“The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
The following essay will be published in three installments; this is the first.
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Congratulations on Doing the Impossible: On the Death of Philosophy, #1
It turns out the end of the world isn’t always an ending. Sometimes it’s a transformation. Like when dinosaurs became birds. (Horizon Forbidden West, 2022: see, e.g., Wikipedia, 2024)
“There was one very important thing about your quest that we couldn’t discuss until you returned.”
“I remember,” said Milo eagerly. “Tell me now.”
“It was impossible,” said the king […] “but if we’d told you then, you might not have gone.” (Juster, 1961)
Where did philosophy go?
One possible answer is, “philosophy hasn’t gone anywhere lately; it’s been dead for a long time.” Back in 1854, when Henry David Thoreau published Walden, it was already time for Thoreau to declare that
there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates. (Thoreau, 1854/1957: p. 9)
According to Thoreau, philosophy dies if everyone, including professors of it, stop trying to live by its light.
Thoreau, of course, sought to resurrect the concept of philosophy as a practicum by going into the woods, living there, and putting that experience in writing. This is shocking, and in the aftermath of Walden, it has seemed necessary to many people to “expose Thoreau” by following him out to the woods and symbolically putting him and his project to death. Kathryn Schulz, writing for The New Yorker in 2015, protested violently against Thoreau and his book:
Walden is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people. (Schulz, 2015)
It is interesting, and relevant to what follows, to note that Schulz’s article is a histrionic mixture of rhetorical moves. She includes ad hominem passages where she mocks Thoreau’s actual behavior in Concord, Massachusetts;[i] she complains about Thoreau’s supposed dishonesty throughout Walden; and she also engages angrily with the ideas in Walden, primarily by caricaturing them. She is not only like many other middlebrow postmodernists—that is, driven by an insane need to read something “seriously” (her term) in order to demolish the public’s esteem for it—she is, ultimately, a victim of her own willingness to try anything, and everything, to rid us (at last!) of Henry David Thoreau.
It’s not clear whether her problem with him is that he’s wrong, or that he’s a liar, or that he couldn’t accomplish exactly what he set out to do. These are obviously not logically compatible claims: for instance, if Walden is a fictitious autobiography, that doesn’t invalidate all of Thoreau’s ideals, since they are meant to be read as transcendent universals. Likewise, if those ideals are self-evidently worthless, then it really doesn’t matter whether he lived up to them or not. Schulz resembles the evasive fellow who borrows a kettle in Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams. (He claims, simultaneously, that the kettle is defective, that he has already returned it, and that he never borrowed it in the first place.) Everything that might be bad about Thoreau, to Schulz, is bad—all at once.
Her “kettle logic” goes further still. Schulz doesn’t believe in Walden’s popularity. “Like most canonized works, it is more revered than read,” she writes, before adding another 6,000 words, all so people won’t read a 19th Century philosopher they aren’t reading. Freud diagnoses such multifarious, irrational polemics as the expression of an irresistible wish. Schulz wishes for a magic trick: behold! The author who makes her feel judged shall now disappear!
Her task is a hopeless one. This is partly because Jack Kerouac, who will never go out of print, has already given us another version of Walden. It’s his novel The Dharma Bums. Unlike Walden, Kerouac claims to be writing fiction, although any “serious” reader will guess that Kerouac’s novel is a thinly veiled account of real events. We can’t read Walden, apparently, because Thoreau was somewhat less of a shut-in than he claimed. We can read The Dharma Bums, however,even if Kerouac was a drunken lout—which he was. It’s an easy road back to Walden from there.
It’s also useless to defame Thoreau because he’s not unique in speaking about himself in terms that seem applicable to everyone. That’s how all philosophers talk. Whenever people read about someone following the dictates of their conscience, they ask themselves, “do these same laws apply to me?” In other words, philosophers are simply leveraging an ineradicable part of our response, as readers, to any text we identify with. That’s why real philosophers (including poor “canonized” Thoreau) have to be put down, like mangy dogs, over and over again—all merely to win a very temporary victory against the universal, itself, as a category.
Frankly, though, Schulz is a little too clear about her intentions. There are smarter ways to get rid of philosophy. You can divide it up, and then conquer it with specialists. You can bury it in jargon. Or you can simply replace it with something that tastes similar, like the aspartame in Diet Coke. Real philosophy is holistic, lucid, and universal, turning lived experience into transcendent metaphysics. Our modern alternatives to it, including the entire genre of “self-help,” aren’t even trying for those laurels. They are, instead, mysteries reserved for the initiated. Remember that bestselling book about manifesting your desires? The title is revealing. It was called The Secret.
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I don’t want to try to do all of these dangers justice in one gigantic post. Let’s take them one at a time, starting with modern attempts to redefine philosophy as a specialized, salaried pursuit. The (real) philosopher Robert Hanna quotes the same exact passage I did, from Walden, at the beginning of his article “Six Studies in The Decline and Fall of Professional Academic Philosophy” (Hanna, 2022). Hanna asserts that the decline of philosophy is the result of “the vocational vices of academicism,” which are “(i) dogmatism, (ii) esotericism, and (iii) hyper-specialization” (Hanna, 2022: p. 49). I would, for my part, probably stop short of putting all the blame for these things on academia. “Hyper-specialization,” for example, is a basic feature of all modern capitalist economies; our educational institutions merely follow suit.
But Hanna is right about the nature of the problem, and the “dogmatism” he’s attacking isn’t the dogmatism of Thoreau, that grumpy, would-be hermit who believes we should be happier and more authentic than we are. It’s a kind of dogmatism that arose when academic institutions began to profit by amplifying, distorting, and reifying disagreements between philosophers. These are thinkers who had been, at one point, engaged in valuable conversations with each other. But their supposed “civil war” became so deeply engraved on the public record of philosophy that even now, when nearly all the original combatants are dead, we continue to segregate their ideas.
I’m referring, of course, to the divide between “Analytic” and “Continental” philosophers.[ii] There are many ways of characterizing this divide. It separates subjectivist philosophers, like Soren Kierkegaard, from rationalists like Gottlob Frege. Frege saw mathematical relationships as symbols of perfect objectivity, and he refused to discuss epistemology any other way. To Kierkegaard, logic is merely a tool for exploring the unique content of individual consciousness. The more complete and consistent our world appears, the more personal and incommensurate it is.
Another way of putting the matter is this: Continental philosophers arrive at disparate “truths” by puzzling over the manifold, unstable nature of human experience without necessarily making any totalizing, universal claims about it. To each his own monad. You can shelve Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy right next to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time without expecting either book to illuminate, or diminish, the other.
Analytic philosophers, on the other hand, are constantly quarreling about the fundamentals of logic. They love taking exception to each other’s work, because all of them agree that truth is unitary, consistent, and comprehensible. Don’t blame the world, says analytic philosophy. The world’s an unchanging formal system; it’s our fault if we haven’t been rigorous enough to describe it in full. One day, reality will appear to us, and be, a single chain of interconnected, consistent propositions. When Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, in the opening to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “the world is that which is the case” (Wittgenstein, 1922/198: prop. 1, p. 31) he is not merely putting everything, all at once, into good logical order. He is uttering a prophecy: “there should be time no longer […] the mystery of God should be finished” (Rev. 10:6-7). Analytic philosophy is the fierce, waning brotherhood of those who share Wittgenstein’s faith.
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Perhaps you are reading this, and thinking, “I understand the difference now. Analytic philosophers are idiots.” (Or, if you are an Analytic philosopher, you’re thinking that I’m the idiot.) But the distinctions I have been summarizing here are only true in the limited sense that people really do believe in them. I learned about “Analytic philosophy” from Richard Rorty, who was a professor of mine in college. He would constantly bemoan the way analytic philosophers sought to erase thousands of years of valuable experiments, including Thoreau’s “living deliberately,” in favor of an up-to-the-minute “state of the discipline.” He mocked analytic philosophy for fruitlessly trying to achieve consensus; they want to unify human understanding, he would say, while they drown us in a sea of disputation. Analytic philosophers, Rorty asserted in one memorable lecture, only blur the most uncontroversial features of rational thought by splitting hairs about it. And, he added, most of them can’t write to save their lives.
Rorty was right, on all counts, but he was also cherry picking a mere handful of philosophy’s besetting problems. Everything wrong with the discipline, it seemed, was thanks to the hard work of those infuriating “others,” the damned Analytics. But taking this position forced him to define analytic philosophy as if was something consistent, with only diehards in its ranks. In fact, as Hanna argues in the article quoted above, analytic philosophy is currently defined in “six overlapping but still saliently different and non-equivalent senses” (Hanna, 2022: p. 51). It has no real essence; how you define it depends on which thinkers you intend to lump together.
Hanna himself runs into this problem of labels, himself, simply because he attempts to link analytic philosophy to all the famous philosophers who helped to invent it. For instance, he calls the first irruption of analytic philosophy the “Logical Empiricist, aka Logical Positivist, doctrines of the Vienna Circle, whose most important members or fellow-travelers included” Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski, and Willard Van Orman Quine. He adds Bertrand Russell to the mix, along with Russell’s impossibly brilliant protégé, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to Hanna, is “the most important book in classical Analytic philosophy” (Hanna, 2022: p. 52).
The Tractatus is certainly one of the most spectacular works of modern philosophy. However, the most important work of Analytic philosophy is the Principia Mathematica, written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. This is ironic because the Principia, for the most part, wasn’t innovative. It spends a huge amount of time restating Frege’s techniques for quantifying logical definitions. The reason Russell and Whitehead became celebrity philosophers, in a way that Frege himself never did, was a function of history moving swiftly and favorably around them. A couple decades, nothing more, separated Frege’s book The Foundations of Arithmetic from the Principia. But those decades were enough to see the work of Georg Cantor, who invented set theory, disseminated throughout the world.
Russell used Cantor’s set theory to stress-test Frege’s symbolic system of logical operators, and (in 1901) discovered the so-called Russell paradox (the “set of all sets which do not contain themselves”). This paradox appears, on its surface, to merely reveal some kind of flaw in the “rules” of the game Frege was playing by enumerating logical operations in order to do arithmetic with them. Ultimately, however, Russell’s paradox is a much more profound discovery about the incapacity of sets to “contain” (i.e., describe and delimit) themselves logically, which forced Russell and Whitehead to create a multi-level system of sets—dividing sets according to the types of functional “call” they would, or would not, be allowed to make on other sets.
NOTES
[i] Schulz writes, for instance, that Thoreau was “lured [back to Concord] by his mother’s cookies” (Schulz, 2015), following in the grand tradition of Philip van Doren Stern, who liked to introduce new literary editions of Walden by elbowing the reader, so to speak, with the story of Thoreau’s mother helping him with his laundry. Schulz also writes, as if we have infinite patience for irrelevant slanders, that Thoreau “was not found particularly likable” at Harvard (Schulz, 2015). Accordingly, this essay is dedicated to my wife, who is doing our laundry as I write these words. It’s also dedicated to my mother, who just tried to FaceTime me, and is now waiting for me to finish philosophizing so I can call her back.
[ii] This essay was produced in a facility that processes Analytic and Continental philosophy together. They are part of a single great enterprise.
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