At yesterday's seminar, an important question came up. The person who wrote the paper wondered whether the reader of his paper would consider it to be arrogant. One of my colleagues replied something to the effect of "but philosophical points are not supposed to be
nice. Philosophy has nothing to do with being nice. The question of arrogance in philosophy is completely irrelevant. You just have to say what you have to say." Another person replied to this: "But points are not arrogant. PEOPLE are." This is a very important insight. And I think it has to do with this: if we think that philosophy is all about delivering points, then the question of arrogance will, for sure, be completely irrelevant. Point made, point taken, what counts is lucidity/clarity/soundness/whatever. But if we say that it is important that philosophical conversations take place among real people, then the question of arrogance will become very important, and not just from the perspective of acting "nice", "decent" etc. And the examination - self-examination - of whether what I have just said was arrogant will not hang on
appearances. Rather: was I self-important? Did I listen at all? What did my words express?
Arrogance will be an issue in much the same way as, for example, sentimentality. Gaita says, I think, that sentimentality in some cases is not only a
cause of why something is wrong - that is, sentimentality is not something that can be separated from "the message". If I blame somebody of being sentimental about something, it is sometimes the case that what I am criticizing is not only a "psychological thing", but I am criticizing the approach taken, and that cannot be separated from
what he says. The same thing is true about arrogance. If the problem with what you say is that it is arrogant the point might not be that what you say is in principle OK but you just have some sort of attitude problem.
That philosophy is a "ruthless business", truth takes you wherever truth happens to go, you just have to
stick to it, is ridiculous. If that is what philosophy is -
then I'll rather do something else.
A few days ago, I discussed gender, uncertainty and neutrality with two friends. At some point, the discussion broke down. Not because we did not have anything to say, and not because we were, on a technical level, disagreeing. The break-down was, rather, due to a failure in the
discussion itself. Was it a psychological failure? Yes. Was it a philosophical failure? Yes, that, too. And here is where I think some would protest - some think philosophy is about either agreeing or disagreeing with your points, on making yourself clear and your interlocuters will say: "yes, that's the way it
is". What made the break-down a philosophical break-down, and not merely a psychological one, was, I would say, that we were no longer thinking together. It was no longer meaningful to talk. What I am concerned about here (and in the discussion then) is why it is
important for us to talk about things. It is sometimes said that the only condition of doing philosophy is "intellectual honesty". I'm trying to say that this is a very limited picture. The kind of break-down our discussion underwent was not primarily about that at all. (I know the way I express myself might not be that clear.) The deal is: it is tempting to think that our personal presence (I don't know quite what to call it) in a philosophical conversation is not only a potential threat to what is essential - that we are sometimes misled and deceived by our personal blindness. That we are personally present in a discussion is important in other ways. Maybe: what it is to have something to say. What it is to say something in one's own voice.
The break-down is not a break-down that could have been prevented by our "re-gaining Reason", soundly returning to the path of truth-hunting. The break-down was not about
that at all, but about something else. The urge to talk to each other is not always "passing on my philosophical insight"; the philosophical urgency of conversation might rather be the urgency of talking to each other in ways that can not be reduced to "making oneself clear" or "getting the message across".
For some reason, most of those who talk about "what philosophy is" mostly talk about what is written in books. Arguments. Methods. Or: "taking something seriously". Some of these texts are quite all right. Some are harmless. But what is quite striking is that few philosophers bother to discuss the real, messy philosophical conversation (and of course what will be a "philosophical discussion" is a completely open question that has more to do with the spirit in which it is engaged, rather than content). That is true also for those philosophers who say that philosophy is "work on oneself". A lot can be said about Raimond Gaita. But one of the many things that makes him an original thinker is that he does not shy away from this aspect of philosophy. (But I'm not sure that his constant mention of Socrates really helps.)
I am not too convinced that the wittgensteinian's favorite phrase "philosophy as work on ourselves" captures this dimension (but of course it's not a matter of catch-phrases either). It's of course quite all right to say that philosophy has a therapeutic role. It makes us attend to our temptations, blind spots, hang-ups. But this picture might gain power in the wrong way, it might start leading its own life (as W himself might put it).
Maybe I should say: philosophical investigations have many characters and we will attend to these when some specific issue is at stake. In that sense, it is wrong to say anything general about what philosophers "do", what philosophy "is" and what philosophical thinking is aimed at. It depends. Sometimes philosophical conversation is untying knots and sometimes it is gruesome excorcism of bad spirits and sometimes it is just getting a new perspective on something. I have been talking about arrogance now, as that has been an issue for me. What it is to say something in philosophy is a problem that is not a purely "philosophical" issue at all, but rather, it has to with why we want to say things at all. I can only speak for myself, but this is an aspect that I find really hard, because it is so easy to loose sight of it. To, as one may say, drone on endlessly, only in a philosophical fashion. For this reason, I easily despair over writing philosophy. For whom am I writing? Why am I writing?
