kingstorming
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who, upon hearing that a room full of literary critics has exploded in a ball of flame and destruction and burnt paper, would say how awful it is, etc.; and there are those who would laugh. I would say that analytic philosophers would, on the whole, fall into the latter camp (well, so long as Frederick Crews was assured to be safe and sound). Granted, literary criticism is a wonderful field that is full of interesting insights; but it is only that way so long as it is also reviled. For once you take fiction seriously as fiction, it becomes harder and harder to suspend disbelief. The other option is to take fiction seriously as reality, in which case you end up being a Barthesian textual-idealist (i.e., a douchebag). It’s really quite the puzzle for serious people.
With that in mind, I recently attended a lecture by Mark Kingwell (University of Toronto), who mostly does social philosophy. His talk was from his upcoming book, “Opening Gambits”. The topic of the lecture was what we do in philosophy: what philosophy is about, what it can accomplish, and how we might fruitfully understand it as a kind of art. (The talk itself was too artful and raconteurish for me to understand as a straight-up argument. I guess that makes for an interesting style, but it also makes me 100% certain that something or other was lost in translation.) He had three central claims, at least as I can gather: that a central part of philosophical endeavor is, or ought to be, playfulness; an amusing aside about the four ways to understand the notion of philosophical relevance; and (here my memory is fuzzy) that philosophical problems presuppose the possibility of solutions, and he casts doubt on the reality of problems.
The vision that Kingwell has in mind for philosophy, summarized in a word, is “play”. Philosophers are people who play with ideas. That’s their task. Well, this is good news, so long as we already suppose that philosophy is fiction. And if philosophy really is like art, then it would be a good idea. For I suppose that, when trying to engage in a cooperative exchange with other people, charity demands a feeling for play and playfulness. That’s the only way to get the most out of our interactions with others; we suspend our own disbeliefs so that it doesn’t get in the way of understanding somebody’s else’s beliefs.
Sadly, one trouble, as was remarked by one questioner (and given a disappointing ad hoc denial by Kingwell), is that it isn’t clear how moral dilemmas get solved when all we have is play. Philosophy involves judgment, and judgment cannot exist without the very serious possibility of a sense of closure. Kingwell gives us opening gambits, but no closing ones. Frankly, it is as if Kingwell’s vision of philosophy is of one great big brainstorming session.
Oh, fair enough, I guess. So with no further ado, here is the next biggest philosopher:
Oh, why do have three descending photos of Kingwell lined up like that. It has a kind of eerie effect.
So, Kingwell is basically something of a late-Wittgensteinian, it would seem, in the sense that he dismisses all philosophical problems as trivial and/or artistic. We have invented them rather than discovered them, etc… The difference is that he, like most of the po-po-po literary crits and unlike Wittgenstein, thinks of philosophical puzzles and language games as one huge discourse of purely aesthetic and entertainment value. Philosophy is an art and art should be pursued for the sake of art and hedonic pleasure (social diversion? or whatever). Or have I misunderstood the old boy?
Anyway, it seems to be the usual stuff from that “school” or academic tradition.
These people never seem incapable of making some fundamental distinctions in their attempts to reduce all of life to “narrative structures” and poetry. Fictional works make truth claims about the external world usually implicitly or as some sort of necessary background to the elaboration of fantastic flights of imagination that use the the tools of rhetoric and style as ends in themselves.. Philosophical works make explicit, occasionally verifiable, truth claims about the external world using the tools of language, such as rhetoric and style, as a necessary means to achieve their ends.
I would say that you had him right, except that he resists the implication that ethics is just a diversion. It’s not clear, though, how it is that he can have it both ways. Or it’s not clear to me, anyway.
I don’t think he’s a textual-idealist, or at least I don’t believe there was anything in the talk that would suggest that he was. But, while we’re on the subject, one does have to wonder how divergent some views in the analytic and empirical traditions are from this position. For Berkeley, everything was a matter of interpretation: we read the world, just as we read books. For Davidson, thought, world, and talk are epistemically codependent, which makes one wonder how we can or why we do have a distinction between them at all. (Or at least, it raises the question of where the distinction comes from. Perhaps you have an answer!) For Russell — well, Russell at a certain point, anyway — historical figures are known by description only. This makes us wonder what reality they have apart from the manner in which we acquired knowledge of them. I worry that people fetishize language too much.