December 30, 2002
TRANSCENDING SELF:
TAKING IDEAS SERIOUSLY: Can we distinguish political choices from philosophical truths? (Seyla Benhabib, Boston Review)A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that "since 1982, more than thirty biographies of philosophers have appeared. Of those, twenty have been published in the past decade, a dozen just since 1999." Among those whose lives have been subject to close scrutiny are Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, leading the group with three biographical works each; Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt follow with two titles to their names. In a culture in which philosophy has become "breathtakingly irrelevant," the study of philosophers' lives continues to hold some fascination.This turn to biography presents unusual challenges. Philosophical theories make claims to truth that transcend historical and social context. From inside the discipline, the details of personal lives seem quite irrelevant to understanding or evaluating a thinker's views. Every student of philosophy learns to master the distinction between "genesis" and "validity," between the personal or historical circumstances that may have led thinkers to develop certain views and the correctness of these views. Studying philosophy in this country and Germany throughout the 1970s, for example, I do not recall a single seminar in which the biographical or historical details of thinkers' lives emerged as a theme.
The fixation on biography, particularly when it is mixed with interpretive suspicion, suggests a retreat from philosophy's aspiration to truth; we wallow in the particular and revel in salacious detail, whether it be Wittgenstein's homosexuality, A. J. Ayer's promiscuity, Foucault's "sadomasochistic" experimentations in the gay subculture, Dewey's sexual shyness, or Hannah Arendt's affair with Martin Heidegger. The ease with which moral judgments are passed on the lives and passions of others and the titillation derived from cutting intellectual giants down to size are indicative of our own culture. Citizens in a republic of voyeurs, we are intent on microscopic moralism, incapable of appreciating more gracefully the contradictions, tensions, and ragged edges of all lives and unwilling to take ideas seriously, as something more than bandages for personal wounds.
If we find something objectionable in a philosophical theory, we can, of course, always attribute it to a personal deficiency. Mill, the great defender of personal liberty and representative government, did not consider Indian people capable of self-rule or the people of the Balkans capable of entering the mainstream of human history. Kant teaches us that there is a universal faculty of human reason that lies at the foundation of moral agency. But his writings on history and anthropology reveal a belief that the distribution of rationality among the human race is not uniform: some human beings, because of cultural and even racial characteristics, are incapable of higher levels of abstraction. Faced with such contradictions, we can call Kant and Mill racists and treat their systems as gussied-up projects of group dominance or expressions of some form or other of heterophobia. But there is an alternative interpretive strategy. We can treat the troubling elements of their views as occasions to probe deeper and ask: What was their understanding of the relationship between reason and culture? Is education the key to the acquisition of human reason? What is culture? And when we do that, we link our efforts at historical interpretation and contextualization with our own efforts to join the debate and engage hard questions about morality, politics, and history, rather than using historical interpretation as a way to satisfy a suspicion, evade these questions, and pretend that we already know their answers.
Doesn't this really miss the point? We should look at the lives of such people to see if their ideas actually did rise above the personal. For instance, we had a History professor at Colgate who dismissed Karl Marx as a hemorrhoid-ridden failure in a capitalist society who decided that meant capitalism itself was flawed. That may be too glib, but it does raise a serious question. Alternatively, though Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, the Declaration that he wrote laid the groundwork for the eventual freeing of all the slaves. Need we not look at the way one man may have been intellectualy imprisoned by his life experiences while the other transcended his? Posted by Orrin Judd at December 30, 2002 9:58 PM
Only the text or text and context? I'm a text and context guy myself, but try applying that to, say, Jesus or Mohammad and see how many people salute.
Not, Orrin, I bet.
Well, unlike any other question asked in the history of the world, it depends.
I think Wittgenstein is brilliant and, after I work through his writings and come to some glimmer of understanding (quickly lost, so then I have to go back again) I have no interest in the details of his life. His philosophy is set out in his books and the text is either convincing or its not.
Arendt, on the other hand, I find impossible to understand without knowing about Heidegger. Then I can say "ah ha" and go back to Wittgenstein.
All Wittgenstein ever gave me was a headache.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at December 31, 2002 8:10 AMHarry:
Why?
If it turned out Jesus was into sado-masochistic sex with goats I think we'd all have to agree he probably wasn't the Messiah.
Ali -
Unless you expressed that headache through action, can it really be said to have existence?
It also occurs to me that the "ah ha" moment I described below explains the attraction of deconstruction: I, a person of no great intellectual gift, am able to feel superior to Arendt, a person of great intellect, by reducing her entire life to a cliche by means of what my wife, the psychiatrist, refers to as "billiard ball psychology."
Harry - Christians do seek the context about Jesus - and the Christian discovery in the Middle Ages of the Jewish rabbinical/Talmudic tradition proved illuminating about the parables of Jesus.
One of my favorite lines is Addison's remark in the first Spectator that readers always want to know what kind of man a writer is. A healthy impulse, I believe.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/fowlerjh/chap6.htm
Posted by: oj at December 31, 2002 9:51 AMpj, you must know an entirely different kind of Christian from the kind I am familiar with. Remember what happened to D.F. Strauss when he tried to supply context.
Posted by: Harry at December 31, 2002 12:30 PMI'm afraid I don't know who D. F. Strauss is.
Posted by: pj at December 31, 2002 2:29 PMDavid Friedrich Strauss, 19th c. German theologian and historian, first great figure in the Higher Criticism, wrote
"Life of Jesus," was driven from his university.
and you knew the people who drove him out?
Posted by: oj at December 31, 2002 3:30 PMLutherans.
Posted by: Harry at January 1, 2003 1:59 PMAh, genetic guilt. You Lamarckian, you.
Posted by: oj at January 2, 2003 10:40 PM