Posted on 05/23/2002 9:33:09 AM PDT by cornelis
'The Making of a Philosopher': The Intensely Examined Life
By MARY LEFKOWITZ
Socrates always insisted that what he knew was worth little or nothing, even though no less an authority than the Delphic oracle said that there was no one wiser than he. Philosophers are not ''lovers of wisdom,'' in the literal meaning of the word, but lovers of the search for understanding. They cannot rest until they can determine for themselves and explain to their colleagues how they know what can be known, and why it is worth knowing.
Not everyone would be happy living this kind of intensely examined life. But in his brief memoir, ''The Making of a Philosopher,'' Colin McGinn makes it sound as if philosophy can even be fun, especially if one is the kind of person McGinn represents himself as being: tough, determined, amusing, combative and very clever.
In the English port city of Blackpool, McGinn, as a teenager, was an indifferent student who played drums in a rock band and looked forward without much enthusiasm to a life in middle management. Then a teacher introduced him to St. Anselm's ''ontological proof'' of the existence of God. He says he ''found the argument hard to follow but absolutely riveting (a lot of philosophy is like that).''
He discovered that thinking about problems like this propelled him outside of himself and his drab environment. From now on he could be in contact with great thinkers of the past, even sitting by himself in his unheated bedroom. He began to read avidly. He became the first member of his family to go to college. If we can believe him, he sat on a bench in Blackpool staring at a mailbox, asking what made it a mailbox: was its substance (mailbox-ness) the sum of its individual qualities (red, cylindrical, metal)? He had started to ask himself difficult questions about the nature of reality.
Despite his unconventional background (he studied psychology at the University of Manchester), in 1972 McGinn managed to get into Oxford as a graduate student in philosophy. Oxford was the center of philosophical discourse at the time, with some 70 philosophers on the faculty. But it was an entirely different world from the utilitarian atmosphere of Manchester, with long-established traditions. McGinn found himself in competition against students who had been studying philosophy for years. But, in part because he was an outsider and largely self-taught, he managed to make an immediate impression even on famous philosophers like A. J. Ayer.
He also discovered how much he could learn by being challenged by people as clever, or almost as clever, as himself. In the field of philosophy it matters who one's colleagues are and how eager they are to involve themselves in discussion. He learned about questions of reference and semantics, and sought to devise a way of making philosophy into a science, with a standardized technical vocabulary -- a quest that he now thinks is futile. Remarkably, despite his diffidence and bad handwriting, he won the John Locke Prize, an achievement usually reserved for people who had done their undergraduate work at Oxford. Then he knew he had become a philosopher.
In the process of telling us his own success story, McGinn lets us know what it means to be a philosopher. He does not let us imagine that it is easy. Great quantities of hard reading are involved, and endless thought. Also, one must be able to get ideas across, so the rest of us can understand them. This McGinn does in the book, with so much apparent ease and clarity that we can actually learn something. But even if we don't, it doesn't matter, because at least we get to observe a dazzling performance, from which both he, as actor, and we, as audience, can derive real pleasure.
As McGinn performs, we can reflect briefly on how we might distinguish between a word's reference and its sense, between what we mean and what we actually say. We become aware that we can apprehend reality only theoretically, because of the subjectivity of sense perception, that there are limits to what we can know. Our mental apparatus is not equipped to ask, much less to answer, many important questions. Philosophy itself is hard for the same reason: ''It's like trying to crack nuts with a feather duster.''
Not all philosophers agree with McGinn's arguments about the philosophy of mind. Some suggest that he has given up analysis for a kind of mysticism. Others, it seems, object to his style. He lasted only three years in a job at Oxford, thanks to the resentment that follows all extraordinary success in academic life. A senior member of the faculty, McGinn says, who had it in for him because he had supported another candidate for the job then held by McGinn, attacked him for using the then-current term ''syntactic theory of mind.'' His critic spoke so ''rudely and condescendingly'' that McGinn (uncharacteristically) could think of nothing to say for several minutes.
IN such an atmosphere the active discussion essential to progress in philosophy was impossible. So McGinn decamped to Rutgers, where he now teaches what he wants to. He has colleagues who are interested in his ideas and eager to discuss them. He lives in New York and, as a break from the rigors of philosophical thought, paddles his kayak in the surf off Long Island. And philosophy has given him entree into the world beyond academe. He has celebrity friends, like Jonathan Miller and Oliver Sacks. Because of his interest in what we cannot know or describe in words, he has appeared on television and has been interviewed for magazines. He even met the television star Jennifer Aniston, and discovered much too quickly that the only philosopher she'd heard of was Plato.
What really matters to McGinn is what he can do with his mind. University politics and the issues of social policy with which so many other academics are obsessed have no place in these pages. Philosophy, unlike science, does not contribute to the acquisition of knowledge. Instead, it expands the imagination and helps us appreciate the extent of our ignorance. By showing us what it is like to be a philosopher in action, McGinn lets us see for ourselves that philosophical issues are exciting and important. The kind of analytic philosophy that he practices leads to moral literacy because it encourages clarity of thought. In that way, if only in that way, it has real practical value. That is one of the many things McGinn teaches us by telling us his own story.
Mary Lefkowitz is a professor of classical studies at Wellesley College.
Sounds about right.
And then there are those self-styled sorts who pin in on having won a prize from the "not quite as clever" sorts by which they're surrounded in the academia for which they have no use as a rule.
Can we, indeed, come to understand the workings of our own epistemic capacities? Hence the enquiries of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Peirce, Russell, and many others.The most recent major theorist in this tradition, and perhaps the most explicit, is Chomsky
...
I want to suggest, perhaps surprisingly, that there are at least two plausible candidates for human epistemic systems that already contain the data conscious reason cannot reach. Neither is plausibly regarded as a by-product of some other faculty, with the limits attendant upon that; rather, both are expressly designed to represent what reason is not designed to represent. These are: the subconscious self-monitoring representations employed by the brain as it goes about its business; and the information contained in the genetic code. Since the latter is easier to expound in a brief space I shall focus on it. And the basic point is straightforward enough: since, as is commonly supposed, the genes work symbolically, by specifying programmes for generating organisms from the available raw materials, they must contain whatever information is necessary and sufficient for this feat of engineering. So, for example, they must somehow specify the structure and functioning of the heart, and they must supply rules for generating this organ from primitive biological components.
The genes are, as it were, unconscious anatomists and physiologists, equipped with the lore pertaining thereto. But what goes for the body also goes for the mind: the genes must also contain the blueprint for constructing organisms with the (biologically based) mental properties those organisms instantiate. They must, then, represent the principles by which mental properties supervene on physical properties. They must, that is, specify instructions adequate for creating conscious states out of matter. And the same holds for other mental attributes: the genes 'know' how to construct organisms with intentionality, with personhood, with the capacity to make free choices, with rich systems of knowledge - just as they contain instructions for making organisms that embody innate universal grammar.(22) This requires a grip on the natural principles that constitute these attributes, as well as mastery of the trick of engineering them from living tissue.
The genes represent unconsciously what creationists ascribe to the mind of God. And since God has to know the answer to the philosophical problems surrounding these attributes, so too do the genes. In fact, they have known the answers for a very long time, well before we ever formulated the questions.
I love a great philosopher who can defer to the Really Clever (if unconscious) genes.
Therein lies the humility, I guess, I associate with genuine philosophers who -- being in love with wisdom -- naturally is awed by its elegance, beauty and mystery.
A gratuitous swipe at Aniston, but she deserves it nonetheless, IMHO. Not long ago, according to some trendy journalist, Aniston finely sliced up Bush's claims to electoral victory, but she swore the recorder of her erudition to secrecy. She then went on the record and proved her great depth of wisdom by saying that Survivor, CBS' competitor of Aniston's Friends, was "not real television." For Aniston, "real television" apparently requires canned laughter and a bevy of writers cranking out formulaic jokes to make actors appear witty!
I've been reading one of the Blanshard Masonic cult classics on the similarities between the Kremlin and the Vatican. (Yes, it's a scream. Hard to believe this guy's stuff was allegedly dog-eared, underlined and enjoyed easy proximity for ready reference on the bookshelves of some of this nation's "greatest" justices.)
Anyway, this morning I was listening to him screech on how Aquinas -- nice guy and all -- wasn't really a thinker because all he was doing was choosing to prove the tenets of his own faith which he believed already.
I mean, really ... how much real "philosophizing" can a self-imposed sinecure like that entail?
But, my worry for them is the worry of the small observer-- I hope they don't sunburn me, I hope they don't go Nova or collapse to become a Neutron Star or Dead Dwarf...all the hazards of great, lone, gravitational objects.
Irving Babbit refers to Emerson as "one of the modern apostles of self-reliance"
nor can it be maintained that Emerson the chief American champion of self-reliance, is conspicuously humble.In speaking of humility, Babbit continues:
If we are to grasp the problem involved in the attempt to be at once humble and self-reliant, we need to go back to the ancient individualism that Rousseau and Emerson in some respects revive and seek to get at the causes of its final failure. The Stoic bases his optimism primarily, we soon discover, not, like Rousseau, on faith in his instincts, but on faith in reason. To know the right thing is about tantamout to doing it. Reason and will thus tend to become identical. The Stoics themselves conceived that in this matter they were simply following the footsteps of Socrates. The whole question is, as a matter of facct, closely allied to the Platonic and Socratic identification of knowledge and virtue; and this again brings up the great point at issue between European and Asiatic as to the relation of intellect and will. The chief religious teachers of Asia have, I have already said, asserted in some form or other a higher will to which man must submit in his natural sef (and in Asiatic psychology intellect belongs to the natural self), if he is to enter the pathway of peace. A comparison between Plato and Buddha might help to elucidate this contrast between East and West. Buddha like Plato sought to bring together philosophy and religion but even so he put far less emphasis on the role of the mind than Plato. The list of "unthinkables" he drew up is almost equivalent to a denial that life can in any deep sense of the word be known at all. It cannot be maintained that the mind (mano) of the Buddhist coincides exactly with the Platonic mind (nous). It is, nevertheless, significant that "mind" is for the Buddhist an organ of the flux, whereas Plato exalts "mind" to the first place [I would interject Plato is acutely aware of the secondary role of ratiocination; that awareness accounts for Socratic ignorance; nor should we forget the emphasis on the soul and the concomitant hope for immortality] It is a less grievous error, according to Buddha, to look on one's body as permanent than to harbor a similar conceit about one's "mind." A Buddhist might regard as the underlying error of Occidental philospohy the tenency that goes at least as far back as Parmenides to identify thought with being. Why should so chimerical a creature as man identify either thought or any other part of himself with being? As Pindar says, What are we, what are we not? Man is but the dream of a shadow." Pindar apparenlty feared lest he might flatter unduly man's conceit of his own permanene if he had called him even the shadow of a dream. To suppost that one can transend the element of impermanence, whether in oneself or the outer world, merely through reason in any sense of the word, is to forget that "illusion is an intergral part of reality." The person who confides unduly in "reason" is also prone to set up some static "absolute"; while those who seek to get rid of the absolute in favor of flux and relativity tend at the same time to get rid of standards. Both absolutists and relativists are guilty of an intellectual sophistication of the facts, inasmuch as in life it is actually experienced, unity and multiplicity are indissobly blended.--Irving Babbit, Democracy and Leadership
This may help explain how on the one hand Emerson would never have become a modern Communist.
Further reading of Babbit would also help to show how Emerson's self likewise tends to irreligion [consider that Communism has been called a Christian heresy) and that he becomes one proper channel for the exaltation of the self-sufficiency of instinct in our country, an instinct which moreover denies instrinsic evil in human nature. "The entertainment of the proposition of depravity," replies Emerson, "is the last profligacy and profanation."
Ironically, this "lat profligacy" can also be the view of the Communist and appears to be the deficiency in the thought of Plato, and elsewhere.
And a good philosopher would remember the most significant American thinker prior to Emerson: Johnathan Edwards, who understood that profligacy, although with great exaggeration.
More excellent comments on Emerson are found in Babbit's The Masters of Modern French Criticism.
I am more impressed with the bad handwriting.
There are two ways to combat the allure of compartmentalization of the mind. One can recognize the barriers do not exist. To the disapproving observers in our relativistic universe, it looks like you're walking through walls.
The other method is to flip open as many compartments as you can. "If the problem isn't where you're looking for it, you're probably looking in the wrong place", as a wise man once told me.
After a few decades, though, you'll notice that they all contain the same thing. I cannot bear to open another box to find local kahunas have designated a "hard problem" and an "easy problem".
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