Juliana de Albuquerque K.
I am constantly mesmerized by the ability through which commonsense demonstrates the possibility of producing philosophy out of anything. In fact, I would like to be able myself to share its belief and to philosophize about the most mundane of matters in the most feeble of fashions. Although this does not seem to be the right path to engage into the suffering of philosophizing as an outrageous fortune it certainly is a good way to make money by selling false promises of wisdom to those naïve listeners of good will.
According to Harry Frankfurt, the most salient feature of our culture is that it produces bullshit,i.e., a quasi-equivalent to Wittgeinstein’s nonsense. But what is nonsense? Plainly speaking, ‘nonsense is encountered when a proposition is even more radically devoid of meaning, when it transcends the bounds of sense.’
In fact, it is Frankfurt’s idea that, much differently from what it is commonly presumed, the etymology of the word bullshit has little to do with bovine excrement. Indeed, its prefix bull comes from bluff which is a talking which is not to the propose – a bravado, or a hot air. Thus, if commonsense’s good-willing tactics do not elevate philosophizing to its ultimate consequences, what is it then? Bullshit, deviant reasoning, cheap-chat: hot air.
Until the present moment I tried to illustrate what is not philosophizing. Consequently all that one knows about it by this text is that it is not bullshit. So, what then shall I mean when I ask myself: what is philosophizing?
To philosophize is to engage oneself in rigorous thinking activity. Thinking, says Hannah Arendt, concerns a journey towards the understanding of the meaning of our world. It is the never-ending activity of questioning whatever that is that we encounter. It is not a job that can be considered to be done through the acquisition of positive knowledge. Instead, thinking involves the tiering work of the negative. Through thinking one is bound to return to questions concerning “the meaning that we give to experiences, actions and circunstances”.
Yesterday I have been confronted with the following question: which of which is more important to philosophical thinking – dialogue with myself or controversy with the other?
In exchanging correspondences with Marcelo Dascal I came to learn that controversy is fundamental to the birth of knowledge because it compels one to question positive knowledge while it generates cooperation needed to the nurturing of knowledge on the make. Whereas, if thinking concerns the journey towards the understanding of the meaning of our world, and if we are talking about a human world being thought by a thinking human being one must come across the fact that human beings are beings-with-others, a truth which undermines the naïve structures of solipsism and necessarily grounds our thinking in thinking with and against others in an exercise of controversy.
Thus, the solitude of the philosopher, – much defended by the colleague who posed me the question-, necessary to the activity of thinking, must not delude us into assuming that philosophical thinking does not involve or worst, should not necessarily in involve, confrontation with others in a broader sense. In the most extreme of cases, a philosopher who engages himself into thinking, in the solitude of his cabinet, does not do so by excluding others from his inner dialogue. Instead, such a philosopher, is only able to philosophize with or against the others which are part of a philosophical tradition – that is to say, if he is interested in doing Philosophy at all. Therefore, to think, says Heidegger, is ‘coming-into-nearess to the distant‘.
In her effort to explain Heidegger’s claim about thinking and her own views on the subject, Hannah Arendt explains that to think is to engage oneself with things and people which are absent. While presence is necessary to the immediate knowledge of the sensible world, it is absence that enable us to think about what sensible presences are in themselves. Thus, Arendt says, that to think about a man one need not to be posed directly in his presence. In fact, she states: “one can easily bring this point home by familiar experience. We go on journeys in order to see things in farwaway places; in the course of this it often happens that the things we have seen come close to us only in retrospect or recollection (…)” Thinking, she explains, necessarily “removes what is close by, withdrawing from the near and drawing the distance into nearess.”
There is, in fact, nothing new about this assumption. Hegel, in his Phenomenology of the Spirit, just as Plato did in the past, invited his reader into a journey of consciousness to the truth about itself. A journey that could only be done by those who reached its end and, therefore, were capable of remembering all its past moments. Memory and remembering: anamnesis is a conditioner of philosophical thinking. And, I said before, remembering in philosophical thinking cannot be detached from its Other: tradition. Thus, as long as one is not a simplon, and one does not assume philosophers develop their thinking over physical entities called books, one will realize philosophical knowledge and its renewal can only be supported by the dialogue and interlacement of the thinking activity of many human beings engaged in the task of doing Philosophy.
It is the communal efforts of philosophers in philosophizing that presents the seen and also the unseen possibilities within tradition. For instance, even though Hegel considered the act of thinking, as a solitary activity, in various passages of his philosophical system he emphasizes the importance of the dialectical moment to the organicity of his Speculative Philosophy. As a matter of fact, it is Hegel who says, in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), and again, on Lectures on the History of Philosophy that Philosophy and its History should be understood as the continuous dialectical development of the diversified levels of the Idea: ‘the relation of the philosophical systems of the beginning to those that came afterwards is in general the same relation of the preceding stages of the logical idea to its successors; in a way that, in truth, the succeeding stages will always contain in themselves their predecessors as dialectically suppressed.’
Does this not involve relatedness to others and dialogue? My idea is simple (and can be refuted, if not entirely accepted): the writing and production of a philosophical work still involves orality and dialogue with others as aufhebt [dialectically supressed] by the inherent structures of the text. For instance, it can be said, for example, that Plato’s works ‘preserved the power of the spoken word on the written page’. But let us try to use another example which might pose us some difficulty.
One must give some attention to Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s style while writing the Investigations. According to the American philosopher, Wittgenstein constructed the text based on two voices: the voice of temptation, understood as that of metaphysics and skepticism; and, the voice of correctness, which represents the ordinary.
That would mean that the book could be understood as a dialogue. But, Cavell also points further: he affirms that in such a dialogue, neither of the voices can be taken as Wittgenstein’s own views. Suggesting that the style Wittgenstein adopts is the one of a confession in which the author seeks to find his way between temptation and correctness.
To say so implies that, as a attentive listener of these voices, the reader should work together with them, i.e., with the writer; in order to learn something. Such a reading will evoke an exercise for acknowledgment between the reader and the text, proving that what is being said should tell him something.
In What is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre raised a very interesting argument on this subject when he said that ‘The book, serving as a go-between, establishes an historical contact among the men who are steeped in the same history and who likewise contribute to its making. Writing and reading are two faces of the same historical fact, and the freedom to which the writer invites us is not a pure abstract consciousness of being free.’
I personally like this quotation because it serves to justify that the role of the confession-like style of Wittgenstein’s Investigations would raise a path to acknowledgment. Thus, giving support to Cavell’s idea in Must we mean what we say? that ‘In confessing you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you. And confession, unlike dogma, is not to be believed but to be tested, and accepted or rejected.’
Philosophy books are alive and they are the voice of a textual subject who wants to be acknowledged, i.e., recognized by an Other. Whereas, I find it weird when somebody tries to tell me that Philosophy as a dialogue was neglected in favor or writing philosophical books. Or, worst, I find it weird when somebody tries to tell me that the writing of books proves that inner dialogue (which, ironically enough, is still a dialogue) is sufficient to produce truth because ‘existentially speaking’ controversies with others should be alien to our structure.
Nevertheless, ‘existentially speaking’, we are fundamentally beings-in-the-world and, for that matter, beings-with-others. Proving, once and for all, that: truth, reason and knowledge (and, maybe even thinking!) bare relatedness as the basis for its manifestation.
