Oedipus and the Sphinx, c. 470 BCE Vatican Museum

One of the reasons that, back in my professorial days, I thought studying philosophy was beneficial was that a culture’s preferences and beliefs could be tracked to its underlying assumptions. A culture rests on what it thinks is true and explanatory. Philosophy has either supplied those foundational views or at least can help one to figure them out. 

So it seemed to me that the study of philosophy made it more feasible to feel at home and be effective in one’s world and time.

Preserving that goal, what do I see as the intellectual situation at the frontier of the current cultural scene? Let’s do the quick aerial survey. In France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was probably the more significant twentieth-century thinker – he was conducting an inquiry into what we can know about perception and action, not pushing a thesis – but Jean-Paul Sartre was the trend-setter. The kernel of truth in Sartre’s view was that one has a bit of freedom even in the most coercive situations and how one uses that bit defines one. Or at least it defines one for that time.

In Sartre’s successors, this germ of an insight morphed into the panoramic postmodern claim that objective factors might be bypassed entirely – clearing the way for the resistless play of interpretations and counter-interpretations. The boundaries of the arena where this seemingly limitless playfulness lived could be defined only in terms of the power relations detectable within it. So the next thing to discover was just who held the oppressive power and who was dominated by that power.

What’s been left out in this account of reality? Can we think of anything? I’ll give you a dime if you can. How about functional powers like the power of dentistry, or the power of plumbing, or cooking, or writing poetry, or chairing a committee that writes a workable constitution, or translating Sanskrit texts? Or arbitrating between factions embroiled in a useless quarrel? Or consoling a grieving friend? Or inventing a device that gives employment to many people?

Has anything else been omitted from the oppressor/oppressed story? Yes certainly, all the oppressive relations on this planet that are quite thoroughly unfair, abusive and hideous but have somehow failed to make the approved list. Plus all the problems that still need to be addressed but have somehow failed to fall under these two neat little headings. I don’t know when the word will finally get out, but all these are considerations that announce an intellectual dead end.

If I judge by the essays that win awards and get reprinted in the American Philosophical Association’s Proceedings and Addresses, philosophy in this country seems largely unscathed by the developments I’ve reported above. However, to judge by effects that leak over into The New York Review of Books and the NY Times Book Review, other disciplines in the humanities had fewer defenses and suffered seriously enough to affect the culture in sectors ranging from law to journalism to book publishing and fields in the middle. A culture of intimidation – where accusations of oppression might land on anyone – can outlast earlier rationales, giving make-work to the mediocre and the appearance of courage to the cowardly.

Insofar as feminism continues to provide a field for philosophic inquiry, my sense is that it has yet to rethink its hyper-Sartrean claim – derived from Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex – that for a woman the decisive factor was neither biology nor history nor even culture but just the decision to be a woman. That claim has failed to protect women in prison from cellmates who were convicted rapists but now identify as women, as it has failed to protect women athletes from players who used to be billed as male but can now stand opposite them on the court by making the same claim.

With regard to feminist theory, developments such as these suggest that it may well be time to go back to the drawing board.

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Where should philosophy go now? What does the frontier look like? Let me try a few forays.

(a) There must be a relation between the mechanistic view of the body and the holistic view. That relation seems largely unmapped. Acupuncture deals with the holistic view; mending fractures deals with the mechanistic view. The relation may prove unmappable, but we should at least try to identify the regions where the question of their relation arises.

(b) Many of us have had premonitions of future events, occurring either in dreams or in strong intuitions that seemed to come from outside ourselves. What would the picture of ordinary, time-bound human life look like if these apparent glimpses of the future were factored in?

(c) The philosopher A. J. Ayer, even though he was a positivist, had an experience that occurred when he’d been deemed clinically dead. The content of the experience had been such as to cast specific doubt on Ayer’s previous philosophical views. To publicize what happened in the way that he did took courage, despite the dismissal it drew – “Freddy has lost his cool” – from one friend, a well-known materialist philosopher. Instead of dismissal, suppose philosophers had pondered Ayer’s report and worked to draw out its possible implications.

Arguments that belittle, deny or explain away new data may have run out their string. Maybe it is time for philosophers to go out where, in past ages, their best work was done.

The most consequential task of philosophy is to articulate the world of thought at the frontiers –

 where what we do know

touches what we don’t yet know.

Related Content: Bad Faith at Sartre’s Cafe | Femininity – A Social Construct? | What Ayer Saw When He Was Dead