Intermission: 20,000 Leagues Of Philosophy?
"As to classing it in the list of fables, the idea was out of the question."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
Please subscribe to our newsletter and follow @thenostomodernreview on Instagram to receive the latest updates on this series. All support is appreciated.
“You are examining my shells, Professor?”
Philosophy is full of obscure shells. Each philosopher wears a shell of exclusive knowledge, glazed with layers of technical jargon, that creates distance between what is written and what is understood by a first-time reader of philosophy. Some of the thickest and most notorious shells are held by the German philosophers, like Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Martin Heidegger—the infamous trinity of pain for philosophy undergraduates.
After reading philosophy for several years, both independently and institutionally, one of the best ways I have found to penetrate these shells is to first understand the technical terms of the philosopher, and then to approach their texts second. This is counterintuitive to many philosophy courses, which dictate that the text ought to be read blind first as a reading assignment, and that the struggle with the more technical aspects of the text is simply to be endured as an unavoidable part of the learning experience. This is a foolish and outdated process, and if you have ever taken a class on the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and his transcendental phenomenology, you will quickly understand what I mean.
Husserl offers a good case for why learning technical terms first is sometimes more efficient as a learning strategy. Priming oneself to avoid bewilderment is a necessary precaution, especially with the German philosophers. This is emboldened by the fact that, even when Husserlian terms are defined by the man himself, they are still notoriously vague and open-ended—at times to the point of inconsistency once he changes his mind, and he has over the years.
Consider his first account of noematic and noetic descriptions from Cartesian Meditations (1960): “If we follow this methodological principle in the case of the dual topic, cogito cogitatum (qua cogitatum), there become opened to us, first of all, the general descriptions to be made, always on the basis of particular cogitationes, with regard to each of the two correlative sides. Accordingly, on the one hand, descriptions of the intentional object as such, with regard to the determinations attributed to it in the modes of consciousness concerned, attributed furthermore with corresponding modalities, which stand out when attention is directed to them. (For example: the "modalities of being", like certainly being, possibly or presumably being, etc.; or the "subjective"— temporal modes, being present, past, or future.) This line of description is called noematic. Its counterpart is noetic description, which concerns the modes of the cogito / itself, the modes of consciousness (for example: perception, recollection, retention), with the modal differences inherent in them (for example: differences in clarity and distinctness).”
This is incomprehensible to a first-time reader, even having survived another poor writer like Immanuel Kant. Notwithstanding the quality of the translation from German, which is another topic entirely, it is difficult to see what Husserl is immediately trying to say. The noematic and noetic components can be rephrased as being acted upon and to be acting upon respectively. In other words, a noematic description might be to be seen while a noetic description might be to see. This is still not perfectly clear, and only relatively accurate, but as an accompanying explanation it can do wonders for any first reading of Husserl.
“May it reach us; and, if necessary, sink this cursed Nautilus.”
Philosophy, like other technical fields, possesses a technical language on its own. But an exceptionalism for philosophy, especially for the Continental tradition, is its willingness to innovate new concepts or to retroactively claim old ones for new ends, without the heavy burden of proof, which you might otherwise find in the physical and biological sciences.
In the 20th Century alone, the world has been introduced to Gilles Deleuze’s rhizomes and planes of immanence, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and hauntology, Martin Heidegger’s dasein, Rudolf Carnap’s extension and intension, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s beetle-in-a-box and many others. But has anyone, for example, attempted to empirically prove whether Jean Paul Sartre’s being-for-itself exists? Or the author function of Michel Foucault, and to an extent, the Death Of The Author (1967) by Roland Barthes?
Bertrand Russell conducted no experiments when he wrote On Denoting in 1905. Despite writing a lot of mathematics with Alfred North Whitehead, its origin was mostly a factor of his mind. He conducted no field experiments to prove 1 + 1 = 2; although, he did co-write three volumes of symbolic logic.
For a lack of articulation, it is easy for philosophers to make new things up; and this too is the strength and freedom of philosophy—recall the rationalist tradition of sitting at a desk or taking a long Kantian walk and solving philosophical problems with your mind. Your proof is that you thought brilliantly enough. Forge new terms to describe this experience.
So if this is the case, then anyone has the potential to become a philosopher; or, in another sense, a philosopher can appear from anywhere, and rely on the quality of their thoughts to make their case. The field is thus liberated from the domain of exclusivity and does not follow suit with the other sciences—the misconception that philosophy should be excluded as a science is another issue for another time—at least to a wider historical extent.
Historically it has been much easier to be an amateur philosopher than to be an amateur scientist, and the field is seeded with the minds of amateurs like Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, although both were well-educated and were offered chairs at various universities, in spite of their academic vagabondage.
Rigour is necessary as a minimum respect, comments from professional peers are to be expected, but the fundamental access to philosophy is simply a passion for it and a patience to slog through the readings of both wonderful and terrible writers throughout history, which naturally, in of itself, is a treat.
“What was, then, the mystery of this submarine craft, of which the whole world vainly sought an explanation? What kind of beings existed in this strange boat? What mechanical agent caused its prodigious speed?”
Paradoxes, thought experiments, neologisms and truth tables, there is an established corpus for classical and modern philosophy and its topics. At its worst, the disputes are minute and little progress is achieved over time, despite decades of back-and-forth publications across universities and sometimes centuries across philosophers. It is possible to gaze at a certain field of metaphysics in one half of the century and to find only marginal progress in the next, or progress in only new fissures between the schools of interpretation—one school against another in a wide, collaborative battlefield of professors, students and enthusiasts.
At its most exciting, the debates are far removed from the classical or the established modern canons; or at least, the results are something unique and worth the inflammation caused to the old system. Radical visions have been seen in underground publications, often backed by unruly posses of renegade professors in more militant sections of academia, where the stifle of undergraduate teaching and the dreaded renewing of tenure fosters a frustration which projects outwards into new, creative worlds. Or broken worlds borne from a singular mind—history and the avaricious touch of genius.
Both worlds have often caused the greatest stirs in philosophy, but the latter genius is a stir to which the rest of the discipline must respond. The history of philosophy is scored with the appearance of genius: there is a before and after Plato, there is a before and after Kant, there is a before and after Hegel—or perhaps not an after enough for the latter.
This, however, is not to denigrate the other reality. The vast majority of philosophical work is cumulative insofar as it is collaborative and dialogical, and slow-moving and even boring at times. But the direction is nonetheless forward and will continue to be, so long as people can disagree with each other and someone wants to write a long essay or dialogue about it. Do not underestimate the quieter moments of history.
Genius is rare, and when it does appear, it is often fickle and temperamental. If the field were to sustain on genius alone, it would move only several steps at a time. And there are many otherwise clever and competent people who have made tremendous contributions to philosophy over their lives. Their genius shows over time, not by some great revolutionary work, but in the gradual exploration of philosophy as a time-honoured study of human problems—and thus problems without fatal answers.
“May the judge disappear, and the philosopher continue the peaceful exploration of the sea! If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.”
What motivates this short essay is a movement against blind first-time readings and against doctrinal stuffiness; the former I judge to be the main reason for most instances of philosophical anathema, for I too have been guilty of wanting to throw Hegel into the trash over a reading; hence, this should also be read as a partial reflection of my time as a student philosopher.
Embrace the Bacchanalian tendency; it should take less effort to love philosophy than you think. In other words, there are much better ways to walk the field; there can still be jouissance in the reading of dead and living philosophers, and the process is not a dictatorship. Read them, if not for their insights, then at least for their personalities—philosophers are historically a bunch of wackos—and find their joy.
Series such as the TNR Alphabet are praxial efforts with a simple premise: demystify philosophy and you will open it up to a greater love than before. If a primer on selected terms in philosophy, written from the retrospective of a once-blind first-timer, now cuts through to the shortest route of what all the fuss is about, it is more likely to convince people that something is otherwise there. Find a guide; this is my advice to other first-timers.
Sifting through ancient tomes is not the average idea of fun; and neither is writing on John Locke and David Hume the keen idea of a Sunday afternoon. But crack at the monolith if you find it joyful; ask for keys—there is no need to brute-force open the door. Before reading a work, glimpse first at its anatomy. Look up its technical terms, seek out its gist, and then attempt your assault on the second try. With any luck, it will open for you like it now opens for me.
It opens like a shell; the shell is part of its beauty. It is no longer obscured by the sea.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.