Marginal Philosophy

Marginal Philosophy

                Like many academics I have a long and ambivalent history with the practice of writing marginalia. I now think it sacrilege to deface my books by writing comments on the margins especially as years later such comments seem to be so much less witty and apt than they seemed in the inevitability of the moment. Still, margins are for writing on (historically that is why they exist) and according to a 17^th Century theory at least nature abhors a vacuum. White empty spaces invite comment and that is why I wrote my last book (and indeed the two before it). Let me explain it this way. One can be perfectly happy thinking only about the text and the established rules for thinking about the text whether that be an artificial text or a natural one. At one time (long ago) I might have been a Jesuit theologian poring contentedly over the scriptural commentaries composed by the Church Fathers with their various creedal statements, dogmatic formulas, rules of interpretation and so on. In this I would have been a very modern (well perhaps early modern!) academic though one immersed in an archaic subject. I would have been the exact equivalent of a biologist in fact: poring over the data about living things in the light shed on them by the paradigms, theoretic and practical, of modern biological science. The historian Thomas Kuhn called this ‘normal science’ though there is normal theology and normal philosophy as well. I even suspect he half understood that the problem was at bottom a theological one as Steve Fuller has suggested for modern science is the product of a revolutionary shift analogous, indeed exactly analogous, to a religious conversion. Be that as it may scientists, philosophers and all others who pursue the life of the mind would (I suspect) like to follow their ‘normal pursuit’ which is to enquire into the problems posed by their specialist colleagues according to the broadly accepted canons of method reigning in their discipline. It is uncomfortable to pursue marginal questions as there are no clear rules for doing so.

By marginal questions I mean questions outside the paradigm of a particular discipline. Some of what I mean might be captured by the current buzzword ‘interdisciplinarity’. There are the disciplines and the margins of the disciplines and the questions that occur in the margins of the disciplines like what Leibniz may or may not have to do with Bach which neither philosophy or music theory quite answers though they may co-operate on an answer. However, this is not terribly difficult in theory though administrators and academic specialists tend not to like this kind of discourse in practice however much they praise it in principle. I am talking about much more than marginal academic questions however. I am talking about the margins between worlds in general such as the margin between the discourse of science and the technical realm and the discourse of sacred narrative or, say, sexual self-discovery. I am talking about the margins between people raised in a western cultural sphere shaped by centuries of Christianity and the secular politics born from it and people whose cultural sphere is shaped by Islam (who have a completely different understanding of what a picture is say) or Confucian or other traditions. What about people in indigenous or animist traditions who don’t quite live in the same nature we do in the sense that they do not construct the realm of nature under the same metaphors that we do (ie as a society not a machine)?^[1] These are questions where the rules develop in the course of the discussion to the extent that the discussion does not break down (which it often does). These questions may be marginal in the narrow sense I have defined here but of course they are central to the world’s business and if you are an academic like me you find that these are the questions the world is putting to you via your students!       

Academics do not like such discussions and with very good reason. What, for instance, has contemporary analytic philosophy to say about Indian philosophy? Nothing on its face for analytic philosophy works on a specific set of problems like qualia or the analytic synthetic distinction under the broad rubric of ‘methodological naturalism’.^[2] As these are not the typical problems or methods of Indian philosophy the ‘normal’ philosopher need not ever bother his head about them and this, I must stress, is a perfectly reasonable stance to take (or would be if we were not currently looking for ways to integrate Asian thought into the curriculum).^[3] It is as reasonable as that of a biologist who reads up on Darwin but ignores Lamarck whom he dismisses unread for the simple reason that generations of his colleagues have done so. Time is finite and revisiting the past does not advance anyone’s career. Countenancing biological heresies may be for someone but it is not for working biologists who have students to teach and labs to run and papers to write. So with the normal philosopher: any student working on philosophy of mind is responsible for responding to books and papers by the Churchlands but not to the Crest Jewel of Discrimination because of where she is situated and the limits on discourse defined by her discipline. All of us (marginal philosophers included) have to work within the confines and expectations of a discipline even while we are addressing the spaces outside it. ‘Normal’ discourse should generally be the order of the day by which I mean discourse that falls within certain agreed upon boundaries.

                As I mention in my book however things are not normal. Politics is not normal. Religion and culture are not normal. Nature itself is not normal according to the best current evidence. One might object (as Feyerabend did to Kuhn) that things are never REALLY normal but, there is normal and then there is NORMAL, and right now these things are abnormal in a degree above what they were previously. This is so in a negative sense and in a positive sense. The first is evident enough on a surface level. I recently talked to a man (by no means unintelligent) who assured me that the current generation of young people is corrupt and feckless and needs to be ‘purged by the fires of war’. He assured me that ‘we’ had no intention of being confined to the dustbin of history and by ‘we’ he meant (I think?) English speakers in the Anglo-American cultural sphere. ‘We’, he told me, would not be replaced though if ‘we’ are now as degenerate as he claims it seems to this author that ‘we’ should probably be replaced as quickly as possible. Plus, since consistency is no longer a thing, this individual thinks that what is at stake in the decline of ‘us’ is ‘the enlightenment project’. This Spenglerian doomsday talk is of course Fascist (and anti-enlightenment) to the core. It is the politics of nostalgia and revenge; the craving for a purer simpler past of national glory coupled with a will to revenge on the people (elites, media, refugees whoever) who are supposedly subverting it.^[4]

It is not normal for intelligent people with graduate degrees to espouse Fascism: the most readily identifiable and the most easily debunked of all political heresies. This is in every sense of the word appalling. With danger comes opportunity however for now we (as in philosophers and thinkers) need to forget about qualia for a bit and think about time in the deep comprehensive sense the ancients did. We need to do this because Fascism is the symptom not the disease. What my acquaintance is on about is time and the inevitability of mortality and change. He foresees a world where the Anglo-west is no longer king and wants revenge on a universe where that is a built in possibility. This in spite of the fact that the Hittites, Romans and Babylonians have all vanished in the course of time and there is no WESTERN philosophic or religious stance of ANY merit that does not foresee the same for the cultural and military dominance of Anglo-American thought forms and institutions. When people cannot accept the obvious, indeed trite thought that ‘time and chance happeneth to all’ and that the external power and privileges of white Europeans mean no more in the great scheme of things than those of the Assyrians or Macedonians it is time to ask again what it means to be a temporal, mortal being and what it means to triumph over time. It is time to ask a deep but marginal question rather than a normal one. It is time, in fact, to ask again, and in a new context about fate and providence as the very first thinkers did. 

East and West (certain Romans perhaps excepted) the answer is not perpetual empire in the sense of a permanent economic, military and cultural hegemony. On this the best authorities agree. The New Testament warns us that God can raise children of Abraham from the stones. So much for fetishizing physical ‘race’. Socrates tells us that the art of living is the art of dying, or as we might say ‘letting’ go. The good is permanent amidst all change (indeed it is the principle of change). Even the modern arch critic of Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, tells us that the love of fate is the highest attainment of human thought which is the core principle of Ancient Stoicism. Indeed, the Buddha tells us that ‘immortality’ is the eternal moment within living and we should not project it in time at all. This is all well worth recalling lest like Uzzah in the Hebrew Bible we assume, arrogantly, that it is our job to prop up the ark of the covenant should it topple! What I am recollecting here from these ancient figures is that it is the wisdom of any civilization that matters for only wisdom is immortal. To over-mourn the loss of physical ‘Anglos’ is to completely miss what makes ‘Anglo’ or any other culture valuable. It is to miss (completely and abjectly) the best that has been thought and said by the “Europeans” whose future one is supposedly so solicitous of. This is founded on the illusion that wisdom is the parochial possession of a ‘people’ or ‘nation’ or ‘race’ who are the only possible exponents of that wisdom and this is naturalism of the worst and most reductive sort. To think that the good depends on ONE set of institutions, one ‘race’, one language (i.e. mine) and that no human good could be realized apart from it is nihilistic. It is idolatry and blasphemy to boot both in the religious sense and in whatever secular sense you want to give these terms. Part of a proper philosophy of history (surely an unfashionable ‘marginal’ subject) is that the good is preserved through time in ways we cannot necessarily discern or predict. This, I should point out, is not a question put forth by philosophers but a question being put to them by the politics of our era though it surely merits a philosophical answer. 

What I’m also saying is that, in spite of what the fellow mentioned above claimed, history is not at all a dustbin. Whether by providence, the cunning of reason or happy persistent accident the values of the past are carried forward into the future and, barbaroi though we are, we have the Homer and Sophocles we need. The Ancient Greeks could scarcely have conceived of what we have made of these authors as we can have no idea of what our deeds will mean to the future when people very different than us shall learn of them and put them to use. This of course is the difficulty of accepting the future. We have no control over what other cultures shall take from us and what they shall leave. We have no assurance they will take anything at all, we European descendants may end up Hittites rather than Romans: a byword for strange, distant people who are no longer central to the exercise of culture. I doubt this of course. I don’t think Plato and Shakespeare are going anywhere by reason of their inherent quality unless we as a species end which is a whole other question. But of course it is sheer mystification to think that ‘white people’ are ‘disappearing’ and not just because race is not a currently accepted scientific concept. People of European descent will cede hegemony (in part or in whole) to people of some other descent as the Greeks ceded to the Romans as part of the normal flow of time.^[5] This is not erasure but natural transformation. There will be loss and gain in this as Greek things might not always go so well in Latin. At the same time, to quote Keats, there is no use leaving great verse onto a little clan and it is largely to Roman copyists that we owe the fact that we have anything Greek at all. Pursuing this line of analogy (which The Atlantic has recently pursued), we might think of ourselves like St. Augustine at the end of the Roman Empire accepting a rigorous sense of providence which meant that the thing that mattered was not who ran the world but rather how it was run and if the monuments of Roman culture were now in the hands of Goths and Vandals that was the will of God and if you are a European descendant you must  remember the Vandals and Goths (or in my case Franks and Celts) are YOU and YOU were once in the position of unwanted ‘migrants’ as people from the middle east and Latin America are now. You must also admit that even the Roman empire was no longer particularly Roman at that time in any racial or ethnic sense and that was the long term result (in part at least) of deliberate policy. ‘Latinity’ was at this point long past being a matter of blood and, to speak of St. Augustine, we are not even sure what his ‘blood’ was.

Philosophy though has different messages for different people. T.S Eliot prays ‘teach us to care and not to care”. My right wing contrarian friend needs to learn not to care and not get caught up in a nostalgia trap that leads to poisonous resentment and tempts one to Fascist political stances. He needs to NOT view history as a competition people who look and sound like him are losing because that is NOT what is actually happening and that is a crude and un-empirical understanding of historical process anyway. Others however need to learn to care or rather we ‘Anglos’ (or in my case half Anglo) need to learn to recognize their care as human care for human things necessary to sustain life. Though libraries may burn it is wrong to burn libraries and it is especially wrong to burn other people’s libraries. Murder is no less traumatic though we all die. Hegemonies rise and as they rise they trample others and suppress the knowledge of their crimes through the power of propaganda. When hegemonies peak and indeed begin to decline a bit dirty laundry is revealed. Winner’s history looks threadbare and dishonest and lost and excluded traditions seek to restore themselves in good ways and bad. Scripts are re-written and while they are being re-written we have no clear idea how the process is going to shake out. I myself am involved in this kind of project (academically) though in a different and rather more arcane and limited form as I point out in a few places in Whose Beliefs Count?. Of course revisiting early modern weirdos like Bruno or Fludd (in search perhaps of different and less destructive ways of being ‘modern’) is small potatoes compared to the decolonizing projects of indigenous and African peoples. Here the danger is not caring too much but caring too little as when people internalize the contempt and rejection of the dominant culture. Here our capacity to care needs to be built up as opposed to tempered because these persons are in a constructive phase of building new institutions rather than maintaining or preserving old ones. I have suggested ways in which these two aims might merge as I try to be useful but every parent knows that on some level they are working for their own obsolescence. Hegemonies also work for their own obsolescence and like governments reach the point where they have done all the practical good they are going to do.

This is the point where the decrepit remains of the empire may need to give way to the Vandals and Goths because the Vandals and Goths are the future. English speaking peoples aren’t going to produce another Shakespeare because the conditions for that are gone. New phases of world culture will take their energies from elsewhere as they have so many times before. We can see with the decline of the Anglo-American Imperium that various things have popped loose. Here are some of them. The first are groups that exist in significant tension with the scientific conceptions that underwrite Western technocracy and the authority of western educational and research institutions. Among these people are new agers and sub-cultures that oppose vaccination or employ non-standard medicine such as homeopaths whose rout by standard allopathic medicine was not, by the way, historically inevitable (homeopathy appeared at a time when standard medicine was still hack, slash and poison!). Primary among these people are Evangelical Protestants who accept a sacred narrative of human origins (understood literally) in opposition to the standard scientific account of the matter. These people have always been at the edge of the Anglo-Supremacy sphere but for that very reason they cling to that edge all the more fiercely for only that edge separates them from the African or Islamic ‘other’. They are thus politically reactive far beyond a mere literalism about Genesis. Since reality is complex and contradictory, we also need to include in this group scientists who FAIL to reflexively support the economic and political interests that pay for their research by, say, lending support to ecological concerns (the Anglo-sphere runs on fossil fuels). There are the various anti-colonial discourses of peoples emerging from under the political hegemon that is the Anglo-Sphere and who, for this very reason, do not reflexively accept the claims of western science to be the final word on reality and don’t accept Anglo institutions like liberalism or technocracy to be the end of history or final solution to the political problem. In this they are joined by many people on the political left AND populist (i.e. Fascist right). This is the position occupied by many indigenous peoples in Canada and the U.S. whose own scared narratives and local knowledge clash with standard conceptions and whose indigenous identity cannot be preserved under the rubric of the bourgeois citizen with individual, abstract ‘rights’. To this we might add the many immigrants and refugees from places like the Middle East, who come with a conflicted view of the West shaped by generations of colonialism, and the rising power of China which clings to its own version of ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’ even against a significant portion its own citizens.            

                My purpose in bringing these examples up is not to throw my hands up in despair at such a cacophony of conflicting voices (many of the people mentioned have conflicting aims) but to make a simple point about marginality. The Anglo sphere is based on three claims. The first is that it has solved the economic problem for the globe by developing the institutions of capitalism. The second is that it has solved the political problem by developing the institutions of liberalism and the procedural state with safeguards for individual liberties yet strong property rights for corporations as well. The third is that it’s institutions produce knowledge in the scientific sense and by this I mean both natural science and economic and political science as well. The west (particularly the English speaking west) leads the globe in knowledge because it has produced means for justifying knowledge that other cultures lack, especially cultures that rest on some form of ‘unverifiable’ sacred or narrative tradition. Since it knows rather than merely opines about the world, since it has shed mythos and attained logos, the Anglo-sphere realizes the status of the philosopher king among nations whose supremacy is based on insight into the true (science) and just (the liberal procedural state). It has even solved the problem of the Tower of Babel by creating the first truly global language! All of these claims are under challenge both from outside and from inside. Now it may well be that the Liberal Capitalist sphere will knock all these insurgents back in place and then we might say it has solved the problem of whacking moles too!^[6] It may cede its cultural and political dominance though carry on as a middle power (diminished but still potent) like the Byzantine successors of Rome. Philosophers are rightly forbidden from speculating about the future but my speculation here is ecological collapse in which case all this discussion is rendered moot anyway.  

                Of course if you are engaged in normal philosophy you will just assert that current standards need to be emphasized more strongly than ever, so that these irrational eruptions do not wreck the institutions we have so carefully built. You will be right to do so as even the marginal philosopher lives in the world (though he may not be of it) and practically concedes the authority of the institutions he lives under, as when he takes the drugs his doctor tells him to take on the assumption that they work. Subverting institutions and their authority does not automatically mean that better ones will rush in to fill the gap. A marginal philosopher however does not play this role. The marginal philosopher does not appeal to logos to beat mythos back in line for, as Lyotard points out mythos, often (he might say exclusively) constitutes the possibility of logos. He does not use the ‘right’ to beat back the ‘good’ (to use the procedural formulation I often hear) and he is not interested at all in ‘saving the West’ except in the immediate practical sense of defending the laws and the constitution he lives under against unprincipled lunatics. We assume wrongly that reason is the tool for doing this for if people live by disordered myths it might be time to tell a better story as Obama (briefly) did and Clinton most definitely did not. Marginal philosophy is about the space between fundamentals and clashing paradigms and how to move between them with the necessary grace and tact. I have tried to give some hints in my book about how marginal philosophy might proceed though I am the very last person that think I have an answer. In an important sense there is no answer but a series of adjustments we might make and different conversations might require different adjustments. Plus, here I will strike a more optimistic note: while I am fortunate not to have any disciples (thank god!) I do have students and these students hail form a much more pluralistic and discrete world than I was raised in. They are much better equipped to do marginal philosophy than I will ever be and I suppose I can say that I have guaranteed my own obsolescence in the best possible sense.                  

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[1] It has been suggested by some that that reign of mechanism has banished metaphor to the OUTER margins beyond even the white edge of the page. This is odd because even brief reflection reveals nature is not literally a machine and that ‘mechanism’ is founded entirely on a metaphor. At any rate it is an odd solecism to say things like “all the world is a stage if and only if all the world is a stage”.

[2] Nothing illustrates better the character of ‘normal philosophy than the (brief) time I spent among the Neo-Thomists. There one debated questions that would be considered nowhere else like whether accidents have real subsistence or ‘esse’. This is because that was a genuine problem that occurred in the day to day working out of that tradition (and the kind of thing embodied, say, in textbooks and manuals). At a time of important transition of course such narrow technical ‘in house’ questions go out the window as pointless and burdensome hence the eclipse of the scholastic tradition in the early modern period where ‘schoolmen’ were not so much criticized as dismissed unread (revolutions in thought are never fair and history is written by the winners!). I hope analytic philosophers will not take it ill if I say the exact same thing is now happening and that their narrow technical discussions are going the way of the scholastic ones. This is because things are not normal and we can’t just do normal philosophy as if nothing was happening outside the academy. I say this even though my understanding and appreciation of that tradition may be as unfair as Hobbes’ comprehension of the dreaded ‘Schoolmen’! 

[3] One can take two attitudes to making space for Indian thought in the curriculum. One can regard it grudgingly as a necessary concession to cultural sensitivity. On such a model, students (or rather their more conservative profs) would suffer through Shankara or Ashvaghosa before getting on to ‘real’ philosophy. I hardly think this is the spirit in which such reforms are proposed yet if Western philosophy is going to dialogue comprehensively with Eastern Philosophy it cannot do so without putting some of its fundamental assumptions in question. It cannot engage in a dialogue without being changed. For instance, how are we to dialogue with Buddhist metaphysics on the assumption that all metaphysics is literal nonsense (mere sounds that people make) or that it is founded on a failure to examine ‘ordinary language’? What is the stance of Anglo-American thinkers going to be in this conversation if it is not one of superior awareness and lecturing of the other? One would have to drop the usual techniques for enforcing the boundaries of a paradigm which are eye-rolls, shrugs and hasty changes of topic (if not chest thumping and bluster). I think that Anglo-American thinkers below a certain age are, in general, ready move on from the radically a-historic and mono-cultural stance of the early puritans Carnap and Wittgenstein (at least until the final pages of the Tractatus!) though what happens when the cost of this is, as with reading Plato properly, the supremacy of analysis itself as an interpretive technique fully adequate to the history of philosophy? When Plato’s dialogues are reduced to formal ‘arguments’ Plato’s ‘argument’ is precisely what disappears and this is generally what happens when ‘analysis’ is applied to historic texts.      

[4] Let’s define the nature of this ‘reversal’ in terms I will borrow from Toynbee. There are in any society internal or external ‘others’ or ‘proletariats’ who represent a threat to a given cultural or political hegemon. Where the Anglo-Sphere is concerned (I can’t speak about the ‘Franco-Sphere’ or ‘Hispano-sphere’) the primary external other of this century, the so-called ‘Islamists’, have scored a shocking military victory. Not only have they successfully attacked the United States (the major hegemon) they have goaded it into an intemperate and destructive reaction. This reaction has squandered lives and vast sums of treasure but more importantly it has destabilized the politics not only of the US but of other nations too. This is plunging the US into economic and military decline from which it may or may not recover. At the same time internal others such as visible minorities and indeed women have challenged the rule of Anglo-Males. This has led to a nostalgic reaction in favor of doddering patriarchs like Trump and Biden which nostalgia might very well destroy the globe. What is worse people on the fringes of ‘white Anglo power’ like Evangelical Protestants sense themselves (sometimes correctly sometimes not)) sinking into the position of an internal proletariat or, as Hilary Clinton more memorably put it, a ‘basket of deplorables’. All in all, this is a perfect storm where global stability is concerned   because it creates broad based fear and with fear comes nostalgia for better times and with nostalgia comes reaction and revenge.

[5] In the category of pious wishes and faint hopes I DO think humans may JUST find some principle of organizing things OTHER than hegemony though it may be one of my basic failures of imagination that I can’t quite picture what that will look like. Fortunately, the possibility does not depend on my capacity to picture things but what future generations will make happen.

[6] All kidding aside the one ace in the hole the Anglo sphere still possesses is the capacity to internalize and neutralize these critiques: absorbing just enough post-colonial or populist discourse to blunt any revolutionary potential these movements may possess. In this way say it can absorb the feminist aspirations of white women but not so readily women of color.