Introduction
Section A: Philosophy and Messianic Light
Section B: Philosophy and Despair
Section C: Philosophy and Felt Contact
Section D: Philosophy and Redemption
"Only a god can save us now," said Heidegger and then he lapsed into silence. But who can believe in gods at the dying of this bloodsoaked century? Superstition was the nemesis of an earlier philosophy. Now the demon is despair. What can philosophy accomplish in our present situation? What point can it possibly have? In what follows I reflect on an answer to this question proposed by Theodor Adorno in the very last section of Minima Moralia.
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects--this alone is the task of thought.
Now why despair? What is the redemption Adorno mentions? What is the messianic light? What is felt contact with objects? In what follows I develop answers to these four questions. In so doing I give you the clearest answer I can to the question, What is philosophy?
On the other side of bourgeois optimism but also on the other side of bourgeois pessimism, relentless critique senses its Utopia, not as positive object but as absolute horizon. Present in no part, it saturates the whole, a messianic light.
Philosophizing is mystical action. It is similar to the compositional practice of John Cage. Cage composes with the intent of letting sounds present themselves simply as sounds. On his view classical rules of composition are glue composers use "to stick sounds together to make a continuity," whereas his own aim as "to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves." (Cage) "Why is this so necessary that sounds should be just sounds? There are many ways of saying why. One is this: In order that each sound may become the Buddha. If that is too Oriental an expression, take the Christian Gnostic statement: 'Split the stick and there is Jesus'." The one who philosophizes, being one who embraces the fact of his or her postmodernity, composes with the intent of letting concepts present themselves simply as concepts. The goal is to create a fissure in our knowings through which the reality beyond them can be felt.
This is a dangerous strategy. The rejection of glue, the movement to experimentalism in philosophy and art, succeeds as a practice only when coupled with the unjustifiable faith in genuine enlightenment. The rejection of glue pervades postmodern culture. Disenchantment with the world, however, is just as common. A mystical sense that a better reality lies behind the veil is rare. The combination of gluelessness and hardheadedness makes for cynicism.
Ours is a culture coming unstuck. The recent history of humor holds a small but clear example of this. Plot the following three data points and then draw in the vector. (1) Classical period: DOONESBURY is classical satire. {See figures 1 & 2}. The humor derives from showing up the distance between characters, their actions, judgments and so on, and what ought to be. A shared standard is presupposed. Critique goes hand in hand with laughter. We are asked to laugh at genuine folly.
(2) Modern period: THE FAR SIDE. {Figures 3 & 4}. Populated by stock characters--cave men and dinosaurs, cowboys and Indians, pets and pet owners--its humor most often turns on setting these characters in stock situations appropriate for a very different character, or in reversing the usual roles of the characters in their stock situations. The cowboy under attack responds to a volley of fire arrows with a schoolboy's whine "Hey! Can they do that?" A large reptile in coveralls removes a mask resembling a human face says to the women in the easy chair "Zelda, I have something to tell you. I am not really a phone repairman who stumbled into your life sixteen years ago but a komodo dragon--largest of the monitor lizards--in disguise." Characters and situations provide continuity, a set of expectations. The humor derives from preposterous juxtapositions that transgress those expectations.
(3) Postmodern period: The David Letterman Book of Top Ten Lists. Here juxtaposition alone provides most of the humor. Some of the items on the list have a Far Side feel to them, some even harken back to Trudeau's critical intent. But none of this is essential to it. Continuity, the narrative context from which an item on the list is pulled, is present only by its absence. This technique can swallow anything and spit it back for a laugh. "Princess Diana's top ten complaints about Prince Charles" {figure 5} could be rewritten for any imaginable couple, no matter how ordinary or how noble their lives. "Top Ten Amish Pickup Lines" {figure 6} shows the power of this trick. One comes away from it confident that Tolstoy, Gandhi and Jesus could be the butt of similar laughs. Indeed, a set of photographs appears in the middle of this parade of crazy juxtapositions, having no connection with anything coming before or after, that includes a portrait of "A group of Canadian high prelates, headed by Paul Emile Cardinal Leger, Archbishop of Montreal," portraits of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and a "Computer-assembled two-image mosaic of Saturn's rings." Letterman's TV show works much the same way.
This potted history of current humor suggests a paralysis of the critical function, a world fallen into atoms each with identical significance. No heroes, no one deserving respect more than another, no one immune from ridicule. The absence of glue makes all lifestyles possible. The absence of any sense of "mourning for better knowledge" makes sure that one will dominate. "The discontent in our culture has assumed a new quality: It appears as a universal, diffuse cynicism" (Sloterdijk). A naive enlightenment that supposedly has seen through everything, says 'Sure running with the pack is absurd, but so is every sacrifice required to avoid it. So--run with the pack. That way one at least gets on in the world, crappy as it is.' One can even do it now with a certain sense of self-sacrifice. After all, from this perspective 'It's what must be done. There is no way out.'
Whatever method we give to our philosophizing, it must have the power to withstand this cynicism, postmodernity's preferred from of despair.
Philosophizing is necessarily experimental. I use this term in the simple sense John Cage gives it. "What is the nature of an experimental action?" he asks. "It is simply an action the outcome of which is not foreseen" (Cage). Philosophizing moves without foresight or even forehearing. Its true symbol is the snail's horn (Horkheimer). Philosophizing, we feel our way. Discovery is a running-up-against.
This point, that the outcome of philosophizing is unforeseeable, cannot be overemphasized. It follows directly from the radical autonomy which is the source and the goal of philosophical activity. Its truth directly negates the idea of philosophy as discipline and the ideal of professionalization to which we, its practictioners in the academies, are held. There is no set of methods or texts we can accept as defining our practice. Recourse to "reconstruction" and "mere technique" makes philosophy into a comfortable form of office work and philosophers into "bureaucrats of pure reason" (Guattari). Setting out with a product line in mind is violence as thought and velleity as practice. If the goal of philosophizing is "to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption," then to demand that it proceed by the canons of sound concept management now in vogue is to sabotage it. Borges describes how each new author creates his predecessors. So it is with each genuine new thought. "Reason or the ratio of all we have already known is not the same that it shall be when we know more" (Blake).
Philosophy attempts by means of concepts to transcend concepts. Hence, the philosophical project is paradoxical. But perhaps the reality beyond our concepts is itself rife with tensions. Isn't this for now the best assumption? "Just as we cheerfully subscribe to, or have the grace to be torn between, simply disparate ideals--why must there be a conceivable amalgam, the Good Life for Man?" Thus Austin with a question (the last sentence in the last footnote in "A Plea for Excuses") puts an end to rationalist ethics. As with the Good Life, so it goes with Reality. 'Why must there be a conceivable amalgam, the Real?' The covert assumption that everything is in order and waits to be understood weakens much academic philosophy. The smug tone, the triviality of the problems addressed, the confidence in the answer put forward, are no accidents. They are part of an essential sub-text: "Everything is fundamentally sound. Here is one small wrinkle which I shall now deftly and professionally iron out." Philosophizing, on the other hand, feels the force of genuine aporias, accepts the possibility of definitive ruptures. In them, in fact, it finds its life and passion; through them it makes contact with its objects.
Philosophical discourse makes new demands on auditors. The march of syllogisms is replaced with a complicated modern dance, the presentation in time of a constellation of ideas whose tensions interact to produce a whole. Understanding doesn't come after every salvo but in some cases comes only at the end of an extended dialogue. The relation between reading (or listening) and understanding comes to resemble the relation between dating and sex. Sex on the first date can be fun but it will be shallow compared to what could be. A period of courtship allows a set of pre-understandings to develop that foster, deepen and protect the physical relationship. And not only the relationship changes. Both parties are transformed. So it is with understanding. That which comes out of lengthy dialogue has many understandings developed along the way to sustain it. The analogy is especially apt when the talk touches matters of the spirit, as philosophizing always does.
Free-thinking friends ask incredulously, "Are you religious?" The first time this comes up between us, I do not know what to say. 'Yes', 'no' and 'don't know' seem equally misleading. The distance I sense between my meanings and theirs is so great that it is not clear to me whether the shortest path between them begins with 'yes' and goes West, with 'no' and goes East or works outward from a profession of ignorance. And there is always the danger that they will read my hesitation as disingenuousness, equivocation, light-mindedness or sophistry. But only trivial questions can be answered univocally and directly. If you ask me about something important, you have to be willing to enter into my way of seeing the world. You have to get to know me to get anything out of my answer. Most importantly, what I tell you won't be mere information, it will be active self-exploration.
Philosophizing, I have a right to be obscure, but a corresponding duty to be clear. How are these compatible? Take what I have said here as an invitation to communication, not the event itself. Don't require me to be transparent to you right off the bat. Let me say what seems needful to me. If you don't understand, and you think you want to, ask me about what I said. If I don't understand your failure to understand, I will ask you about it. Reiterate this process as needed. Through this dialogue, feeling our way, we make contact. By this contact something real is changed. A new relation between human beings, a truly human relation, begins. By this process the wishful thinker is redeemed.
Adorno, Theodor. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. New York: Continuum, 1976.
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London & NY: Verso, 1978.
Blake, William. William Blake. Oxford Authors. London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Guattari, Gilles Deleuze & Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Hamann, Johann Georg. Socratic Memorabilia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno & Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1972.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
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