‘Burlesque Philosophy,’ or ‘Stupid Thoughtfulness’
“The chief fallacy is to believe that Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought; thinking is always result-less.”
–Hannah Arendt, Letter to Mary McCarthy, Chestnut Lawn House, Palenville, N.Y. August 20, 1954
There is an exchange about doubt, fear, and thinking toward the beginning of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt’s correspondence. Mary is working on her novel, A Charmed Life, and asks Hannah for her thoughts on the phenomenon of doubt within the tradition of western political thought:
“One thing I’m anxious to talk to you about is a problem connected with the novel, which is about bohemianized people and the dogmatization of ignorance. Or about the shattered science of epistemology. ‘How do you know that?’ once of the characters keeps babbling about any statement in the realm of fact or aesthetics. In morals, the reiterated question is ‘Why not?’ ‘Why shouldn’t I murder my grandmother if I want to? Give me one good reason,’ another character pleads. . . .When did this ritualistic doubting begin to permeate, first, philosophy and then popular thinking?”
Hannah replies:
“The feebleminded thoughtfulness or thoughtful feeblemindedness of intellectuals — Your Example: why should I not kill my grandmother if I want to? Such and similar questions were answered in the past by religion on one side and common sense on the other. The religious answer is: because you will go to hell and eternal damnation; the common sense answer is: because you don’t want to be murdered yourself. Both answers don’t work any longer, and this is not only because these specific replies — nobody believes in hell any longer, nobody is so sure if he does not want to be killed or if death, even violent death is really so bad — but because their sources, faith on one hand and common sense judgments don’t make sense anymore. The philosophic answer would be the answer of Socrates: Since I have got to live with myself, am in fact the only person from whom I never shall be able to part, whose company I shall have to bear forever, I don’t want to become a murderer. I don’t want to spend my life in the company of a murderer. This answer is no longer good because hardly anybody nowadays lives by himself; if he is alone, he is lonely, i.e. not together with himself.”
Arendt goes on to say that the people about whom Mary is writing behave like “burlesque philosophers,” because they are meddling in the realm of philosophy — a situation for which, historically, only philosophers ever ‘dared to risk themselves.’ “Burlesque,” here, does not signify striptease (although perhaps there’s a metaphor here); rather, “burlesque” refers to an absurd or comically exaggerated imitation of philosophical questioning. It refers to an imitation of Socrates, who aroused anxious fury with his feigned naiveté.
Arendt offers an historical account of doubt in the western tradition beginning with English and French philosophy, arguing that what they share in common is a distrust of the senses that resulted from ‘the great discoveries of the natural sciences.’ The natural sciences taught us to distrust ourselves — that our senses couldn’t reveal the world to us.
This self-doubt taught us to always question ourselves, and in so doing bred a kind of pathos of uncertainty. For Arendt this perversion of common sense is dangerous, because if we lose this sixth sense, we lose our shared world in common.
Arendt’s letter critiques Methodism: a tyranny the humanities have long sought to upend. She argues that if everyone moves through life saying the same thing, (for instance that 2+2=4) an assumption arises that people are all the same, that subjectivity has blended us into a unanimous agreement that is predictable, rational, logical. If so, we can assume that there is a ‘normal man’ who can easily perform the task of addition. If he somehow falters in answering this simple additive question, there exists a psychoanalyst or a God who can correct him, show him how to be like everybody else.
Arendt continues:
“Now, historically: The ritual of doubt started with Descartes and only in him will you find the original motives: the real anxiety that not God but an evil sprit is behind the whole spectacle of Being.”
She continues to summarize Descartes’ movement through the western tradition, and adds:
“If I may add a word of my own, independent of historical situations: The chief fallacy is to believe that Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought; thinking is always result-less. . . .The difference between philosophers and other people is that the former refuse to let go, but not that they are the only receptacles for truth.”
Truth, Arendt tells us in not “in” thoughts, it is “the condition for the possibility of thinking.”
At the beginning of The Human Condition Arendt writes that we live on earth and inhabit the world. The world is something that we make, in part through common sense. But this common sense is not a form of knowing; rather, it is a ground of understanding that rests on speech, on our ability to understand one another, and on a belief that somehow language will be able to hold us.
What happens when we continuously disrupt this common sense ground with questions? If we’re always asking: But how do you know that? Or, demanding: Give me a reason!
What’s wrong with a little unreason?
Why do we ask questions? Or better, how do we ask questions?
Do we ask questions to engage in a form of thinking? Do we ask questions to learn? To get to the bottom of something? To understand? To know? Do we ask in order to think?
Sometimes, to ask a question is to be after something — some end, some result. Sometimes you ask a question and someone suspects an ulterior motive. They respond, “what are youreally after?” Sometimes something is willed behind the formation of a question that is present, but absent.
In her own writing Arendt distinguishes between fact, opinion, truth, and knowledge. In her lecture notes, she urges students to ask questions. She tells us that questions are how we learn.
How do we think about learning?
Arendt’s response to McCarthy’s question appears in her later writings on common sense inThe Human Condition and in Thinking. She turns to Descartes and the modern condition that has somehow transformed us into a bunch of doubting Thomases, doing away with common understanding.
This form of doubtful questioning, though, is not a Socratic dialogue and it’s not dialectic in the spirit of negation. This form of doubt-turned-question doesn’t have anything to do with the search for, lust for, or longing for Truth. Longing after Truth is never a desire to actually possess some objectifiable, graspable form of Truth.
The character Mary paints, who typifies the modern age for Arendt, or the condition of thinking in the modern age, is not after truth, he is after information, or knowledge.
How do we think about the difference between Truth, knowledge, and information?
Was thinking replaced by an unquenchable desire for information?
Do we believe that we can ever know? That there can be an “asked and answered?”
Are we fiends itching for answers? Today, with the Internet and iPhones, it seems we’re addicted to easy information.
Somehow this demand for information, the demand for knowledge, is also coupled with an existential state of doubt. Doubt is not an expression of not-knowing, rather it is an expression of how much we know, or are capable of knowing, or at least think we know.
And what longing for Truth is there left in the age of Google, now that we know so much and worlds of information lay at our fingertips, waiting to be had? When the space between question and answer collapses, what time is there to contemplate Truth? To dwell in aporia?
Information, which is sometimes traded for knowledge, is a different animal from Truth, and that drives us away from asking and from asking after asking. And this demand that we get to possess, to reach some end when we go about asking questions — Can it teach us how to love the world?
I suspect not. How can we ever love anything that we’re trying to possess, to master? Or anything that we call into constant doubt? Is there a relationship between loving the world and having faith in the world?
How might we be better learners? How might we be better question askers?
Of what are we doubtful? Are we fake doubters? How do we ask questions without doubt?
Is there some well-hidden fear lurking beneath our flimsy questions? How does the premise of doubt appear? Could it be we’ve all taken on a kind of anti-authoritarianism? Certainly, it must be some greater kind of pessimism. (If ever a greater kind?)
But, what is the argument? What are you trying to do here? What are you after?
Perhaps, Arendt is making an argument for fear, to embrace the precarity of not knowing. Perhaps, fear is important for moral judgment about how one should act in the world? Perhaps, we might need a little more fear. If this state of doubt began, after all, with Descartes’ assumption about our fear of being here, we ought to find more steady ontological ground. Perhaps not.
Must we confront the epistemological question? Would it be enough to just blame Kant? Or Hegel? Maybe Existentialism? Or Marx and his ruthless criticism of everything, right?
You would know that, wouldn’t you?
Maybe it was Descartes after all who set us down this path.
And I think: How can I know that?
And I answer: But then again, why not?
Samantha Hill, Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College
