LOGIC AND LOLLIPOPS
O'Brien, Dennis
LOGIC AND LOLLIPOPS DENNIS O'BRIEN Do the professional philosophers offer stones, bread, or Twinkies? In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled "The Lollipopping of the West," George...
...Technically, Steiner or any critic would be wrong both about traditional and modern philosophy to characterize it as too abstract, too distant, too remote from human needs or experience...
...But .I answer that philosophy offers people bread and they want Twinkles...
...It was with this exchange in mind that I betook mysel[ Commonweal: 207 to the annual convention of the American Philosophical Association during the Christmas holidays...
...To understand my love for Miss Dakota, not just to ogle her on the ramp, I must understand myself and that problem "is not abstract but perhaps the most concrete there is...
...Some of the problems are real...
...Wittgenstein places the difficulty of philosophy properly when he says...
...The APA ran a special bureau in Washington to advise philosophy Ph.D's on non-academic careers, but the problem lies on the side of the employer, I fear...
...Steiner accuses philosophy of giving people stones, who hunger for bread...
...Whether it is Plato searching for the Forms which we already know implicitly, Wittgenstein trying to get a view of the everyday grammar of language, or Sartre trying to glimpse the very self that ~ is investigating itself, it is precisely because the philosophers' problem is not abstract--out there, at-a-distance--that we have such a hard time getting a clear view of it...
...Kant is really the first professor of philosophy, not only in virtue of academic appointment, but in virtue of his view of philosophy as a special profession not as part of a general world of letters...
...Judith Economos, for one, answered back on behalf of professional philosophy in the Times letter column...
...Perhaps it was appropriate to have the bathing beauties and the logicians chic by vowel...
...The establishment of a professoriate of philosophers brings with R not only some upgrading of technique, but also insularity as the separate profession creates its own special languages, journals and professional meetings...
...Steiner suggests that philosophy has become too remote, Professor Economos that it has become too difficult for Miss United Teenager...
...There just is no place for more philosophy professors, but if one could return to early custom, there is plenty of need for philosophers...
...True, Heidegger can be monumentally opaque, but then there is Plato's Parmenides...
...The very existence of the American Philosophical Association is a sign of the difference between contemporary philosophy and the historical tradition of philosophy...
...they don't hold up...
...Beginning with the revolt against the immensely learned and technical philosophy of the medieval scholastics, there have been repeated attempts to make philosophy more scientific, more compreheasible, more practical, more in conformity with immediate experience or ordinary language...
...After an hour of pleasant conversation he concluded: "I'm sure there is a place for a philosopher in the Kennedy administration, but I can't think where...
...I remember making some tentative inquiries myself with a White House staffer during the Kennedy administration...
...Kant, Husserl and the NonEmpirical Ego" among the shades of such noteworthy former residents of the Park Sheraton as Perle Mesta and Spiro Agnew is a trifle unnerving...
...Whatever precision and professional polish has been gained foi philosophy 'from its spawning of a prof:ssoriate, it is probably a decided loss both to philosophy and the larger world that philosophers are no longer immersed in the general culture of letters or employed as literary secretaries to statesmen...
...Astrologers and popgurus appear to have pre-empted the market place of ideas from traditional prophets and wise men...
...Over a period of time, philosophers have developed specialized vocabularies that require decoding for ,the uninitiate...
...The present is left with the less attractive, dryer, more complicated answers . . . . For many people, morever, the rewards are too austere...
...Descartes is generally regarded as the founder of "modern" philosophy, and the effort of his Meditations is in the direction of simplicity...
...Modern philosophy can be highly technical, but in some respects the techniques of modern logic make that study more perspicuous than Aristotle's Analytics...
...The most depressing aspect of the APA meeting was the desperate search for academic appointment by the young Ph.D's...
...Philosophers more or less look like philosophers...
...Do the professional philosophers offer stones, bread or (maybe) erudite Twinkies to the spiritually famished...
...When a contemporary anti-Cartesian, John Austin, counseled his pupils to read through a moderate-sized English dictionary as a preliminary to good philosophy, he was making less of a demand, it would appear, than his Oxford predecessor, William of Ockham, or than would be made in an elementary social science course which required mastery of Fortran...
...One spied a Sterling Professor of Metaphysics next to a 17-year-old blond with coronet and sash...
...The sociology of the profession aside, however, there is a deep reason for the difficulty of philosophy for Miss North Dakota that needs to be touched on in any just account...
...At the beauty contest the intriguing reality is at-a-distance, I can comprehend it, place it, encompass it, take it or leave it...
...It is definitely not a meeting of university presidents in Brooks Brothers blue and wing glasses...
...Ah, but to fall for Miss North Dakota...
...He did manage to stir up enough enmity to get the hemlock, but that was surely not due to his philosophical teaching, but to his unfortunate association with Alcibiades who proved such a spectacular traitor to Athenian democracy...
...Socrates hung out with a rather refined crowdmtoo refined in some respects...
...Bacon, Descartes and Commonweal: 209 Hobbes were not protessors...
...As recently as the middle of the nineteenth century, much of John Stuart Mill's most important work was published in the general literary reviews and only with the foundation of Mind in 1876 could philosophers indulge in private languages...
...A fashion reporter might refer to it as "the donish style": rumpled, tweedy, maybe a tie, a bit beardy, horn-rims and steel rims...
...Aquinas's theory of beauty of apprehensio ipsa placet in the Cotillion Room was followed in the same hall by the Magnolia Debutante Ball of 1977...
...The first impression of any philosophical convention is slightly surrealistic...
...Unlike the medievals who demand a vast acquaintance with ancient philosophy, the Bible and the Fathers, Descartes stakes no scholarly claims, preferring to speak directly to the reader through an invitation to meditate on some rather obvious data about human error...
...Philosophy has been and ~ difficult not because it flies to abstract regions, but because of the general human flight from what is concrete--from our own deepest intimacies of knowledge, action and feeling...
...Esoteric poetry, minimalist art and technical philosophy simply cannot or, perversely, will not meet the great and common spiritual needs of mankind...
...As an :undergraduate teacher charged every fall and spring with saying something intelligible to Miss North Dakota and her peers, I find the relative ease with which philosophical technicalities can be unpacked consoling...
...Nor is Ecorlomos correct in suggesting that philosophy has .become that much harder...
...Philosophy has not retreated from any problems...
...What exactly would Kant or Husserl say to Miss North Dakota...
...If George Steiner worries about the fact that con,temporary public wisdom seems to be dispensed by amateurs and nuts rather than professionals, it is worth recollecting that the majority of the greatest philosophers of the past were "amateurs...
...31 March 1978:208 There is an equally persuasive scenario that contemporary philosophy has become--for philosophy--rather easier to comprehend...
...Had Miss Dakota (North or South) taken a wrong turn and ended up with the philosophers instead of at the contest, would she have understood what was going on...
...Not everyone accepts Steiner's diagnosis or suggested cure for the obvious disease...
...no promises of gratification, revelation, certainty or solace can honestly be made...
...Rather, it has seen that they are harder problems than once was hoped and require harder thinking . . . the easy solutions have been tried...
...Leibniz was a librarian, Spinoza a lens-grinder, Locke a private secretary...
...31 March 1978:210...
...In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled "The Lollipopping of the West," George Steiner notes with proper wit :and dismay the expanding taste for spiritual junk food in America...
...When could that have been...
...It is hard to believe, in short, that contemporary philosophy is more foreign to "the masses" than the work of Aristotle or Hegel...
...As Commonweal noted in its Christmas editorial, Steiner believes that it may be time to reappraise traditional religion in a favorable light...
...Steiner suggest s that the flight to french-fried philosophy is due in part to the current state of the high culture which has deserted the people...
...Probably not...
...Now I am into itmliterally, I am no longer a mere speotator but part of the problem...
...You win Miss United Teenager by 50 percent beauty, 25 percent poise, 25 percent intelligencebut it does not specify philosophic intelligence...
...One should not be deceived by the vivid social setting of Plato's dialogues into believing that once-upon-a-time the philosopher commanded wide public attention...
...The difficulty with philosophy is that it deals with subjects so close to us that we lack perspective...
...What struck me, however, in attending the sessions was how quickly one could decipher even the most impenetrable jargon (Sartre on the transcendence of the ego) in terms that are not at all remote from common experience...
...The normal fate of philosophic labor is expressed by David Hume, who bemoaned the fact that his Treatise of Human Nature fell "stillborn from the press," failing even to attract the enmity of the "zealots...
...Our problems are not abstract but perhaps the most concrete that there are...
...Planting these spiritual sons of Balliol in the foyers of the Park Sheraton in Washington can only precipitate, ironies...
...Both writers seem to assume that there was an age when philosophy was accessible spiritual food for the masses...
...Mathematical logic is a highly technical field which philosophers who do not specialize in the area have difficulty comprehending...
...Philosophy is to the common view of life as a lover is to a spectator at a beauty contest...
...Many past philosophers were clerics from Aquinas to Berkeley...
...What makes philosophy so difficult to comprehend...
...To top it off, since philosophers are few and the hotel's rooms are many, some farcical Fate booked the Miss United Teenage beauty contest for the same period...
...Nevertheless, there is something fundamental about the difficulty of philosophy and the Charge that in its modern form it is peculiarly remote from public needs...
...Philosophers since Socrates have fallen under the ban of official opinion, but ~vhether it was Thomas ,Aquinas battling with the Bishoo of Paris, or Bertrand Russell battling the courts of New York, the intellectual content of these quarrels has rarely emerged in the public domain...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 7
