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by kyrenaios, on 01 January 2021
Filed under: philosophy
There is an interesting quirk about philosophy. In no other field of study are the practitioners as little concerned with being wrong – of course, philosophers don't relish being wrong either, but it can be awfully hard to find a common ground (a "language game" for you Wittgensteinians) for two philosophers to accuse each other meaningfully of being wrong; just think Kant and Spinoza, for instance. Thus calling a philosopher's works "wrong" often simply falls on an admission of difference – or, perhaps, by some appeal to political effects: so-and-so's theory led to Nazism, and so on. While this latter approach carries some weight, in its extreme conclusion it simply falls back on a moralistic nihilism: nothing ever leads to anything good ever. Since no one, I believe, considers a moralistic-nihilistic dystopia a "positive" political outcome, it is self-evident that this kind of criticism sabotages its own ground.
Yet for all that, I submit that what would be the unifying factor for all philosophers – no matter the creed – is the universal desire to avoid being banal. Philosophers absolutely abhor banality. One will go a lot further accusing a philosopher of being a mere "epigone" of some earlier, presumably more "perfect" exemplar of whatever doctrine they propose. The fundamental principle applying to philosophers is, to reverse that well-known formula of Hannah Arendt's, "the evil of banality". Banality is what belongs to the unwashed common folk and his "folksy wisdom". The philosopher aspires to being something more, to a θεωρητικὴ ἐπιστήμη beyond that of mere ἐμπειρία. Think thoughts as of yet unthought! Create radically new concepts (pace Deleuze & Guattari), or forever be deemed – gasp! – a "banal thinker"!
One does not have to be a follower of Žižek to agree with his assessment that this sort of vision of unshackled creativity in philosophy is not more than a disguised mirror of the neoliberal appetite for endless expansion; and one can only add to it that neoliberalism is far from the cause of this anémie de la nouveauté contemporary thought suffers from, lest we fall into the opposite trap of placing it entirely in some sort of imagined opposition between "ancient" and "modern" that certain Straussians delight in.
For, however much the corporatization of academia and the pressure for philosophers to justify themselves in the "market" (truly a way to make sure that no philosophy will again be done in the universities in a thousand more years) did us not a whit of good, the aversion to banality belongs to a certain self-conceptualization of philosophy that did not begin and probably will not end with the capitalist world order.
Our thinkers churn out volumes upon volumes of books on the subject of "what is philosophy?" without ever pausing to ask themselves: "what is banality?" Because it is in no way a banal question.
We know the saying "common sense is uncommon" so well that it has itself become a worn-out cliché. Yet that doesn't make it any less true.
If the absolute proliferation of conspiracy theories in our age taught us one thing, it is that we fool ourselves best when we imagine ourselves too smart to be fooled by anything. « Les non-dupes errent » – there, too, is a species of Gallic banality that never lost its bite, despite the best efforts by a certain individual who claims the mantle of being his héritier principal.
We may as well indict Kant, too, for all the philosophical nonsense that have been produced in this direction; for we neither possess nearly as much of this fabled Urtheilskraft as we'd like to think, nor have need of it. This whole schtick, this so-called "critical philosophy", we may not have much to mourn for if we were to jettison it in its totality.
For when it comes down to it, philosophy isn't much more than that which says a few banal things. But it in no way means that the "folksy common Joe", who only exists in a particular fantasy anyway, is now our model of a philosopher.
In truth, none of this mystical band of "common folks" is worthy of philosophy, and we can't even hope to educate our way out of this quagmire. Education only makes things worse. "πολυμαθίη νόον ἔχειν οὐ διδάσκει," said Heraclitus in his inimitable way: much learning does not teach you to have sense – νόον ἔχειν, this phrase in Greek, it refers to exactly the kind of "banal" common sense that, as it turns out, is the most elusive above all. Then he continues: "Ἡσίοδον γὰρ ἂν ἐδίδαξε καὶ Πυθαγόρην αὖτις τε Ξενοφάνεα καὶ Ἑκαταῖον": otherwise, it would have taught even Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus – a veritable pantheon of the greatest thinkers and writers by his time.
Diogenes Laertius¹ reported this saying with all the breathlessness of a tabloid paparazzo: look at the guts of this man, who so casually throws around such hallowed names in an insult that seems almost an afterthought? But then again, would Heraclitus be the philosopher we all know and love, if he didn't possess exactly this much pugilism?
We may rejoice in knowing that another thinker from roughly the same time, but a totally different civilization, happened to make exactly the same gutsy statement – we understand these earliest of the ancient thinkers too little, because we never let them speak to us in their own way. We never learn their language, and when we do, we still let the things we already know cloud our hearing. Again that damned πολυμαθίη.
For Zhuangzi, whose name is also written Chuang-Tzu, is far from the "mere interpreter" of the more celebrated Laozi (Lao-Tzu) that we imagine him to be. Some scholars even go so far as to place him before the author of the Tao Te Ching, whom they propose to be different from the historical Laozi that Zhuangzi refers to. This question does not concern us; we will let it be settled by textual scholars. But Zhuangzi is also considered by a good number of people, Chinese scholars and western Sinologists, as, beyond the mystical wrapping he is shrouded in, a rather banal writer. No doubt the Taoist religion, which appeared much later and appropriated these thinkers as their gods and saints, nullified much of their edge – by far the best way we know of to make a philosopher harmlessly ineffectual is by making them a god, as the Athenians were quick to do a generation after they gave Socrates the greatest honour and power – by sentencing him to death.
Yet a cutting edge Zhuangzi most certainly possessed. Consider this passage, which is worth quoting at length²:
昭文之鼓琴也，師曠之枝策也，惠子之據梧也，三子之知幾乎！皆其盛者也，故載之末年。唯其好之也，以異於彼，其好之也，欲以明之彼。非所明而明之，故以堅白之昧終。而其子又以文之綸終，終身無成。若是而可謂成乎，雖我亦成也。若是而不可謂成乎，物與我無成也。是故滑疑之耀，聖人之所圖也。為是不用而寓諸庸，此之謂以明。
Now the translation by A. C. Graham³, which is a very bad translation (as all translations of philosophy are), but possibly the least bad:
Chao Wen strumming on the zither, Music-master K'uang propped on his stick, Hui Shih leaning on the sterculia, had the three men's knowledge much farther to go? They were all men in whom it reached a culmination, and therefore was carried on to too late a time. It was only in being preferred by them that what they knew about differed from an Other; because they preferred it they wished to illumine it, but they illumined it without the Other being illumined, and so the end of it all was the darkness of chop logic: and his own son too ended with only Chao Wen's zither string, and to the end of his life his musicianship was never completed. May men like this be said to be complete? Then so am I. Or may they not be said to be complete? Then neither am I, nor is anything else.
Therefore the glitter of glib implausibilities is despised by the sage. The 'That's it' which deems he does not use, but finds for things lodging-places in the usual. It is this that is meant by 'using Illumination'.
That this 成 "complete" is applied to music is attested to by the Kangxi Dictionary: good music knows to end in due time, not to ring on and overstay its welcome. Beyond the occasional outburst of music, an ocean of illumination in the realm of the usual. The realm of banality, where the sage "finds lodging-places for things".
For, notwithstanding those rather influential attempts in the twentieth century to dislodge metaphysics from the θρόνος φιλοσοφίας in favour of some obsessive-compulsive "writing machine" view of reality, there is yet space for the beautiful itself to shine, not through the artifice of music and language (for which we shall sooner or later need a Kantian theory of judgement-power), but simply in itself, in the Divine Illumination Zhuangzi alluded to, in all its banality – on account of which Plato declared his entire theory of naming unsatisfactory because, in the last instance, it is simply the banality of things that matter compared to the names that mislead us into thinking we may ever "understand" anything about these things. And if that turns out to be, after all, a more Kantian perspective than we gave him credit for, just as well: no one knows as little as the one who knows half well.
The rest is silence. Did Zhuangzi dream of a butterfly? Did a butterfly dream of Zhuangzi? What a banal question he asked, we may exclaim – and, in thus exclaiming, verify a passing remark of Lacan's in one or another of his seminars, that what the cryptic story about a dream and a butterfly proves is simply that Zhuangzi is, after all, in no way whatsoever – an idiot.
1: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 9.1.
3: Chuang Tzu, The Inner Chapters, translated by A. C. Graham, 1989, p. 55.
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