the dirty ways of sophists”; “philosophy is king”; “the unexamined life is not worth living.” But it is really through living that we understand what is worth examining (that is, genuine problems). The problems that matter will confront us at the “right time” in life, and when they do, they will be inescapable until they are addressed. Consider former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, quoting the Kohelet / Ecclesiastes at the ground-breaking 1993 Oslo I Accords advancing Israeli-Palestinian relations: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven; a time to be born and a time to die; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time of peace. Ladies and gentlemen, the time for peace has come.” The world that we live in, and the World that is the I, has no shortage of problems. (Rabin was assassinated two years later; the Oslo talks entirely collapsed in 2000). We will know where and when it is time to philosophize. Philosophy is a powerful tool — but it does not have to be and is not, all-welcoming, all-embracing, all-applicable, warmly inclusive. Re-introduce the Other into philosophy that we encountered when we were all, at some point, the Other to philosophy — struggle with it, love it, abandon it, pick a fight with it. As Heidegger highlighted in his existential phenomenology, our use of tools can make us more reflective and attentive towards ourselves and the world, but only if we are not absorbed completely into them, if they can break and cease to be useful: we need some sense of alterity from our tools; we cannot belong entirely to them. The problems will guide us on how to use philosophy. We should be wary of assassinating the Other to philosophy in our engagement with philosophy, of identifying too all-consumingly and enthusiastically with the figure of the philosopher, of reverent obedience to the fanatic injunction “it is always time to do philosophy.”
I close with the words of Deleuze.
“We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves… it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”⁶
In those little gaps of solitude, let us ask ourselves the uncomfortable question: Who am I to philosophy — here, now? Let us young people ask this question long before we metaphorically jump out of our Parisian apartments. Let us set flight towards the next day’s dawn after flapping through the dark that befalls dusk. And let us speak only when we have posited an answer.
¹ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994): 1.
² Eyal Sivan, “Against forgetting: An interview with Eyal Sivan,” interview by Charlotte Silver, Al Jazeera, November 12, 2012, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/11/12/against-forgetting-an-inter- view-with-eyal-sivan.
³ Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (Penguin Press, 1998): 95.
⁴ Deleuze and Guatarri, What is Philosophy?, 112.
⁵ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1739): 269.
⁶ Gilles Deleuze, “Mediators,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995): 129.
