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+--- Thread: When Philosophy Lost Its Way (/thread-1892.html)
When Philosophy Lost Its Way - C C - Jan 20, 2016
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/11/when-philosophy-lost-its-way/#more-158895
EXCERPT: [...] in the late 19th century. This institutionalization of philosophy made it into a discipline that could be seriously pursued only in an academic setting. This fact represents one of the enduring failures of contemporary philosophy.
Take this simple detail: Before its migration to the university, philosophy had never had a central home. Philosophers could be found anywhere [...] Against the inclinations of Socrates, philosophers became experts like other disciplinary specialists. This occurred even as they taught their students the virtues of Socratic wisdom, which highlights the role of the philosopher as the non-expert, the questioner, the gadfly.
[...] The second event was the placing of philosophy as one more discipline alongside these sciences within the modern research university. A result was that philosophy, previously the queen of the disciplines, was displaced, as the natural and social sciences divided the world between them....
RE: When Philosophy Lost Its Way - Magical Realist - Jan 22, 2016
Quote:Our claim, then, can be put simply: Philosophy should never have been purified. Rather than being seen as a problem, “dirty hands” should have been understood as the native condition of philosophic thought — present everywhere, often interstitial, essentially interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. Philosophy is a mangle. The philosopher’s hands were never clean and were never meant to be.
I deplore the antisceptic sterility academia reduces philosophy to. That's why I got into existentialism. Philosophy was no longer speaking to the condition of the common man, questioning freedom and power and truth as it was always meant to. In the journals of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein and Camus I gleaned from the consciences of soul-searching men the truth that had been lost. Now when I read a modern academic treatise today in philosophy I just scratch my head and wonder--how did it ever become so abstract and complicated? How did philosophy quit being about wonder and anarchy and doin the right thing and instead about conformity to a long line of peer-reviewed overintellectualized chessmatches? Who asks the real questions anymore? The ones that used to bring down governments and churches and exposed us to the primal wildness of our condition. Philosophy SHOULD be dirty. It should wreak of blood and sweat and sex. It is the human encountering itself anew in the desolation of its absurd existence.
“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manner and morals of mankind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson