Are Philosophers Normal?

On Election and Its Discontents

There is one view of philosophy that says it’s not for everyone. The heroic temperament and mental acuity needed to question one’s assumptions puts one at odds with mainstream society. The philosopher is a tragic figure, at least viewed from the outside, because he cannot integrate—like Socrates who asks annoying questions and then is made to drink the hemlock. The philosopher is threatening and abnormal viewed from without. Viewed from within, the philosopher is the only person not captive to conventional thinking, the only person with the courage to strive. Thus, the philosopher is equal parts outcast and self-aggrandizer (not unlike the Biblical Joseph, and not unlike many messianic figures). If you think of Marc Chagall’s representation of the Jewish people as a whole a kind of Jesus-like figure (or alternative to Jesus) you see the same chicken-egg pattern: Are the Jews hated because they see themselves as a chosen people or are they a chosen people because they see themselves as chosen? Just as theological election and antisemitism are twinned, philosophical election and misosophy (hatred of wisdom) are twinned.

But the view of philosophy and philosophers as exceptional is not the only view, just as some Jewish thinkers have sought to tone down the theology of election, or, what amounts to the same thing, raise up many, if not all, peoples and traditions to the level of the elect. In America—a nation of immigrants—thinkers like Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell sought to turn philosophy into something ordinary, something continuous with everyday life. Sartre and the French existentialists also sought to close the gap between philosophy and just hanging out in cafes. Sartre is said to have remarked that if you drink a glass of wine with awareness that can be a philosophical act, a kind of applied phenomenology. Walter Benjamin revived the idler, the storyteller of folktales, and the collector as quasi-philosophical characters. Heidegger and Wittgenstein, depending on how you read them, articulate a vision of philosophy as an attempt to unlearn conceptual attachment and cerebral idolatry and simply return to everyday life with new awareness. Wittgenstein says philosophy is more like therapy for philosophers who have gone astray, than a view from the mountain-top. Before these movements, Nietzsche, in challenging the tradition from Plato to Hegel, makes the case for style over substance: the excellent life is not the examined one, but the unique one, the creative one, the dynamic one.

In the old and standard view, philosophy is “queen of the sciences.” In the more humble and typically more modern one, philosophy is a way of being in the world or an activity, not dissimilar from any other craft, be it writing verse, making films, cooking, or chatting about politics at the bar. There is something “Zen” like in this second view of philosophy. But don’t be fooled. The Zen masters still sat and sit for hours. Even if the goal is nothing extraordinary, it sure seems like a lot of effort is put into achieving that which cannot be achieved. Benjamin’s idler is not lazy, nor is the Zen meditator complacent, nor is the Wittgensteinian philosopher passive. And so it is unclear if the second view of philosophy achieves the democratic and egalitarian sensibility that it poses at first blush. Ok, on the one hand, anyone can listen to John Cage, or compose 4’33 seconds of silence. But how many do? How many actually appreciate it? Perhaps even fewer than those who could follow Socrates’s discourses. The egalitarian movement that treats philosophy as just one thing you could do, along with fly-fishing and juggling, may end up making a greater gadfly of philosophy than the one which aspired to create a class of philosopher-kings (or, according to Leo Strauss’s recommendation, “sects”).

Here I am reminded of Rob Henderson’s notion of “luxury beliefs,” a riff on Thorstein Veblen’s idea of “luxury goods.” People show off status not by purchasing flashy items, but by ascribing to views that they can afford to trumpet, even as the consequences are harmful or wasteful or simply absurd. Is the view that philosophy is a normal activity a luxury belief? Is the view that one is not chosen, and that all are equally special, not a kind of relativism that flattens the pathos of a calling?

I continue to toggle between the view that philosophy is extraordinary and the view that it is an activity like any other (just as the Israelites of the Book of Samuel sought to become a nation like all others.) But ironically, we must admit, that nothing could be less normal than the aspiration to normalcy. Just as the German Jews sought to blend Jewishness and Germanness to the point of total assimilation, they were outed by German romantics and eventually turned into political enemies. Right as Hermann Cohen was saying that Judaism is a rational religion and the true expression of Kant, a storm was brewing. Do the ordinary philosophers not make a similar mistake? Perhaps they (we?) seek to assimilate too much to non-philosophy and should own their (our?) power more. Paradoxically, this may yield greater integration than a pseduo-hospitality which annuls the difference between philosophical life and normal life.