self -contradiction
yofaceizscrumpy
2006-10-15 08:57 pm
Sorry for interrupting you this evening, but it seems like your community is a walking contradiction.

As any sophistica can see from dictionary.com, "the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct" is the definition of philosophy. To be anti-philosophy is a totality that claims truth.

I kindly request that you disband your entire community this instant.

Anti-philosophy is simply an attitude or approach of skepticism to the possibility of most or all philosophical projects as philosophers themselves define their projects.

There is a simple reason to take an attitude of "anti-philosophy." All great philosophers, from the very beginning of the conversation that we call "philosophy", have been in some sense anti-philosophers, rejecting the very idea that any kind of philosophy is possible or that all previous "philosophy" was philosophy at all. Whether Plato or Rousseau or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, or even such an infamia as Heidegger, (and many more) the first original steps in their philosophical work was to question whether philosophy, or at least systematic knowledge as assumed by philosophy, is possible at all. Is it possible to "know" (or describe or find a method to produce) the structure of "reality," the conditions of knowledge, the foundation of "being" or "thought," or the grand historical movements of "spirit" or the inherent logics of "Mind", in the way that philosophers claim, or are the very claims a form of self-deception?

Further, any advance in "knowledge" (science, theoretical thinking, mathematics) has represented both a break from philosophical rumination and a crisis of philosophy. Every scientific advance has represented a reconception of philosophy because previous philosophy is found to be limited and unfounded... And yet rarely do the professional advocates of the philosophical project look at itself with humility. The whole dung-shifting machine just rolls along as if all previous speculation had not been thrown onto the heap. All philosophy, like all religion, becomes an illustration of shifting into the "holes" left by science and literature, a "God" of the gaps approach... where there is no "science" it is there philosophy shall fill in the gaps. And finally any "advance" in "experiential understanding" has been pre-philosophical and has largely involved the kind of experience we get from the visual arts, poetry, drama, novels, etc. In fact, basically, what we call philosophy has nothing to do with wisdom or knowledge... Philosophical practice is basically a parasite on the arts, out of which the discipline of philosophy grew, during the historical period when arts separated from religious ritual... And philosophical practice is also parasitic on science, from which philosophy reacts by constantly redacting itself and reforming itself as commentary on scientific practice.

To the extent that you can say that an "attitude" or "approach" is philosophical, only to that extent can you say that "anti-philosophy" is a philosophy, and thus represents a contradiction, or perhaps a systematic paradox. But this in-itself represents the kind of imperialism of knowledge that philosophy has been accused of by every great philosopher who started his/her philosophical career as an anti-philosopher. Philosophy seeks to dominate all forms of knowledge, seeks to be a term that is everywhere and nowhere. In this way it is a lot like the word "language" or "ideology". Everything becomes a "language" and thus every aspect of mind or communicative experience is filed under the category of language, thus we get "the language of music" and "the language of architecture", etc., etc. The same occurs with the term ideology.... Among some "thinkers", even some anti-philosophers, all thought becomes an example of ideology and thought-itself is not possible without "ideology". You can parade out as many dictionary definitions of philosophy that you like to prove that an "anti-philosophical" attitude is self-contradictory, but it doesn't negate the fact that the definitions themselves are self-contradictory, assuming that all thought is philosophical and that philosophy is both everything and nothing.

This is the way that many use the term "philosophy". Philosophy is not only some kind of "systematic thought" obtaining to wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of the world, but also something that we "have" implicitly, simply because we think at all. Thus it is impossible to be an anti-philosopher because by definition all systematic thought of any sort is philosophical, and if the thought is not systematic, then the implications of thinking, is itself philosophical. Thus the reasoning goes, "To think 'anti-philosophically' is an example of philosophical thinking." But this is like the Cretan who says all "Cretans are liars", the very fact of making the statement I am "anti-philosophical" is either paradox or contradiction. Well the former rather than the latter. Yet the possibility exists that it is neither. It is simply a double-bind statement created by the systematic gossip of philosophers themselves, those engaged in the intellectual circulation of gossip to the extent that they have imposed a dictionary definition that is totalistic and intellectually imperialistic. But let me suggest that like most double bind situations, this situation was produced by a category mistake or a problem of logical typing. It is possible to be "anti-thinking" in certain situations. If I am a baseball batter, I am not thinking at every moment about how to swing the bat. If my baseball coach tells me that you have to get "beyond thought" and "just swing" wjem you are in the batter's box, I know that he is saying that "conscious" thinking is harmful to my batting average in this situation. But to define his "anti-thinking" statement as also a "thought" and thus self-contradictory is a form of sophistry, the same kind of sophistry that practically all philosophers engage in at one time or another. They, the self-described lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have propounded their definitions through intellectual gossip, so that you are a philosopher whether you know it or not and no matter what you do or think getting beyond philosophy is impossible.

But lets be real. A "Philosopher" is a professional category in our modern society. Propounding philosophy is what those rarefied "professionals" do. But before "philosophy" was a profession it was a denotation of a systematic orientation to life that was "positioned" outside of organized (western) religion. Philosophers were not so much anti-religious as un-religious. Philosophy had an historical beginning and it has historical limitations. It was born when literature began to separate itself from religion and it began to attenuate when science began to separate itself from both religion and philosophy. Philosophy as an historical practice has always shaded into literature and myth on one side and science and mathematics on the other. Philosophy is not "strictly" bounded or limited by these other experiential practices and ways of producing understanding, but philosophical practitioners have always ignored the fact that they are simply continuers of these other projects. At its best philosophical practice provides abstraction and meta-comment on literature and science. At its worse philosophical practioners pimp off of literature and science while at the same time pretending to dominate both of those practices and proclaiming the originality of their discipline. An anti-philosophical point-of-view is simply a point-of-view that recognizes the historical limitations of philosophy and hopes for the further attenuation of philosophy in the future. But let me emphasize, that It is only the arrogant imperialism of some philosophers that necessitate anti-philosophy. To the extent that any other field -- religion or even physics or biology -- exhibits this sort of arrogant yearning to dominate other fields, then they too should be called to task.

Then what is left of philosophy? Mostly gossip. The true subject of philosophy has always been gossip in one form or another. It is gossip taken to a higher level -- the gossip of complex society commenting on the fact that face-to-face society, where gossip truly matters, is no longer possible. Philosophy is essentially meta-gossip, on the form and function of complex structures of growing human society.

There is no "contradiction" in being an anti-philosophy philosopher: if you believe that philosophy is parasitic meta-gossip, then your function is to reveal how philosophy works as a form of meta-gossip. Yet we assume that this practice of critique of philosophy that I am calling "anti-philosophy", is also a form of meta-gossip. The snake eats its tail.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
27 May 2007
(reedited 28 May 2007)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

music: Perfidia - Glen Miller

Tags: anti-philosophy, anti-theory, atheism, chomsky, common sense, creativity, fiction, folk psychology, gossip, ideology, limitationism, limits of knowledge, methodological naturalism, philosophy, philosophy as gossip, superstition

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The "Folk Psychology" of Philosophers & the Social Networks of Gossip: Example-the Mind-Body Problem	Jan. 9th, 2006 @ 10:45 am

The Strange Persistence of the "Mind/Body Problem" and the "Folk Psychology" of the Philosophers as an Example of the Social Networks of Gossip:

In one of these posts I made the mistake of ironically using the term 'folk psychology' to describe the persistence of the 'mind-body' problem among philosophers. The absurdity of that persistence I take as a given. What is taken as the "mind-body" problem – i.e. the inability to account for the 'qualia' of experience on a pre-determined physicalist basis or the impossibility of giving a physicalist account of "what it is like to be a bat," for example – is the same problem that is encountered in all areas of scientific inquiry, including the hard physical sciences.

Two quotes I am fond of will illustrate this thesis.

The question of what kind of a world [quantum mechanics] describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/

"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale."
Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy .

The first quote is from a standard account of the human problems encountered by common understanding when trying to explain the implications of quantum mechanics. The second quote is from Bertrand Russell's lead up to his philosophy of knowledge. These quotes should be taken together, but with the following addenda – perception-itself is also part of that intrinsic physical world that is intrinsically unknown – except that we do know what it is like to experience our own perception. On the other hand a scientific theory, even one that is primarily mathematical, is simply a "non-common sense" way of perceiving the world, or the relations of the world that we take for "objects." Further, all of these perceptions of the world can be conceived of as "appearances," but not as " mere appearances," i.e. it is not as if the appearance itself was somehow unreal or not a part of the world that we investigate, when we investigate the nature of what is real.

Galen Strawson put this best, in describing some ideas that he partially derived from Russell:

In having Experience in the way we do, we are directly acquainted with certain features of the ultimate nature of reality, as Russell and others have remarked – whether or not we just put what we known into words in any theoretically tractable way. And this is so whatever it is best to say about any non-Experiential ( e.g. dispositional) aspects of the mental that there may be. We may certainly hope to develop our understanding of the nature of the Experiential, but we can do this only by adding to what we already know of it by direct acquaintance.
…

[H]ow things appear or seem is how they really are, the reality that is at present in question just is the appearing of seeming. In the case of any experiential episode E, there may be something X of which it is true to say that in undergoing E, we only have access to an appearance of X, and not to how X is in itself. But serious materialists must hold that E itself, the event of being-appeared-to, with all the qualitative character that it has, is itself part of physical reality. They cannot say that it too is just an appearance, and not part of how things are, on the pain of infinite regress. They must grant that it is itself as reality, and a reality with which we must, in plausibility, be allowed to have some sort of direct acquaintance. As Russell says, we must 'treat "seeming" with respect". Real Materialism by Galen Stawson in Chomsky and His Critics, edited by Norbert Hornstein and Louis Anthony at p. 67, quoting B. Russell in An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.

The basic mistake of those philosophers who persist in referring to the mind/body problem is an inability to break out of there own common sense notions of what science does and does not teach us. The same is true with the philosophers who refer to the problem of the "mental" or of "qualia." The problems they refer to are not unique to a naturalistic study of the world of the mental or of experience. It is rather an aspect of the limits of all theoretical study. These limits have been expressed in various ways since Newton's theoretical revolution in science. Empiricists, idealists and materialists alike have expressed them. What has not been recognized is the reason that they exist whenever we think the world through theoretical science. In effect, the special kind of thinking that is represented by a descriptive and explanatory theoretical model, a theory that is pragmatically testable, with tests that are repeatable, is very narrow in its representations of reality. In many ways these theories are simply other ways of "perceiving" the world. This means that the problems of perception and "seeming", the problems of making sure of reality, which we have in everyday life, do not disappear when we use a theoretical construct to refine our perceptions. The problems of appearance, of knowing what things are like, do not disappear in the physical sciences, as they don't disappear in the sciences that deal with the mental, they are only given sharp relief. They are made deeper.

I think it will be helpful here to quote the whole passage that Strawson refers to above. Russsell first points out that some of the problem that philosophers have is that they don't ask themselves 'what is meant by "seeming".'

If a dream or a table 'seems' to be one sort of thing, while it is 'really' another we shall have to admit that it really seems, and that what it seems to be has a reality of its own. Nay, more, we only arrive at what it 'really' is by an inference, valid or invalid, from what it seems to be. If we are wrong about the seeming, we must be doubly wrong about the reality, since the sole ground for asserting the table composed of electrons and protons is the table that we see, i.e. the 'seeming' table. We must therefore treat 'seeming' with some respect. Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.

For years Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the mind/body problem is not only wrong it is simply not even comprehensible. This is not because we know so little about "minds" or "perception" or "experience" but just the opposite; what we don't know about is what the physical really is. A "body", in the way that the Cartesians stated the mind/body problem, is a concept that has been shown to be unsustainable, since Newton elucidated his theories. Every fifty years or so physics comes along with another refinement of what the 'physical' really is. It turns out that just possibly the physical is just as well conceived of as little bits of information. Strawson points out that Russell once remarked "that the reason that physics is mathematical is not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little." (Strawson, op.cit. p.61) (Note, if Engels insisted upon calling his materialism "dialectical" it is because he had some intuition of the truth of how little we know about the physical. In other words "dialectical materialism" as originally propounded was a primitive insight into our lack of knowledge. The idea of the physical was meant to be a provisional and unstable concept, a constantly moving target. The fact that Engels had this insight, even though he was a very bad scientist only means that he was trying to understand the crisis of materialism after Newton and Darwin. There is no reason to bow down to an idea of philosophy that was meant to make up for our lack of knowledge of the physical, when we now have much greater insight into the reason why such concept as "materialism" or the "physical" don't stay pinned to the mat.)

The confusion comes with most philosophers because they think we know through science what the physical and is, and the real problem is to try to explain the mental or the qualia of experience. The opposite is true in a really interesting way. We know our own minds and experiences intimately. We experience the qualia of experience and thus this seems to us to be what needs to be explained or accounted for. Mental experience "seems" so florescent and effervescent to us, so unsettled. Non-mental objects on the other hand "seem" so solid and relatively easy to define, mainly because we are programmed to handle them, touch them, taste and smell them. They seem stable and there is reality in the "seeming", but what our theoretical evaluations show us is that we know so little about the physical. We simply don't know what it is. The "seeming" of our experience is what we really know. To quote Russell again:

"The essence of matter appears to be this: We can distinguish series of events in space-time which have a certain kind of close resemblance to each other, such that common sense regards them as manifestations of one 'thing'. But when we look closely at the question, it turns out that what physics offers is something more abstract than this. Take, e.g. the continued existence of a certain electron. This means to say that events in a certain neighborhood will be such as can be calculated on the assumption that there is an electric charge of a certain standard magnitude, in the middle of that neighborhood; and that the neighborhoods of which this is true form a tube in space-time.

So long as we stick to the standpoint of pure physics there is a certain air of taking in each other's washing about the whole business. Events in empty space are only known in regards their abstract mathematical characteristics; matter is only an abstract mathematical characteristic of events in empty space. This seems rather a cold world. But as a matter of fact we know some things are a little more concrete. We know, e.g. what it feels like when we see things. 116 (Emphasis mine.)

Yes, this is exactly the way it should be described. What we know is what it "feels like": to perceive. We know the perception of "things" from the "inside" of our own experienced reality. Since we know this experienced-reality intimately, the illusion arises with most philosophers, -- i.e. the philosophers who set goals for how explanations must be given if we are to explain the qualia of experience in a naturalistic way, -- that it is somehow these experiences that must be explained intrinsically, and "reduced" to the "physical", if mental experience is to be explained at all. But it is precisely our knowledge of the physical that cannot be apprehended through anything but a mathematical abstract except by way of the seeming of experience. The problem of intrinsic knowledge of the physical is as great, if not greater, than the problem of qualia.

Once again Russell says it much better than I can.

It used to be thought 'mysterious' that purely physical phenomena should end in something mental. That was because people thought that they knew a lot about physical phenomena, and were sure they differed in quality from mental phenomena. We now realise that we know nothing of the intrinsic quality of physical phenomena except when they happen to be sensations, and that therefore there is no reason to be surprised that some are sensations, or to suppose that the others are totally unlike sensations. The gap between mind and matter has been filled in, partly by new views on mind, but much more by the realisation that physics tells us nothing as to the intrinsic character of matter. 117 (emphasis mine).

My supplement to this is that the optimistic connotation of this paragraph ("It used to be thought… We now realise … no reason to be surprised… the realisation that…") has been undercut by subsequent history. And this is what I find curious. What was true then in 1927 about what physics told us that we don't know about the physical is even truer now after almost eighty years of further discoveries of the strangeness of the physical. Yet philosophers persist in not hearing the news.

How to explain this?

Well philosophers seem to have an explanation of the way they think only they apply this explanation to others in an inside-out fashion. What I am saying is that they project and externalize their notions into a theory that they call "folk psychology" and then attribute the workings of the theory onto the common people. Ian Ravenscroft at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ explains one version of "folk psychology" in the following manner…

[F]olk psychology is a theory of mind implicit in our everyday talk about mental states. In the everyday traffic of our lives we make remarks linking sensory experiences to mental states; mental states to other mental states; and mental states to behavior. Thus we remark that the smell of freshly baked bread made Sally feel hungry; that Sally wanted to go on a diet because she thought that she was overweight; and that Sally went to the fridge because she desired a piece of chocolate cake. According to some philosophers, remarks such as these (or suitable generalisations of remarks such as these) function as a term-introducing theory which implicitly defines terms such as "believe", "want" and "desire".

Ravenscroft, then quotes David Lewis instructing us to do the following in order to build a model of a "folk psychology":

Collect all the platitudes … regarding the causal relations of mental states, sensory stimuli, and motor responses. … Add also all the platitudes to the effect that one mental state falls under another … Perhaps there are platitudes of other forms as well. Include only the platitudes which are common knowledge amongst us: everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on. Lewis, D. (1972): "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications". Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 249-58.

My contention is that the only folk that such a model would be applicable to are members of the caste we call the intelligentsia, and that in particular such a model would be instructive only when constructed from the "platitudes which are common knowledge" among philosophers. In such a case, we would call the results of this model an "ideology". We know that the intellectual caste is more susceptible to ideology than most and we won't be surprised by what we see from the results of the collection of such platitudes.

The transmission of these platitudes we will call "gossip", because as should be clear all philosophy is basically transmitted through gossip and is often nothing more than gossip itself. When common people and "housewives" (sic) engage in gossip it is called by its true name. When intellectuals engage in gossip it is often called "philosophy."

In The Sociology of Philosophy: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Randall Collins states:

In the case of the ideas we are concerned with…, the ideas that matter historically, it is possible to demonstrate that the individuals who bring forward such ideas are located in typical social patterns: intellectual groups, networks, rivalries.

The history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups. Nothing abstract is meant here – nothing but groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social movements.

Well how much such ideas "matter historically" is a matter of empirical demonstration. I do agree that these ideas are transmitted through "social networks" that "have the characteristics of social movements." But I do think that what really matters are actual social movements, like the one that ended slavery, or the movement that brought us the realization that women should be full and equal members of our society. What philosophers are engaged in is "gossip". This is not to devalue gossip. I believe that gossip is important to any culture, though when gossip becomes a mass media commodity it is greatly deformed. But I also think that we should call what most philosophers do when they transmit their ideas by its correct name, i.e. gossip.

Why insist on calling certain aspects of the transmission of philosophy a form of gossip? Isn't this abusive to philosophers? Yes, I am afraid that professionally trained philosophers will not even understand the basic point of my insistence that what they do is a form of gossip. I want to persist in a view that all human beings are philosophers and that philosophy must become a democratic and cooperative activity. Calling the transmission of philosophy a form of gossip illustrates the fact that doing philosophy is an activity of everyday life and it is not like science a technical specialty that needs long years of training. The same is true of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political analysis and participation, foreign policy, singing songs, telling stories, etc. Philosophy, as something 'technical' and separate from what the rest of us do is the product of a self-consciously anti-democratic movement, an aristocratic reaction to the threat of democratic decision making in Greek city-states. In other words, it was a semi-secular invention of a defensive intelligentsia. Such discussions that take place in philosophy and literary criticism, in the non-academic sense of these words, belongs to us all and can be understood by us all, or else they have failed in their main job, the shaping of open dialogue.

Now, as far as the conception of folk psychology is concerned, and its transmission through the hierarchical social network established through gossip, I think what it can be used for is explaining the persistence of the platitude called 'the mind/body problem.'

When I originally called the mind/body problem part of the 'folk psychology of philosophers' my correspondent did not understand the irony. He thought that both the mind/body problem and folk psychology were meant to be taken seriously as products of philosophy instead of as the transmission of gossip by other means, i.e. through the formation of an ideological world view appropriate to philosophers.

Let me say finally that folk psychology is a fine illustration of retail bullshit in its relation to gossip. The notion of folk psychology seems to me the academic homologue to the idea of the 'folk tale' among the nineteenth century philologists. It is also similar to the notion of 'folk music' among the Bohemians. Such notions arise when a social group that wishes to understand "the masses" posits a notion of a "primitive-authentic" and projects this authenticity upon others. The term "folk psychology" is a term of art which derives from the intellectual elitism of the academic (mis)conceptions of everybody else. The only people that the notions of 'folk psychology' actually describes are the philosophers who use it and who persist in such pre-Newtonian notions as 'the mind/body problem.' It is the equivalent of many other insular and parochial notions that are raised to pseudo-theory.

Intellectuals may exhibit a 'folk psychology'. Everybody else can make do with old fashion common sense – which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. As Bertolt Brecht said, in a much different context, people have no desire to become folk.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 January 2006

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Tags: anti-theory, bertrand russell, common sense, folk psychology, gossip, ideology, materialism, methodological naturalism, naturalism, philosophy, philosophy of science, philsophy as gossip, realism, science, social networks, superstition

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Academic Reproduction of Hierarchy: Continental & Anglo-American Philosophy; Politics of Division	Mar. 17th, 2005 @ 09:03 am

A question asked at real_philosophy by fortunate_son
There was a question posed about analytical and continental philosophy and someone asked "does it have to be either or?". I found this funny because in the philosophy club that we have at my school, we were discussing the similarities and differences as well as pros and cons between the two. However, I didn't think about the either/or question until now. So before I go into what I think, what does everyone else think? Can you have your cake and eat it too? Can you do both continental and analytic philosophy

I would like to point you to two specific books. The first is by Gregory McCulloch who wrote a book explaining Sartre's early phenomenological philosophy in terms of analytic philosophy. It is a book that throws light on the notions of phenomenology and the notions of analytic philosophy, showing how they can 'understand' each other and how they can each compliment each other, perhaps showing the weaknesses in each 'world view.' The book is Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes by Gregory McCulloch and is well worth looking at as an answer to your question. The second book is by Arthur C. Danto and is called Nietzsche as Philosopher. Among other things, this book argues, that Nietzsche can be interpreted as an original analytic thinker in his attempts to understand 'meaning' and 'language'. Danto points out that many of Nietzsche's notion on language prefigure Wittgenstein and Austin. At some future point I intend to give detailed reviews of both these books.

I always thought that the division between 'continental' and analytic philosophy was a product of academic positioning and the reproduction of hierarchy within university 'departments.' I also think that insisting upon these divisions within philosophy is a little like insisting that you can't be a mathematician and a poet at the same time. Of course you can. The hard question in this case would be is there a poetics of mathematics? (We do know that there is a sort of mathematics of poetry as there is a sort of mathematics of music.) Of course nobody would insist that mathematicians and poets exist in the same academic department. But also nobody would insist that those who study romanitic poetry should reside in separate departments from those who study metaphysical poetry. Unfortunately this is the situation with many philosophy departments.

In many old U.S. philosophy departments if one wanted to do 'phenomenology' one could only do work in the humanities department or in a divinity school connected to the university. If one wanted to do analytic philosophy one could go to select schools whose philosophy departments mostly specialized in analytic philosophy or if one wanted to study pragmatism or if your philosophy derived from Kantian notions then you would have to select a certain university's philosophy department where those particular philosophies were studied. Most of this is simply a matter of the politics of academic hierarchy and has nothing to do with 'learning' or 'creativity' or contributing new ideas. The fact is that there are very few standards outside of science and mathematics with which to judge academic work. Thus the standards we use in areas such as literature and philosophy are either absurdly quantitative (the "publish or perish" standard, the "citation-count" standard) or completely a matter of personal relations, connections, or the circulation of good and bad 'gossip', especially such notions as 'fame,' 'celebration,' and 'renown.' Thus professors within academic departments must try to reproduce themselves and their ideas in order to make their way up the academic hierarchy. The ideal here is to create a graduate student who will promote and extend your own ideas giving you as much credit as possible. From the graduate student's point of view the ideal is to win over her advisor or other professors without becoming a clone of anyone of those professors. The tug of war in such cases tends to produce, within the humanities, certain well defined 'schools', 'departments', and world-views that look completely artificial to those of us outside the territorial fights that have produced these schools. Often those schools are 'defined' or recognized by such notions as 'style' of thought or collegiality that are purely 'cultural' and not at all philosophical. Of course these are all only general tendencies that are structured into the university system in much the same way that 'rate of profit' is structured into the corporate system. Each individual will have his or her own more or less alienated experience of these tendencies.

One may object that this answer to your question is going off onto a personal theme that is not what your question is about. I accept that. But my answer to your question is, "Yes, it would be very worth while and easy to combine many of the themes of 'analytical philosophy' and 'phenomenology' (just to name the main contenders in the 'continental' and 'Anglo-American' split)." The immediate question is then, why does the split exist in the first place and why was the split so obvious in the United States through most of the 1970's -1990's? The split was obvious in the fact that practically all 'continental philosophy' was done outside of philosophy departments through most of the 80's. This was harmful to philosophy in general because many themes of cross fertilization were missed. It was harmful to the literature departments in particular where continental philosophy found refuge because it led to a decline in the actual appreciation of good literature and the rise of impossible literary 'theories.' Yet, in spite of the intellectual harm the split continued for a long period of time. Why? A lot of the explanation has to do with history and the two events of European nation-state sponsored mass slaughter that we call World Wars One and Two. But I think the other explanation has to do with the politics of philosophical gossip and hierarchy that I mention here.

One may also object that my example of a mathematician who is also a poet is not an apt analogy. A rigorous analytic philosopher may think that the best analogy would be between an astrophysicist and an astrologer because these two fields are mutually exclusive. A good phenomenologist may think that a better analogy is between a physicist who only studies one small aspect of electro-magnetism all his life and a physicist who studies among other things cosmology and the origins and basis of the universe. I think that both analogies would be wrong and mine is the more correct one. The fact is that the phenomenologist is usually only writing about things that we can only speculate about and he is writing almost in the style of a novelist. To the extent that my representative phenomenologist plays fast and loose with history or ignores the latest discoveries in science that may refute his speculations then the phenomenologist is acting in the way of an astrologer, but other wise he may provide insight that is a bit more than intuitive. On the other hand it is simply untrue that 'anglo-american' philosophy in general and analytical philosophy in particular is very narrow and does not deal with everyday experience. What is the base in the mutual misperceptions between the Anglo-American philosophers and the continentals is actually a misconception of the range of philosophy. It has only been very recently that philosophy has separated from science on one hand and literature on the other. In fact philosophy must be the blend between the two and sometimes the dividing line between the two. But those philosophers who bend toward the natural sciences, mathematics and logic tend to be of one kind and school and those who bend toward literature tend to be of another kind and school. Personally what I care about is clear writing, the fire of ideas expressed creatively, and rational thinking that can account for the non-rational and sometimes even the irrational.

The idea of 'translating' continental philosophy into themes and ideas that at first sight do not seem compatible is a very good one. For example I have always thought that the notion of 'dialectics' in Hegel's "Science of Logic" is a groping idea for computational notions of 'recursiveness' and positive and negative feedback. A cautious approach of rewriting some of Hegel's ideas into terms familiar to cognitive science, would seem to me something that might be interesting. Something very similar might be done with Husserl. Also, another example, might be how Wittgenstein's notion of 'language games' is very similar to many notions derived from post-structuralism (though I find most pomo thinking an exercise in obscure and bad writing). Another example is Lewis' notions of 'counterfactuals' and how they dovetail with some continental contrasts between 'nomos' and 'narrative', even though the former is supposed to be a structural explanation of 'reality' and the latter is more a psychological explanation of how we see and develop the world. I am not saying that these ideas are the same but rather that they contribute to and help complete each other in ways that might be insightful if pursued with a bit of humility and without any notion that there can be a 'theory' that offers both description and explanation of phenomena in any deep sense as in the natural sciences.

To this end I think the line of thinking that your question suggests may produce fruitful results.

Jerry Monaco
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PHILOSOPHY IS GOSSIP: AN HISTORICAL THESIS: Distinctions, Digressions on a Line of Thought	Feb. 13th, 2005 @ 06:32 pm

PHILOSOPHY IS GOSSIP: AN HISTORICAL THESIS -
Some methodological points, distinctions and digressions on a line of thought: #2
by Jerry Monaco

I will boil down my argument to four points: 1. Gossip is essential to the transmission and reproduction of philosophical arguments. 2. There is a kind of gossip that is specific to philosophical friendship and enmity, to the way philosophies reproduce alliances and oppositions. 3. A philosophy of gossip would be a (very) modest but interesting addition to an historical view of philosophy. 4. A clear view of the gossip of philosophy may help us to understand some sociological reasons why 'philosophy' is no longer the province of public intellectuals.

(#1 is located in a previous post along with the full comments of my correspondents at This link for Shandean Postscripts to Politics & Culture:)

In partial reply to Vernach & cuthbertscoast

cuthbertscoast wrote:
'This view would be more convincing if the gossip-process described were *specific* to philosophy. '

Vernach wrote:
'I don't know how familiar you are with Sociology, but that was the subject i was referring to most when I made the post. I'm a supporter of the sociological perspective of interactionism; therefore I believe that human interaction (including gossip) has a part in producing qutie a bit (but not all) of the products of many human cultures , philosophy being one of them.'

Mode of Transmission & Production of Philosophy: Gossip

If one begins to look at philosophy from the point of view of a mode of transmission and production through gossip, certain processes in the history of philosophy that have been previously ignored as trivial, become interesting. For instance the formation of 'schools of thought', the splits within those schools, how those schools of thought propagated themselves, differentiated themselves and reproduced themselves, how they lived and died, etc. become the focus of the transmission and propagation of philosophical argument. All of this is brought to the forefront and revealed anew from the askew view of gossip as mode of transmission of philosophy.

Further, by freeing our selves from the text based analysis of philosophical transmission and focusing on a mostly (though not exclusively) oral practice, one begins to see with new eyes, how arguments themselves are evaluated and transmitted, why certain notions and concepts become 'talisman'-like transmitters and badges of schools of thought, why certain ideas are reduced to easily circulated viruses or 'memes', etc. If we place all of this in intimate relation with the circulation of gossip philosophy looks more like a semiautonomous social practice than a simple production of ideas and ideologies. Finally, from the point of view of transmission of gossip we might be better able to explain why some arguments and ideas fail to find a fertile population for propagation. Such failure of ideas can be looked upon as both the failure of friendship and the failure of its opposite, to produce gossip. The notion I would like to push is that friendship, enmity, and the gossip that goes with it are crucial to understanding strictly philosophical arguments better than they are to understanding scientific arguments or mathematical arguments. (In another post I will provide some counter examples in science, mathematics and politics using Cicero, Cantor, and Bayes.)

Let me concede that my playful thesis will not be worth the candle unless friendship, enmity and the transmission of philosophical arguments through gossip are a factor in forming the very structure of philosophical arguments.

What you should notice right away is that this is not a sociological project nor is it a postmodern argument though I admit that there is a little of both in it. But as cuthbertscoast recognized there is also a bit of Wittgenstein in it and a large dose of my engagement with the history and philosophy of scientific theories.

A Moderate Anti-Sociology: “Contra-Vernach”

Traditional Sociological Concerns
I think social structure, city-state politics, and nation-state politics are very important to the matters I am referring to when I talk about gossip as a transmission of philosophy. Certain social relations are better than others in providing the social oxygen for gossip to flourish and philosophy to be transmitted in a way that is not wholly formal. For example, in my historical comparison of Northern Italian city-states from 1200-1600, the cities that relied most on political gossip for transmission of 'news' were also the cities where the new philosophy of humanism thrived. On one level this may simply be a classic example of how correlation says nothing about cause. But I think a detailed study of the collectors and writers we know as humanists will show that gossip was necessary to their project. The case of ancient Athens is singular because we have no real base of comparison with other Greek city-states. But given what we know about the other city-states and what people said at the time, Athens was something like the epitome of a polis that relied upon gossip for news. The fact that democratic Athens was a super incubator of gossip was appalling to the anti-democrats in Ancient Greece. I believe that 'political' gossip in a broad sense (which is mostly a male intellectual imitation of domestic gossip) is one of the best seedbeds for philosophy.

Philosophy and the ‘Ideological’ Sciences
I would just like Vernach to know that this is how I relate my thoughts to traditional sociological concerns. But I would also like Vernach to know that my concerns are in some respects 'anti-sociological'. I basically agree with him that sociology is a cousin of philosophy. But I would push Vernach’s view even further. Sociology is merely an ideological 'science'.

From this point of view it is interesting to ask why law, sociology, political science, economics, and psychology are no longer considered philosophical disciplines. (Notice that ‘law’ was historically the first among these to differentiate from philosophical discipline and practice.) My preliminary answer is simplistic. The support for most of sociology and much of psychology are variations of market research and public relations research. In fact the origins of the public relations industry in the U.S. is directly connected with the origins of modern sociology, political science and psychology as separate disciplines. Before market research and the public relations industry, philosophy used to serve some of the functions now served by the ideological ‘sciences.’ Now philosophy is no longer needed to serve those functions. Personally, I would be much happier if sociology came under the overtly ideological discipline of what we call philosophy. It would at least be truth in advertising. But then there are of course good sociological reasons why sociology, psychology, economics, and political science are independent of philosophy. These disciplines are useful training grounds for future administrators and they help to articulate the interests of the dominant (state and corporate) administrative elites and the ruling classes. They also form the background for corporate and political research into the ‘behavior’ of the population as a whole, etc. This is precisely some of the work that philosophy used to do in less complex societies. The paradox is that if these disciplines were conceptually folded into what we think of as philosophy, and literally folded into philosophy departments, they would probably become more rigorous because they would be under constant epistemological attack from within. In fact they would become so rigorous as to suffer philosophical paralysis, thus not serving their allotted function of helping to understand and control the population. I would consider such a result a net benefit.

As you can see what seems to be a contribution to 'anti-philosophy' is in background an attempt to see why philosophies 'live'.

Gossip in Philosophy Compared to Hierarchy in Law
Now what do these points have to do with gossip in philosophy? One reason why gossip is crucial in philosophy is for the same reason why such extreme measures are taken in law school today to guarantee ranking and hierarchy on every level. (The amount of econometrics used to judge law school rankings exceeds every other discipline. The fight for hierarchical placement among law school students and professors is mind-boggling to observe. The attention paid to all of this by the major law firms is puzzling but also functional.) When the teaching of philosophy functioned something like the teaching of law does now gossip was the only way that a philosophical notion could be judged over a long period of time. There are no big advertisement campaigns for a philosophical notion, only word of mouth and what could be built through friendship and enmity.

Gossip as Overdetermination or Underdetermination in the Appearance and Disappearance of Philosophical Argument
I would also distinguish my views from Vernach’s sociological generalizations about gossip. My point is that the way ‘gossip’ works as transmission of friendship and enmity in philosophy is essential to the survival and disappearance of philosophical arguments and that it often either overdetermines or underdetermines those arguments. Friendship and enmity is essential to understanding philosophical arguments but gossip as a means of transmission is essential to understanding the shaping, reshaping, and propagation of those arguments across societies and over historical time.

I will seek to show by examples in a later post how philosophical gossip is different from the way gossip works in politics or science or in domestic relationships. I concede that gossip has much to do with everyday life and is often a kind of cement or division in philosophical relationships. For instance one thing I would like to show through using my peculiar notion of gossip is that gossip often establishes the rules for a kind of Wittgensteinian language-game of schools of philosophy. I hesitate to use Wittgenstein’s notions directly because they are both contentious and ahistorical. I only use the notion here to show how my notion of philosophical gossip is distinguished from sociological notions of gossip. Gossip in philosophy is inextricable from the use and survival of arguments.. Another way that gossip in philosophy is different from sociological notions of gossip is that it establishes the grounds for the survival of philosophical arguments. This is not the only way gossip transmits philosophy but it is one way that philosophical gossip differs from gossip in everyday life. I would also like to distinguish my idea from a notion of an ‘anthropology of philosophers.’ Though I think that such an accusation would come closer to what I am trying to show, I don’t think that the intellectual culture of philosophy is very easy to pin down simply because philosophical traditions are so obviously historical in a way that crosses cultures.

My peculiar definition of gossip
Of course my thesis may simply be trivially true. In other words if my counterfactual about gossip and philosophy was stated 'if no gossip then no philosophy,' I think this would be a triviality. As both cuthbertscoast and Vernach noticed this counterfactual could also be stated 'if no gossip then no human communication within society.' Such a statement or restatement is not a counterfactual that is meant to bring one to see that philosophy is causally dependent on gossip, in the manner of counterfactuals as presented by David Lewis. If my statement merely took the everyday definition of gossip then I think it would be a trivial statement. This is because gossip is not so much in anyway a cause of human communication within a society, but rather that there is no way to communicate in a society over long periods of time without also communicating everyday-over-the-fence gossip. In this case ‘gossip’ would not be distinct from philosophy in the way that saying ‘Hello’ would not be distinct from saying ‘Hello’ loudly. These would not be distinct ‘events’ or historical facets, just different aspects of the same event. Only if there is something distinct about how gossip organizes philosophy and philosophical alliances and oppositions, and only if there is something between gossip in the context of philosophy and gossip in everyday life will my thesis be ‘non-trivial.’

As I wish to make clear, I am employing a peculiar definition of gossip as a means of circulation, organization, and reproduction of arguments within a context of philosophical alliances and oppositions, of philosophical friendships and enmities. The reason I use the word 'gossip' at all is partially for the sake of provocation, partially so I can see philosophical history in a new way, and partially because I have an affinity for everyday language. One could possibly talk in Bourdieu's terms about language, symbolic power, the circulation of cultural capital, but one can't accept his technical terms without accepting what I consider his absurd theories on language, derived from Saussure thrice removed. Therefore I prefer my peculiar definition of gossip as an attempt at a conceptual tool to other terms that may seem more appropriate.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
11 Feb. 2005
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Philosophy Without Gossip: A counter-factual on the disappearance of philosophy	Feb. 9th, 2005 @ 11:56 am

Philosophy Without Gossip: A counter-factual Philosophy is Gossip #3
By Jerry Monaco

Let us imagine a different philosophical world.

The imagined world of anonymous philosophy
In my imagined world all philosophical works are anonymous. We know nothing of a particular philosophical worker's personal life. Every piece of writing, whether a book or a paper is not identified by authorship or by philosophical school. This would mean that there would be no indication whether the writer of paper P is the same or different as the writer of book B. All stylistic identification which may identify a writer of B as the same or as different from the writer of P would have to be stripped from the work -- perhaps by computer 'translation' or the secret censor. We will know not a thing about a philosopher's personal life. We will know nothing at all about philosophers only the written works. Further more in this imagined world identification with philosophical 'schools' or 'movements' will not be allowed except to the extent that a philosophical work identifies with a particular argument. To take this to an extreme a philosophical work would not be able to identify the particular historical and cultural context out of which it came. The author must assume the context but the reader will not be able to identify the actual 'location' of the assumptions. To the extent possible philosophical works will have to describe their assumptions through argument.

By necessity this world can only be a world of written philosophy. This will mean that the philosophical practice of oral argument that most human beings participate in will not count as philosophy. And in fact most philosophers today do 'value' the kind of philosophy they do in writing higher than oral communications, not to mention oral communications between 'non'-philosophers.

Now let us imagine two variations of this fictional world. In one of these worlds oral philosophy in any organized sense will not take place at all.

In the second variation oral philosophy will take place but without connection to written philosophy. This would mean that people taking part in any philosophical discussion would not be allowed to identify themselves as authors of book B or paper P.

I will further assume that in such a world or 'culture' there is free access to all philosophical works and in theory 'instant' communication between all who desire. This means that for all who care to read philosophical works there are no transaction costs in the reception of those works and the 'time costs' in 'reading' of those works are reduced to a minimum. Some limit must be established, so I will assume that every human being can read a maximum of the equivalent of 1000 pages per day from age 13 on-wards and this will take four hours. No minimum is set, so some human beings may read nothing at all if they so choose to ignore the luxury of philosophy. Also some selection by sorting must be achieved so our secret censor, the computer, will have selected lists of arguments that readers can choose from. But these lists are to a certain extent arbitrary so that a writer can not 'choose' his 'school' by writing towards the secret censor's list. Further more I assume that 'readers' rate their best reading experiences so that the best of philosophical writings filter to the top in one way or another. The ratings will be automatic and will depend on the 'best' argument.

I invite the reader to consider why most philosophy would disappear in such a world. It would disappear because most philosophers will no longer have anything to say or anyone to contend with. Most philosophical arguments are simply unrecognized stylized repetitions of past arguments. Nothing new is added. There is no progress in philosophy only disappearance of an argument or repetition. I also contend, that this is not true of science and that under the same conditions what we call science would not disappear. In fact given my conditions of no transaction and time costs in communications science would probably thrive.

I realize that such worlds are impossible and undesirable if they were possible.

Friends, Enemies, Gossip, and the Oscillation of Philosophical Arguments
My larger point is that most philosophy would not exist, in such a world. In effect very few things outside of a select area could actually be transmitted. Most philosophers would not find any reason to write.

Outside of the world of friendship and the assumed structure of 'the enemy', outside in depth social relations, and contemporary and historical gossip that transmits and transmutes all of what is called philosophy, there is very little reason for philosophical writing. The arguments of philosophy matter, but they only matter as set against each other in social and historical context. The problem with philosophical writing is that philosophy essentially says the same thing over and over again, or else it is banished from the field and then it sets itself to analyze the field from which it has been banished. Written philosophy is a continuous oscillation between one antinomy of an argument and another until the social or practical conditions that established those antinomies no longer exist. At which point such philosophical discussions around those old antinomies are (1) forgotten, or (2) looked upon condescendingly, (how could anyone ever believe that) or (3) transmuted into similar terms while the practical relations of denotation and connotation of the old terms are conveniently suppressed or (4) suffer diminution to the point that a field such as physics is no longer philosophy but instead we have a 'philosophy of physics.'

From this point of view, philosophy only exists by posing insoluble questions. Once those questions are solved philosophy as such disappears or moves on to other grounds.

It is my contention that those insoluble questions are valued and revalued, made 'alive', only through the philosophical practice of making 'friends,' 'enemies' and the transmission and production of friends enemies and philosophies. It is through what I wish to vulgarly call gossip that this transmission takes place. It is also my contention that the relations between friends and enemies and the transmission of gossip will often condition the very structure of arguments.

Postscript on the provocation of the 'gendered' term 'gossip'
I realize that in this historical view of philosophy I am using the 'dirty' word 'gossip' provocatively. For me the word 'gossip' is not a dirty word but simply one way people talk about themselves and others, talk about relationships. Sometimes gossip is good, sometimes it is bad. The word 'gossip' often has had a connotation that is 'feminine' in gender. My wish to incorporate it into philosophical fields that have had a connotation that are masculine in gender is a provocation. One further note. In most cases gossip is called 'gossip' when referring to communications about relationships between women. When similar communications between men refer to political or business friends or enemies then such communications are called 'news.'

Personal Postscript on my world-view
I do not have a feminist or pomo world view for treating philosophy as I do. My world view is historical, derivative of the enlightenment, and in the political tradition of left libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism. What has influenced me most in my philosophical life is a combination of intellectual skepticism with the experience of meeting illiterate El Salvadoran peasants who were better thinkers than most people I met in universities.

Jerry Monaco
8 Feb. 2005
New York City
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» Philosophy is Gossip Beneath the Rose #2

Gossip that dares not speak its name: Gossip in the transmission and production of philosophy
by Jerry Monaco

My correspondent writes: '[G]ood philosophers are machine-like in their ability to arrange and illustrate arguments in a thorough, logical progression.'

We, who read philosophers, are talking to the dead in order to discredit their ideas. It is as if we need to kill the dead all over again so that our own ideas can live and shine new. But this is a useless task. The dead will stay dead. They can only die once. What the living philosopher desires to kill is the living ideas of the dead philosopher. A bit macabre, yes? I believe in the Oedipus Complex to the extent that I believe in the 'Lucifer Complex' (via Milton) or the 'Prometheus Complex' (via Shelley) or the 'Galileo Complex' (via Brecht), but one can't help but see that there is something Oedipal in all of this.

How can I express my shock and amusement at such notions about the 'machine-like' logical progression of philosophical arguments? This reminds me of the Olympian way in which judges talk of the law. The law is inviolable. And so is this kind of philosophy. If you think that philosophy is only about good arguments you haven't dipped into the professional journals of late. Or perhaps you are too close to the academy to see that such statements as the above are a product of unself-conscious ideology.

(It is not ideology I am afraid of, it is unself-conscious ideology.I know the word 'ideology' in our culture is a term of abuse, but we are all ideological in one way or another, it is just that the best philosophers make their ideology as explicit as possible. See Balibar's Spinoza and Politics. This parenthetical remark is only here so that readers may realize I am not using the word 'ideology' to abuse anyone as most United Statsians would assume. I am using the word to try to 'turn you around', to remove your eyes from the shadows on the cave wall, so you can see how deep your ideology goes. So deep that it is part of your very self. This is where 'Plato's Problem' merges with 'Orwell's Problem.' See Socrates method in the first book of Plato's Republic.)

I should like to expand this line of thought, not let it go. So I will state the various aspects of my thesis with less prettiness.

Gossip is essential to the transmission and production of philosophy. Philosophical relationships, and the gossip that surrounds them, among contemporaries and across the generations, should be essential to our historical understanding of how philosophical ideas differentiate. Philosophers come to understand philosophy not only as a collection of ideas and positions but as a form of gossip about relationships between philosophers. Out of this we should be able to develop an historical view of the displacement of gossip within philosophy. This will lead me to a speculative philosophy of gossip. I do not believe that this is a great undertaking but it might actually say more about history and philosophy than, say, a philosophy of humor.

The overdetermining work of gossip is not only true of the homosocial tug-of-war, between Wittgenstein and Turing, but I do think the relationship between W and T is emblematic of how the gossip of philosophy mutates into an unconscious philosophy of gossip. I have read a dozen or more commentaries on Wittgenstein's weird, but not-easily dismissed notions about the relation between 'pure mathematics' to 'mathematics,' and every single one has at least mentioned the Turing/Wittgenstein entanglement. Why? The answer is that the commentators, without willing to admit it, think that this gossip is important, somehow or someway. This is simply gossip that dares not speak its name. I think that this gossip is not only important but is essential to the production and transmission of philosophical thought and practice. (At the moment, I do not wish to psychoanalyze the reactions of philosophers but they often react to such notions as if the thought is not merely ridiculous, but somehow frightening.)

Our own creation of arguments and our own understanding of philosophy cannot be separated from gossip about relationships. This process has only been increased and intensified by the professionalization of philosophy by the corporate university system. This is because among professional philosophers it would be embarrassing to display 'gossip' as part of their practice of philosophy. So they don't refer to it, even, when it is obvious, such as in the relationship between Athenian democracy and philosophy. If Athens is not an example of the production and transmission of philosophy through gossip I don't know what is. Other intellectual cultures where the transmission and production of philosophy through gossip should be obvious are late Enlightenment France, the Wiemar Republic and the former Hapsburg states between the WWI and WWII, and post-war France (1945-1975).

I could go into a detailed analysis of each of these periods - Socrates and Athens; Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot in the Late Enlightenment; Sartre and Camus, etc. But for a moment think of those logical 'machines' who deployed arguments as if unfolding mathematical proofs, the men of the 'Vienna Circle'.

It is impossible to understand the origins of their arguments and not know that they were motivated not only by the arguments themselves but by the intensely felt absence from the circle of Wittgenstein and the willful expulsion from their minds of both Freud and radical Social Democracy. A list of Vienna Circle preoccupations will do for now: These include, the circulation of gossip about Wittgenstein, Freud, and various social democrats on the fringes of the Vienna Circle; the drive to turn thought into a burning flame of fame where each in competition with the other could make his name (just like bad boy Freud); the combination of a fervent smashing of metaphysical idols (esp. Heidegger) with obvious petty bourgeois resentment; the attraction to and repulsion from Nietzsche. This list will do for now. The fact is that Gossip, to some extent drove them to produce and differentiate their thought. This is not a judgment on the Vienna Circle's arguments, only an observation of their history. Why resist?

The very fact that gossip is now underground among the professional philosophers makes gossip insidious instead of at times delightful and at other times infuriating. Philosophy is just a small town. That small town existed on and off for 2300 years across history and within a few limited geographic areas. To ignore gossip in a small town is to ignore a good part of how the town thinks about itself.

Admittedly, the mode and means of gossip has changed in the last 200 years and now we must contend with the fact of the star-system, and celebrity culture, along with its oppressive elitism. In my mind the fact of the star-system within philosophy is all the more reason to move from the gossip of philosophy to the philosophy of gossip.

The historical fact is that 'gossip,' can be seen as the unabashed immutable background 'noise' to philosophical thinking and writing. I say 'unabashed' because philosophers did not even see the need to hide their use of gossip and their delight in gossip from the time of Plato until the rise of German Idealism. The personal relationships from which gossip emerged, and the role of gossip in the transmission and production of philosophy was probably so obvious to such writers that no one would consider it as a separate social phenomena that needed to be noted.

It was only with the rise of German Idealism, and the professionalization of philosophy in the university system, that gossip became a dirty little secret, as if gossip was the equivalent of sexual relations among the Victorians, something that must be kept hidden. Coincidentally, it was also soon after this period that philosophers on the edges of the Academy -- Nietzsche, Kierkegaard -- developed what might be seen as a philosophy of gossip. I simply seek to make this philosophy of gossip explicit. If you wish to ignore these obvious points in the history of philosophy you will miss much of what philosophy is about. And you will also miss a good bit of the entertainment of philosophy.

(For instance, there is nothing more amusing than Nietzsche writing about Socrates' ugliness. Nietzsche, of course, develops philosophical points about Socrates from his ugliness. But you might ask yourself, how and why did we know about Socrates' ugliness in the first place. Once you follow that question where it will take you, you will see that Nietzsche was not anomolous in using this little bit of gossip as part of philosophical speculation. In fact Nietzsche was just turning the fact of Socrates ugliness around upon all the philosophers who thought that was a point in Socrates favor. But what is this but a form of gossip? Or think of the Oedipal interpretations of the relationships between Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. What is this but gossip parading as insight. Maybe it is also insight. I don't know. You tell me. By the way, you shouldn't be such a stick-in-the mud about these things.)

Many philosophers and writers have written implicitly about what I am explicitly calling gossip. One cannot read Plato and Aristotle without realizing how much they were influenced by low down and dirty gossip, and how much they transformed this gossip into the content of their philosophy. Their views on friendship and on ethics in general, are partially a reaction to an atmosphere of philosophical gossip. (Another example is Cicero. I do not think of Cicero as much of a philosopher, and I think any decent populare should best oppose him as a politician, but one cannot read his essay on friendship, and all the commentaries to this essay on friendship, without realizing how much of all of this was the epitome of gossip. In this case, philosophy is gossip by other means and gossip is simply politics.)

Of course the importance of gossip is easier to see in philosophies that emerge out of the intense intellectual cultures of the city-state. Like the Greek city-state, the philosophers historically located in the Northern Italian city-states (Beccaria, Machiavelli, etc.) are also easily read through the eyeglases of gossip and their reaction to gossip old and new.

This phenomena of the relationship between intellectual production, gossip and the city-state should be looked into with a better historical and philosophical eye than my limited resources are able to bring to the subject. A major part of what later came to be known as humanism was simply a collection of gossip about the Greeks and Romans and the circulation of gossip about other collectors of gossip. Only those who felt Christian pangs of guilt were embarrassed about this obsession. 'Antiquarians' of all sorts were largely responsible for the collection and transmission of ancient philosophy to modern times. One of the major interests of many of those antiquarian collectors was little tid-bits of gossip.

It is only with the professionalization of philosophy that gossip became a guilty secret, something hidden in the articles, and whispered in the backrooms of the little boys that do philosophy. One of the nicer things, about recent times is that more and more women also do philosophy, and perhaps everyday experiences such as how gossip is central to philosophy will come to the fore in the near future. The feminization of philosophy on this level will be welcome. But unfortunately I think that the material culture of professionalism will in the long run defeat this breath of fresh air in philosophy.

Now days, it might be 'cute' and pomo for a philosopher to be obsessed with the actors and actresses on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or with Martha Stewart, but no one, absolutely no one, should admit, that such interests may actually be expressive of the line of their arguments and the direction of their thoughts. And if you, philosopher, happen to admit to your guilty secret of an obsession with Martha Stewart, how impolite would it be to admit that your interest in the Sartre/Camus dispute may not be much different and in fact that the substance and gossip surrounding this dispute are not just entangled with each other, but are displaced overdeterminations of how the dispute developed in history and of our changing views of the dispute. Of course the same can be said for Plato's obsession with and invention of Socrates for that matter.

Philosophers are not supposed to care about the star-system and celebrity culture and get all excited about meeting 'famous' people, at least not in relation to their professional lives. And if they do care about the star-culture they are not supposed to care about the circulation of gossip and how that influences the production of philosophy. But the star-system and celebrity culture are now more influential on philosophy than ever before, simply because it has become an essential part of the structure of wages in and out of the academy. This means more than ever before gossip has become an adjunct to the commodity of the philosopher's labor-power.

I could bring it up to date with Rorty and Stanley Fish if you wish, or Quine and Dennett but I suppose that would be impolite. It is not nice to analyze living or recently dead people as if they had been dead for 200 or 2,000 years.

Yes, I would like to blur the distinctions between philosophy and all other arts, crafts and disciplines. The idea that 'philosophy' is somehow a separate discipline apart from fiction and poetry on the one hand and science and mathematics on the other is simply an unabashed display of the current stupidity of philosophy that thinks its main products are meant for professional journals. The idea that philosophy -- even the most abstract philosophy, even philosophy that is a little too wise -- is something that is academic and professional, unfleshed and unbloodied, lacking sweat and tears, lust and friendship, and lacking all the gossip that adheres to all thought, this view of philosophy is what engaged philosophers must fight against.

I have met people who I would consider good philosophers among illiterate peasants in El Salvador and among teacher-organizers in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. These people I would call philosophers and they would not be shocked by my view that philosophy and gossip are intimates. There were many, also, many famous philosophers who have been explicit about the relationship between gossip and philosophy -- Augustine, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard -- but it is only because these philosophers (though I disagree with their views) were at least honest enough with themselves that they did not scare at the shadows of the 'baser' interests that motivate philosophy.

Jerry Monaco
New York
7 Feb 2005

(note: This was originally a repsonse to a comment on my post from 6 Feb. 2005. I will append the comment to the comment fields of this post.)
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Feb. 8th, 2005 @ 12:36 pm

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» Whispered Beneath the Rose, Philosophy is Gossip: On Gossip and Philosophy

On Gossip and Philosophy: Whispered Beneath the Rose, Philosophy is Gossip A note for From the philosophy of gossip to the gossip of philosophy:
by Jerry Monaco

It occurs to me that there is something that is usually not talked about among philosophers. Beneath the rose the guilty secret of philosophy is gossip. Gossip is something that many philosophers do not make explicit but often talk about and sometimes write about as if they never talk about it. One of the pleasures of philosophy is gossip.

This came home to me once again while writing about the 'serious' subject of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics. In the previous entry of my blog Shandean Postscripts to Politics & Culture: - February 5th, 2005 I wrote a little note on Wittgenstein's views on pure mathematics. It was called Wittgenstein's Fright at Cultish Mathematicians. It was about Wittgenstein's olympian dismissal of certain aspects of pure mathematics as games that were not part of what mathematicians do but rather were a 'cancerous growth' on the body of mathematics. Specifically Wittgenstein attacked Bertrand Russell's use of theories of the mathematicians Cantor, Weirestrass and Dedekind. Russell used their mathematics on the infinitesimal, the infinite and continuity to claim that their could be a Foundation of Mathematics. For Wittgenstein all of this was a delusional mind-game.

There is nothing original or even hard in my little note. It doesn't reach the level of a good sophomore's summary of an incident in philosophy. The whole process was just a display of my attempt to educate myself on subjects I obstinately refused to learn during my wasted youth

But what holds the most interest in this philosophical incident has nothing to do with formal logic or pure mathematics. Rather it is Wittgenstein's 'relationship' and intellectual battle with Turing. This relationship is a small aspect of Wittgenstein's views of mathematics yet it is always mentioned by those who write about this subject. Turing was Wittgenstein's student in a class during the 1930s at a time when Turing was emerging as one of the great mathematicians of our time. The arguments between teacher Wittgenstein and student Turing, Wittgenstein's singular passion to get Turing to 'see' how mathematics works according to Wittgensteinian games on the intellectual level and pragmatic adjustments on the practical level, had very little to do with the actual arguments and more to do with a certain kind of experience of living. It was an experience of a failed friendship that could never speak its name. I am not saying that there was anything sexual in their relationship but rather that 'friendship' itself was a forbidden territory between the two and this fact of failure to communicate, both the need for friendship and the necessity of its rejection, was dangerous. It was also a fuel for the intellecual tug of war over mathematics. At this point in philosophical and mathematical history both Wittgenstein's theories and Turing's rejection of those theories were a mirror of the failed and frightening friendship between a fierce and abstract father who wished to bring his son out into the elements, and a lost son who wished never to emerge from the labyrith that his teacher's theories sought to destroy. The reception of the debate between Wittgenstein and Turing has been a mere emblem of the relationship between these two thinkers. The very structrue of the arguments have been misunderstood ever since, to the detriment of the fierce father and the triumph of the tragically lost son, because of the commentators inability to see the logic of the relationship. Most commentators prefer to be lost with Turing or to build an idol out of the head of Wittgenstein. They do not see the actual arguments, because their unadmitted fascination with the gossp of the Oedipal family romance of philosophy has blinded them to what is real.

From the origins of philosophy until today, to some small extent, gossip has driven important aspects of philosophy. There were very few philosophers who were exempt from this (perhaps Kant) and one cannot read about how philosopher's developed their ideas against what they heard 'about' other philosophers without realizing that simple gossip influenced their world views. I am not only talking about the personal relations between philosophers but also the way philosophers talk about themselves and make other philosophers the object of gossip.

This first occurred to me while reading the book "The Frenzy of Renown" but recently while writing about the Sartre/Camus dispute I began to think that most of what we care about in philosophy is a form of gossip. We also care about the 'issues' but some how they are only important when put next to the lived-experience of what philosophers do and how they think about each other. Then later while studying Althusser and the post-structuralists it seemed to me that all that is left of interest in what they have to say is gossip. Now with Wittgenstein and his relation to mathematicians, it occurred to me that in certain intellectual cultures gossip can be a major factor in philosophical contention. But not only is it a factor in how and why philosophers' argue but it is also a factor in how and why they differentiate their arguments. I am sure this was as true of the presocratics and of the post-platonic philosophy in ancient Greece as it was for Wittgenstein or Sartre/Camus.

How one would write an essay on the motivation of gossip in philosophical thought I do not know. If anyone has any thoughts please tell me.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
6 Feb 2005
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Feb. 7th, 2005 @ 02:20 pm

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