I
had a partner who teased me whenever I informed her that I’d worked something
out in my own head. She had a sharp ear for pleonasm and so I made attempts to
avoid being teased.
Recently,
I discovered that the journal Radical Philosophy
has been revived. The old one started in 1972 and ran to two hundred issues
before running out of steam. This morning in the shower - and nearly fifty
years after contributing to the first issue of the original Radical Philosophy [1] - I had the thought (in my own head), Isn’t the
expression radical philosophy a
pleonasm?
All
philosophy tries to get to the root/s of things, to get beyond the repetition
of conventional thoughts, the reliance on unchallenged assumptions, the polite
acquiescence in received wisdom. That does not entail that philosophical
conclusions must end up being sceptical in character. You may dig down to the
roots and discover they are very strong and hold up the tree very well. Your
task then becomes that of re-familiarising others, of getting them to look
afresh at what has become so familiar that it is too much taken for granted.
Take a look, give that root a big kick, and you will find it hurts you more
than it hurts the root.
But
to confine philosophy to just sceptical and non-sceptical versions is too
limiting, anyway. Raymond Geuss titles a recent book Changing The Subject (2017) and broadly speaking argues that
philosophers repeatedly change the state of the question. Marx was very
explicit about the change he wanted to make: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various
ways; the point is to change it. [2]
It’s
a commonplace in the philosophy of science at least since Thomas Kuhn’s work
(1950s – 1960s)[3] that
when a scientific revolution occurs, it’s not just a theory which changes. It
is the questions asked, the bits of the world which seem in need of study, the
definition of the subject itself. Geuss is casting the history of philosophy as
possessed by a similar dynamic.
But for both science and philosophy, it does
not exclude the claim that they aim at truth.
There
is art and literature which might be described as philosophical and which also
tries to dig down to the roots, either to refresh our understanding of our
world or suggest we might be better off shifting ourselves into a different
one. William Wordsworth seeks to refresh, to re-imagine our familiar world, to give the charm of novelty to things of
everyday as Coleridge puts it in
Biographia Literaria.
In contrast, there are those who use literary and
theatrical techniques of estrangement or alienation to upset our habitual
responses, hoping to lead us into questioning the normal, into imagining a
world different from this wearying reality of ours. In the recent past the
names of Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht [4]
are closely linked to such an approach, but the techniques are not new. They
are deployed in a long procession of older works in which the morals and
manners of other cultures are held up as mirrors to our own: Montaigne's sixteenth century essay "On the Cannibals" is an early example.
Of
course, art and literature and philosophy too are often enough produced as
comfort food, offering no challenge and packaged like candy. On that, my
philosopher’s advice is to refuse substitutes and only curl up on the sofa with
real ideas and fairtrade chocolate. [5]
[1] “Sanity, Madness and the Problem
of Knowledge”, Radical Philosophy, 1,
January 1972, pp. 22-23. Now at academia.edu
[4] “English Formalism and Russian
Formalism”, in my Materials and Medium:
An Aesthetics (2016), pp. 71-80.
[5] Here Dr Pateman enters into competition
with Dr Peterson who in 12 Rules for Life
(2018) recommends a masculine diet of Heidegger and fry-up breakfasts. Cousin
Medicine publicly despairs of us both but kindly whispers, Peterson’s diet is
much worse.
