Ideas and Scholarship in Philosophy

[Philosophy Now]

Raymond Tallis asks: does it matter who said what?

https://philosophynow.org/issues/104/Id ... Philosophy

[Impenitent]

Who said What?

I Don't Know

Hey Abbott...

-Imp

[d63]

Dear Editor: In Raymond Tallis’ article “Ideas and Scholarship in Philosophy” (issue 104) I was reminded of what it is I admire about the good professor. On one hand, there are these Neo-Classicist impulses at work in him (that is given his scientific background) as can be seen in his disdain for more continental approaches to philosophy: Lacan, Derrida, etc. At the same time he shares a common disdain for intellectual arrogance and elitism with this particular fan of the continental approach. This can be seen in his concepts Neuromania and Darwinitus, both of which I have encountered too often on message boards in the form of Troll-like Behaviors –which makes him almost heroic given his own academic achievement. And this particular article reflects that balance. That said, I want make a few points on the issue addressed that will hopefully be complimentary to his.

My experience has been that we tend to work in the overlaps of philosophy. The process is one of starting with general issues (the nature of mind, Free Will, the meaning of life, etc.) that tend to bounce around blue collar circles primarily because they have been bouncing between the great thinkers of our culture since the beginning of civilization, then working our way to the details. This has a couple of implications as concerns Tallis’ article.

For one, the secondary text that seeks to interpret the process of culture has basically played a role in that process. It still adds to the discourse. As Deleuze and Guattarri point out in What is Philosophy, it is about the creation of and free-play with concepts that will hopefully lead to the creation of, yet, more concepts. We may be, at a more superficial level, be reading a philosopher who is trying to explain what another philosopher has said. Still, what that philosopher is ultimately doing is creating concepts based on the concepts the philosopher they are interpreting has created. In other words, secondary text can play a major role in the process of an individual’s process. Philosophy Now does as much for its readers all the time.

At the same time (and as Tallis suggests) if one finds themselves getting serious about it, they’ll find themselves, by necessity, wanting to get past the interpretations of secondary text and play them (along with the individual’s interpretation of the secondary text) against the actual text. And that, in my experience, is a point of no return. One may wish to return to the “good old days” when they could breeze through it in the same way they might a Steven King novel. But at that point, there is no turning back. There is nothing but the original text itself.

[marjoram_blues]

Firstly, to philosophise in ignorance of what has been already said by those who have thought deeply enough to capture the attention of the world for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, is to deprive oneself of an essential assistance for one’s own thought. It may be enjoyably self-flattering to think, like fifteen-year-old Irie in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, that one is having thoughts that have never been thunk before; but it is an odds-on bet not only that they have been thought before, but they have been thought more deeply, more clearly, and in a more connected way. It is perverse to deny ourselves the shoulders of giants upon which to stand.

Even so, some may still wonder why we should go back to the originals, rather than relying on summaries and digests. Yet there is something very special about eavesdropping on the minds of great philosophers speaking in their own voices, and experiencing the questions and the arguments as they were felt when they were brand new or first seen clearly

Listen to Tallis. It's not old hat to read the ancients.
However...

It would, however, be dishonest for me to pretend that I have read more than a tiny minority of the classics of Western philosophy. In my eagerness to make sure that I have not missed out on too much of ‘the best that has been thought and said’, I have often (to be honest, usually) settled for digests. The truth is that even the most dedicated reader could not have more than a brushing acquaintance with a small proportion of those works which are rightly regarded as key to the evolution of philosophical thought...

...Any actual philosophising is mired in contingency – shaped by a multitude of accidents that define a narrow cognitive parish in which our philosophical project finds its starting point and which defines what counts as progress towards an end. Even the great thinkers are limited by the accidents of the time and place of their lives. Aristotle died in ignorance of how Plotinus, Descartes, Newton and Frege were to change fundamentally the terms of philosophical debate. In our youth we enter the ongoing polyphonic conversation of philosophy in the midst of things, and we leave the still-ongoing conversation mid-sentence several decades later. We join the philosophical caravan for only a short stretch of an unending journey.