It makes sense to suppose that philosophy requires a way of life. Any ‘ruling passion’ must orient the actions of the one ruled by it. There might well be a characteristic life-pattern, a regime of sorts, of those ruled by the love of wisdom, philo-sophia. The pattern might be indistinct, susceptible to enormous variations, even as the love of money might animate an athlete, a financier, or a killer for hire. Still, the difference between a wisdom-love and a money-lover (assuming that wisdom does not culminate in the love of money) must play out inactions as well as states of soul insofar as he loves money, a man will converse about no general topics, unless conversing about general topic brings in money. And even then, the money-loving talker will likely tailor his speech to attract a large, paying audience; he will prefer to tell them of that wisdom they will desire and accept as wisdom. There would then be no distinction between the life of the philosopher and the life of the sophist.
What Richard Schusterman describes as “professional philosophy” must then be no philosophy at all, or some extraordinarily fortunate philosophy. [1] In its good fortune, it may not be fully aware of the condition of its flourishing: some political regime that encourages (or at least does not seriously discourage) citizens to pay to listen to philosophers. Insofar as philosophers are unaware of the conditions of their own existence, they are at risk. Insofar as they are unaware, they are also unphilosophical. Perhaps fortunately, it has become increasingly difficult for even “professional philosophy” to remain unphilosophical in this way, given the radical and disruptive challenges to the very conditions of academic ‘professionalism’ seen in the past several decades. Unfortunately, these challenges also tempt or intimidate the professional profs into capitulation.
Schusterman would meet this challenge with a particular form of philosophy, pragmatism, especially as conceived by the first-generation American pragmatist, John Dewey. Dewey blends theoria and technē while avoiding the ‘aristocratic’/’vanguard’ consequences of both Hegelian/Marxist thought on one side and l’art pour l’art estheticism on the other. Dewey wants a democratic, meliorist fusion of theory and practice; “philosophy for everyone” may not be Socratic, as Schusterman claims, but it is a characteristic motif of American pragmatism.
It is not clear that philosophy as conceived by pragmatists can finally distinguish itself from any other practical activity. Fuse theory and practice, and what is the wisdom a philosopher loves? How does philosophy differ from pounding a nail, making a layup, sawing on a fiddle (assuming that Rome isn’t burning)? How does a pragmatic philosopher distinguish himself from a pragmatic politician, a successful commodities trader, a happy hooker? Pragmatism in philosophy may bring for a dark night in the city of pigs where all sows are black. At one point, Dewey tries to distinguish a good man in his ‘growth’ from a criminal in his professional growth, with embarrassing implausibility. [2] It isn’t clear that Schusterman can do any better.
Martha C. Nussbaum ‘feminizes’ pragmatism. [3] Philosophy is to be not only “practical” but “compassionate.” Unlike Dewey, she looks not to Francis Bacon and his modern project, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, but to the Hellenistic philosophers. The Hellenistic “combination of logic with compassion” attracts her, as long as it can be supplemented with Aristotle’s political sense.
But will not an ambition to formulate a politics of compassion not land the philosopher somewhere in the orbit whose apogee is Rousseau and whose perigee is Marx, with all the concomitant secular-religiosities that that orbit traces? To put it another way: Dewey’s Baconianism has a thumoerotic Machiavellian core, of which Dewey himself may or may not be aware. (Bacon was.) Machiaville and Baconsburg (more grandly, the New Atlantis) are fundamentally towns without pity, although the latter can make quite a show of pity. To be effective in the real world, pity needs power; absent an omnipotent and providential God, it needs self-empower and thumoerotic Man. Rousseauian compassion, replacing Christian charity, has recourse neither to prayer nor to technological power; the Hegelian and Marxist attempts to find a secular replacement for the all-powerful God who has disappeared—the eschatology of ‘historical’ dialectic—have simply failed. Why would recourse to the philosophers of antiquity, who were not especially compassionate or ‘constructive’ in the modern sense, rescue the mission?
Michel Foucault traces what appears at first to be the progressive moralization of philosophy, but turns out to be philosophy’s progressive accommodation to despotism. [4] Socratic philosophy is already ‘moralizing’ and ‘politicizing,’ at least in contrast with the natural philosophy that preceded it. Politics means ruling oneself and others and being ruled by others. The Stoics under the Roman Empire and the Christians, also under an empire, shift the emphasis to ‘being ruled.’
‘Being ruled’ means writing more, talking less. Laws are written. Bureaucratic regulations are written. The vast bureaucratic empire of Rome evidently produced a philosophy of rules and regulations. Ruling ‘by the rules’ must attend to the body, inasmuch as the body is more easily ‘accessible’ to rule by rules than is the soul. But this does not prevent attempts to rule the soul by rules, to make the soul assay itself in accordance with a network of rules laid down by a pedagogue-king to respectfully silent students, their souls treated as if they were passive bodies waiting to be pierced and tattooed.
Rule-bound philosophy risks losing the ascent from the cave, perhaps the most distinctive feature of Socratic philosophizing. In Foucault’s words, “Alēthia becomes ethos.” But if truth simply becomes ethos, one has a sort of pre-modern version of Enlightenment, a triumph of the sophists, of soi-disant knowers over philosophers.
Thus Foucault’s Stoics are distinguished from Christians primarily because their rules come from nature and not from a personal God. The personal God, not unlike the worldly king, requires self-revelation and submission. The personal God kindly requires submission for the sake of human salvation, whereas the worldly king, if he is a tyrant, will have no such charity at heart. In the monastery, “obedience is complete control of behavior by the master, not a final autonomous state,” ultimately because in a created world there is no autonomous state. “The self must constitute itself through obedience” because it does not finally constitute itself at all; God constitutes the human soul, which, to survive, must return in fear and trembling to its Maker.
Foucault additionally claims that the emphasis on ‘being ruled’ reflects a shift from caring for oneself to knowing oneself. this implies that Plato’s Socrates, that first of all self-knowers, was more despotic than anyone, a claim that goes badly with his dialogic disposition. “In Greco-Roman culture,” Foucault writes, “knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes that fundamental principle.” Yes, but only in the sense that knowledge, including self-knowledge, is conceived as power—a Baconian not a Platonic notion. Foucault here is Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean.
Thus, in his commentary on Alcibiades I, Foucault remarks that “the intersection of political ambition and philosophical love is ‘the care of the self,'” but fails to remark that this intersection fails, that Alcibiades careens to political disaster and Socrates must flee or drink hemlock. Theory and practice, self-knowledge and politics, do not so easily unite, and Plato’s dialogues tell us that in a rich variety of ways. Theory and practice are related, but their unity is not more easy to effect than a polis ruled by philosopher-kings. Foucault’s own attempt to united theory and practice non-rationally, ‘experientially,’ in the “limit experience”—a pragmatism for anti-Enlighteners—replaces the Nietzschean “yes to life” with “yes to death,” and thereby cancels itself.
Unlike the pragmatists and Foucault, Pierre Hadot claims neither philosophic nor ‘anti-philosophic’ status for himself. [5] He present himself as a scholar. Perhaps because he doesn’t try to make something of the philosophers he reads, he recovers the character of the old philosophers intact. Philosophers are “strange,” foreigners in their native countries; Socrates is “unclassifiable” to the men of this world, the political men (when they do not mistake him for a sophist). This means conflict, not meliorism, and the philosopher had better watch his step. Hadot sees that the Hellenistic rules exist not for themselves but for the instrumental purpose of getting the philosopher through the day, a day full of numerous unphilosophic dangers. The zeteticism of Ulysses needs the prudence of Ulysses. But the arête of Ulysses is not “inner freedom”—here Hadot Rousseauizes—but the alliance of prudence and courage symbolized by Athena. (Unless the alliance of prudence and courage is what Hadot means by “inner freedom.”) Better is his Georges Friedmann citation from that year of bad events, 1942, exhorting us to strive to become worthy of the revolution rather than to revolutionize too directly. To become worthy of the revolution might bring forth a real revolution. (Or, as someone observed, the real American Revolution took place in the minds and hearts of Americans.) A real revolution might or might not turn out to be a political revolution. Why else found a city in speech?
Notes
- Richard Schusterman: Practical Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophic Life. New York: Routledge, 1997.
- John Dewey: Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press, 1968 [1916].
- Martha C. Nussbaum: Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
- Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. Alan Sheridan translation. New York: Vintage Books, 1977 [1975].
- Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercise from Socrates to Foucault. Michael Chase translation. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1995.
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