Pithy Takes on Some Philosophers

I love the word pith. I also love the experience of pith — brief and dense. I almost wrote quick but pith is often slow, even if short. No doubt, for each of these entries, one could write something else entirely. I don’t ever want to be definitive; I want to be exploratory, inviting, proliferating.

These are my takes today, meant to be descriptive rather than poetic, performative, or provocatively interpretive. I do this as an exercise: quickly, how pithy can I be? What do I choose to mention? An exercise in cutting.

Friedrich Nietzsche: The great philosopher of joy! A radical affirmation of this life. There is nothing outside of life to ground us-no god, no morality, no truth, nothing that is not in flux. And yet, when freed from the prison of morality, there is nevertheless an ethics: Be healthy! (Which, in turn, demands all kinds of things such as discipline.) So stop being so righteous. And stop seeking a way out — religion, truth, morality, ego are all nihilistic. The so-called great questions of philosophy — what is truth? what is good? — are nihilistic. The questions are: What do you eat? Where do you live? How do you recreate?The formula for greatness, he says, is amor fati: don’t just accept your life, your fate, but love it — everything about it.

What I recommend: On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann. (These two books come together and are, to me, his best.)

Socrates: Everything in this mortal world gives way before the sublimity of the divine. Anyone who thinks she knows the truth is full of it — it being delusion or hubris. So Socrates asks them questions until they admit they know nothing — or they get so annoyed, they walk away. (The real Socratic method is not a way to know but a way not to know!) Which is why he’s always ironic (Kierkegaard claims Socrates invented irony): as a mortal, he must speak its language but when he does, he erases what he just said, pointing to the divine. They killed him for being a nudge.

What I recommend: Phaedrus, tr. Rabinowitz and Helmbold

Matthew Ritchie paints what the postmodern sees.

Postmodernism: A whole bunch of writers who try to make sense of life when sense is not guaranteed as nothing is fixed and sure, nothing is outside this world. The question that all postmodernism asks is: If everything is, in fact, flux — if there is no center — how do we make claims, know things, have form? Of course, “postmodern” is a category that wants to be outside its insistence on difference, grouping wildly disparate thinkers together. Postmodern, as a category, undoes itself.

Jacques Derrida: Which brings me to Derrida: every claim to know the world, to say this is this, enacts its own undoing because everything bleeds. Everything is what Derrida calls intertextual. Think of it this way: to define a word in a dictionary demands you look up other words that demand you look up other words ad infinitum. You never land at a final meaning that is not dependent on other words. Derrida calls this movement, this operation, différance — the deferral of meaning through the internal difference of meaning. To read for différance, for the way a text undoes itself (and hence creates itself), is what he calls deconstruction.

What I recommend: Writing & Difference and Margins of Philosophy

Henri Bergson: The whole problem with the history of philosophy and thought, including science and math, is that it begins with the assumption that time is added to space. This leads us into creating what Bergson calls false problems. But time is not added to the world; it is constitutive of matter. As he likes to say, the world endures — by which he means it’s temporal. And hence always changing and ever novel. Motion is not a series of points added up; it is its own action, to be understood on its own terms. While this creative evolution resists a general theory of knowing, there is a method to understand things, to inhabit their difference, their duration: he calls it intuition. Intuition, not intellect, is how we enter into the world of other things.

What I recommend: Matter and Memory (I warn you: it’s hard!); Time & Free Will; The Creative Mind (perhaps the easiest way in)

Søren Kierkegaard: In almost all of his writing, Kierkegaard used pseudonyms, creating a situation for each book: a perspective. Because, above all, we are individuals. And we all stand before a world that is both finite and infinite. As individuals, we can consume the finite world immediately, wantonly, as an aesthetic. Or we can have our experience of the finite mediated by social ethics. Or we can give up the finite as best we can and surrender to infinity as we recuse ourselves from this social world, taking refuge in a monastery, perhaps. But the highest goal we can achieve is to walk in the infinite and the finite at the same time: with each step, what Kierkegaard calls the Knight of Faith, walks into the infinite and back to the finite, over and over. This Knight of Faith lives in the finite social world — job, kids, friends — while having an immediate, delirious, and insane relationship to the infinite. (To wit, Kierkegaard’s example is Abraham: he marches his kid up the mountain to kill him and, afterwards, goes on living in the social as a father and husband. Without any doubt or anxiety! Which is why Kierkegaard calls Abraham the father of faith.)

What I recommend: Fear & Trembling (Penguin)

Foucault was famous for his laugh. I believe his humor is what’s most overlooked in his writing. (Supposedly, when he was teaching at Berkeley, he was known for wearing white leather pants — alas, that was before my time.)

Michel Foucault: Power is not only prohibition — you can’t do this or that. Power is also, and primarily, productive: we are created, and create ourselves, within limits that constrain what we can think, say, and do. Foucault calls this discourse. A discourse is the field of what can be said and thought, of what is true and what is not; it’s the arrangement and distribution of words, thoughts, and bodies. He looks at the history of certain discourses that most believe to be ahistorical — sexuality, madness, punishment — and discovers how these discourses operate across time, how they work to define, limit, and distribute our words, thoughts, and bodies: how they create us and, in so doing, control us.

What I recommend: History of Sexuality v1 (hilarious, beautiful, poignant); Discipline & Punish.

Gadamer is not so hip these days. But that’s a shame. His “Truth and Method” is an incredible, life altering book.

Hans-Georg Gadamer: We are all of the same stuff — history. So while we might be different to each other — speak different languages, have different beliefs — we are necessarily connected by the mere fact that we are all of history. So rather than communication necessarily failing, as Derrida might have it, communication is necessarily successful, even if going astray from things like intent or the seamless relay of information: something is always communicated. This hermeneutics, the school Gadamer is associated with, is rather sweet, if I may say so.

What I recommend: Truth & Method (Continuum)

Gilles Deleuze: The great thinker of difference: each text, for Deleuze, is a new terrain with its own logic and modes of operating. When he reads Spinoza, Leibniz, Foucault, Bergson — or, for that matter, grass, Francis Bacon, bird songs, Moby Dick — he discovers different worlds at work. And yet these worlds are not solipsistic; they intertwine, overlap, pick up pieces of each other, carrying them in new directions. Deleuze gives us a vision of the world that’s decentered yet immanently ordered, albeit with an order that is never fixed or secretive or underlying but that is always emerging.

What I recommend: The Fold: Leibniz & the Baroque; and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (maybe his “easiest” book). Other Deleuze may be “important” but he is difficult to read unless you’re determined.

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: This two-headed beast proliferate concepts. The world teeters on the edge of chaos but, usually, remains formed even as these forms give way, merge, dissipate in a relentless operation of what they call territorializaton, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Things don’t function like trees with roots and branches; they are rhizomes — roots everywhere! Roots all connected! Whereas Derrida shies away from concepts to avoid the pitfalls of metaphysics — sticking something in place — Deleuze and Guattari go the other way: they proliferate concepts to infinity, even if they begin to wade into the incomprehensible.

What I recommend: A Thousand Plateaus (a monster; but have fun with it, skip around it, grab from here and there); What is Philosophy? (a good way into their thinking)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: We are all of this world, stuff going with stuff. To know the world is not to stand apart from it (as a certain scientific method proffers) but to be immersed in it, of it, with it. Perception is not a matter of subject and object but happens in-between: as we see the world, the world sees us. To touch the world is to be touched by the world. Identity and knowing are what he calls chiasmatic as self-other, perceiver-perceived, and subject-object are always already intertwined, swapping places at infinite speed.

What I recommend: The Visible and the Invisible

Originally published at http://hilariousbookbinder.blogspot.com.