Justin Erik Halldór Smith

A Plea for Folk-Philosophy

There is a well-known division between two camps of academic philosophy, often called 'analytic' and 'continental', with each side more or less convinced that what the other side is doing is not really philosophy at all. This is a provincial and mandarin dispute, and I do not wish to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider those expressions of interest in fundamental questions that one might find in monasteries, madrasas, tea houses, yurts, around campfires, late at night as the seal blubber burns. Can such interest count, I want to know, as philosophy?

Once I took part in a conference in a mid-sized provincial city in Transylvania. As part of the opening ceremony, the local Orthodox bishop was invited to hold forth on the value of philosophy. He seized the opportunity to denounce Marxism, existentialism, and even rap music, and praised all in attendance for guarding the flame of spirituality in a corrupt and materialistic world. His éloge dragged on. The most distinguished member of our delegation could be heard snoring. I passed the time looking over the paper I was going to present, which as it happens was on 18th-century materialism.

The bishop had heard there were some philosophers coming to town, and he assumed he shared a common language with us. I can only guess as to his exact background, but I imagine this man had spent time in a seminary, and that he read there at least some of the authors academic philosophers would recognize as constituting the Western philosophical tradition: Origen, Clement of Alexandria, probably Augustine, maybe even the pagan Plato. This man had probably incorporated what he learned about these authors into his understanding of questions such as, What is the fate of a person after death? Am I essentially or only contingently associated with a physical body? What is infinity?

Now on most reckonings those are philosophical questions, yet the reaction of the visiting party (myself included) was to dismiss the bishop as something of a yokel. I suspect this would be the reaction of the vast majority of professional academic philosophers in the West, and a fortiori if it were not a Transylvanian bishop, but rather, say, a Mongolian shaman, who deigned to hold forth on the questions on which we take ourselves to be experts. While at the time I went along with this prevailing sentiment, it now seems to me that this encounter was in fact nothing other than a clash of provincialisms.

The problem might simply be that the term 'philosophy' is used in two very different senses: one to describe a well-defined tradition of systematic and methodical inquiry, which appears to have developed independently in human history only in China, India, and the eastern Mediterranean; the other, which might be called 'folk-philosophy' or 'ethnophilosophy', on the model of ethnoastronomy, ethnotaxonomy, etc., to describe the set of cultural variations on a range of beliefs about nature, the self, etc., which humans qua human cannot help but have. But one way of moving beyond provincialism might be to consider the possibility that all philosophy is in a sense ethnophilosophy.

After all, the minds of non-literate pastoral peoples are exactly the same as those of seminarians mastering Thomistic doctrine. The difference is that the pastoral people's minds have different prostheses and institutions to support and to mirror their thoughts. A revealing parallel case is law: does law begin with Hammurabi, and receive its first mature expression in the Roman period? Or were these milestones simply the explicitization of something that was already there, that cannot not be there wherever there is a society that is organized in some way or other according to a set of --perhaps unspoken-- rules and prohibitions? Is a written legal code the coming-into-being of a new way of thinking, or is it the transfer of a familiar way of thinking into a different, external storage medium? If we are prepared to accept the latter possibility, we are thereby enabled to think about, say, Roman law, in fruitful comparison to, say, Hausa law (generally called Hausa 'custom'). And similarly with philosophy.

Philosophy in our narrower sense might be more rigorous than folk-belief, yet still indebted to folk-belief in ways that it ought to be part of the philosophical project to uncover. An analogous uncovering has been undertaken in recent decades in the cognitive-scientific study of folk-taxonomy. It has become clear, in particular,  that the modern system of Linnean biological classification, while more exact and rigorous than pre-scientific and pre-literate systems throughout the world, is not for that so much a rejection of the earlier systems as it is an outgrowth of them. This discovery tells us something not just about the history of science, but also about the way that science at present continues its project of carving up the world.

The distinguishing feature of Indian, Chinese, or European philosophy, on this approach, would turn out to be not some greater clarity or depth of thinking. Instead, it would be a by-product of the way certain, principally Asian, technologies, above all writing and the reproduction of written texts, are incorporated into a society. The presuppositions and aims of inquiry might be different for, say, an uncontacted Amazonian tribe, and the technologies and institutions for pursuing these aims are certainly different. But there are still human minds there puzzling out the nature of reality and of humanity's place in it. This activity ought to be of interest to philosophers not out of some naïve celebration of cultural diversity, but rather for the hard-headed scientific reason that it gives us a real measure of the full scope and range of humanity's responses to the questions we call 'philosophical'. Taking this measure is one way of deepening our understanding of these questions.

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Divination, Sacrifice, Art

An excerpt from my essay in Heide Hatry's new book, Not a Rose. To learn more about the book, or to buy it, go here.

There is a certain variety of pulp erotic novel that tries to entice you into purchasing it by displaying the curve of a woman’s hips, or the suggestion of what is properly called the ‘intergluteal cleft’ on its cover. Some of these covers play on a sort of visual metaphor, and show you an image of a piece of fruit that might at first glance be mistaken for the female anatomy. Peaches and cherries work particularly well towards this effect.

Now suppose the graphic-design department of a publishing house decided to use the haunches of a goat,or a piece of gristle from the dinner plate, to bring about the same trompe-l’oeil. Pause a moment on the difference between these two sorts of illusion. When we learn that what we are seeing is a cherry, and not a woman’s derrière, we feel amusement, and perhaps even more desire than we would have felt had it been, so to speak, the real thing.

But if the same tromperie is carried out by a blob of fat, not a cherry, we feel we have been truly and unfairly trumped; any desire we had will now be thoroughly squelched, and off we go in search of the latest Churchill biography or some equally unsexy thing. In truth the eye is soothed and seduced by the fruit. It takes being trumped by meat for such representations to register as an offense. Cherries and peaches are the staples of erotic poetry, while ‘meat’ signifies we have crossed from the erotic into the pornographic.

Heide Hatry does not propose to substitute woman with fruit or meat, but rather to put meat in the place of the fruit, the carnal – the truly carnal, one might even go so far as to say a revelatory carnal.

In ancient Rome the haruspex was the man who divined the future by reading the internal organs of sacrificed animals (mostly lambs). Divination is by definition aleatoric: it lets the world, and time, and chance decide the outcome of a given trial, and the result is taken as a statement of the truth quite apart from the question of whether it is a thing of beauty or not. Divination wants answers; art (at least as it’s often understood) wants pleasure.

Now I know none of this is on Hatry’s mind when she is creating her art, and no doubt that’s for the better. I come to her work simply as a philosopher interested, first of all, in the history of reflection in the West on the ontological differences between inanimate objects, plants, animals, and humans; and, second of all, interested in the history of reflection on the nature of objects of art. I think of this latter category, as it has been conceived until very recently, in the broadest sense of whatever it is that is produced by human artifice.

To the extent that art is to be something more precise than this, it is going to converge with the sort of semiotically dense business that has long been familiar to us from things like ritual sacrifice and other elements of what is now called ‘religion’. Heide confounds our sense of etiquette, to begin with; but beyond that she confounds our grasp of the order of nature, and at least brings back into view, the reversion of ‘art’ to the more profound category of offering.

More Bits that Didn't Make It In Under the Word Limit

History is essential to philosophy, as everyone in the field now agrees. But the adequate study of the history of philosophy involves an understanding of its many dead ends, false starts, and withered research programs. This means among other things that we have to take seriously many topics that scientists can safely ignore, such as alchemy, astrology, and physiognomy, since at some point or other these have played crucial roles in the explanation, respectively, of the nature of material bodies, of the causes of motion, and of the relationship between mind and body.

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Here I cannot help but recall an incident in graduate school, when I was obliged to trek over to the earth sciences library at my university to find Friedrich Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance), a great 19^th-century philosophical study of the concept of matter from Thales through Hegel. I wondered as I walked: Who could have put it in the earth sciences library? Presumably this was not going to be the library of some Borgesian alternative universe, but just a regular geology library. The book could only have been placed there by someone who thought that materialism had to do with matter, and that the earth, in turn, was a prime example of such stuff. In other words, it was put there by someone who, rather late in the game, continued to see the disciplines through the lens of natural philosophy.

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To this day, doctoral students in, say, geology, continue to earn Ph.D.’s, but the ‘Ph.’, which abbreviates the Latin genitive of ‘philosophy’, is vestigial, and few geologists wonder what it is doing there. Yet as in evolutionary biology, we would do well to not dismiss a trace of the past as merely vestigial too quickly. Could it be that there is in fact something philosophical about studying, say, the sediments of riverbeds? We can perhaps understand why the sedimentologists would wish to answer this question in the negative. They’ve got work to do: dirty, muddy work, and no time to worry about the history of the concept of matter.

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There were still branches of philosophy that could not branch off into science departments, such as the core areas of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. They could not branch off, arguably, because there was no possible positive science into which they might be turned. Logic is useful for thinking about things, yet as Wittgenstein reminds us, logic itself tells us nothing. Metaphysics has been in the philosophical doghouse for most of the past few centuries, because (on one common definition) it pretends to treat of entities that are by definition beyond the bounds of experience, which many agree is impossible.

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It is the crime of looking into what goes on in the heavens and below the earth that marked Socrates, rightly or wrongly, as what was, for a long period between him and us, known as a ‘natural philosopher’. In the comedy of Aristophanes, it is as a natural philosopher that Socrates discovers that thunderbolts and flatulence are fundamentally similar processes, are investigable as interrelated phenomena within the same natural order. Looking into the heavens and beneath the earth was a crime because it threatened to expose the levers and riggings that traditional thought preferred to attribute to the active agency of supernatural forces. Such looking was also, by the same token, one of the most basic things, along with meditation upon the self and on the divine, dialectical exploration of arguments, and investigation of the limits of knowledge that philosophy conceived itself as doing. Natural philosophy was philosophy, and philosophers, to the extent that they practiced natural philosophy, were curious, and so also potentially dangerous.