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(review) *Changing The Subject*, by Raymond Geuss -- philosophy is dead?

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https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi...hilosophy/

EXCERPT: . . . The philosophical establishment denounced people like [Richard] Rorty and [Raymond] Geuss as relativists, bent on destroying the sacred distinction between truth and falsehood. But they defended themselves by pointing out that even if there is such a thing as an almighty final truth, it looks different from diverse points of view, and gets expressed in different words in diverse times and places. [...]

Changing the Subject is a history of philosophy in twelve thinkers. There are lucid self-contained essays on Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, Augustine, Montaigne, Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lukács, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Adorno; but Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume and Kant don’t even make it to the index. The whole performance combines polyglot philological rigour with supple intellectual sympathy, and it is all presented – as Geuss puts it – hilaritatis causa, or in a spirit of fun.

Out of his twelve philosophers, Geuss seems closest to Lucretius, who despised religion (though the word religio meant something rather different at the time), and maintained that the world has no moral purpose and is utterly indifferent to our existence. Hobbes comes almost as high in Geuss’s estimation: he invented the concept of the “state” as the locus of political sovereignty, and treated it as an “artificial construct” which pays no regard to such so-called principles as “natural rights” or “the common good”. Hegel, as Geuss reads him, was a good disciple of Hobbes because he avoided trying to “justify” the ways of the world, and he opened the way for Nietzsche’s furious attacks on self-serving ideas of “truth-telling”, “profundity” and “authenticity”. In the wake of Lucretius, Hobbes, Hegel and Niet­zsche, philosophy seems to be essentially a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by moralistic sentimentality.

[...] Geuss concludes by suggesting that philosophy is dead: vital signs gave out some forty years ago, he says...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi...hilosophy/

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https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/changing-the-su...to-adorno/

EXCERPT: . . . One question I asked myself as I was reading this book is whether Geuss thinks that Western philosophy has come to an end. The book's twelve chapters contain no explicit avowal of an end-of-philosophy thesis -- that would be too predictive for Geuss's taste -- but two aspects of his discussions suggested to me throughout that some version of this idea might be at work here. The first is that the book ends with Adorno -- whose name (not accidentally, I presume) is the most prominent word on the book's cover -- and it is natural to take his well-known account of the interdependence of myth and reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment as heralding the end of Western philosophy, at least as traditionally conceived. If Adorno marks the end of Geuss's story, then perhaps that story ends with the end of philosophy. (Although, it should be noted, the end of philosophy is proclaimed in some form by all six of the philosophers in the book's final half, suggesting that philosophy might be more robust than its own practitioners imagine.) This aspect of Geuss's book could be taken to suggest that there is something intrinsically self-undermining in the very kind of rational inquiry undertaken by Western philosophy that guarantees, when it is carried out with perfect consistency, its own demise. Something like this was maintained by Nietzsche, for example, who believed that the Christian over-valuation of truth, when adopted by philosophers, would undermine the very commitments to "pure" reason that made enterprises such as metaphysics or rationally founded ethics intelligible in the first place.

Second, there is a dim, apocalyptic mood, reminiscent of Weber, that hangs over the entire book, expressing itself in scattered references to impending "catastrophe" and "calamity," especially in the form of ecological collapse (e.g., 45, 249, 292, 301), as well as to the spirit-killing forms of totalizing bureaucratization that Geuss, echoing Adorno, refers to simply as "California" (293). ('Southern California' seems to me the more appropriate term, but this is a mere quibble.) There is even some suggestion, perhaps taken over from Heidegger, that Western philosophy itself -- more precisely, the ways in which it was shaped by Socrates's mode of formulating its concerns and mode of inquiry -- is to blame for this development: "perhaps that catastrophe is precisely Western philosophy, although the full force of that calamity did not hit Plato [or other philosophers] so much as the whole population of Europe during the subsequent 2,000 years or so" (45).

The most natural way of construing this version of the end-of-philosophy thesis is not to think of Western philosophy as internally, or rationally, self-undermining, in the sense that what makes it no longer possible is a result of consistently enacting the very commitment to the rational questioning that is constitutive of it. We could rather think of Western philosophy as having championed a distorted conception of the power and autonomy of reason that has fostered a view of the relation between human beings and the rest of nature that turns the latter into a mere instrument for human purposes. This, in turn, has produced an ecological crisis of such proportions that the preconditions, not merely of philosophy, but perhaps of life itself, are now in danger of final destruction. Geuss alludes to this possibility in his conclusion but, consistently with the book's modest tone, treats it as merely one possibility among others. For if, as he at one point suggests, philosophy sometimes arises as a response to "apparently irreconcilable . . . conflict, severe suffering, real loss, [and] experienced deprivation or weakness" (298), then our impending ecological crisis might well provide a new impetus for philosophy's renewal. Or perhaps, since philosophy presupposes a "certain minimum of optimism" sufficient to make its sort of thinking seem worthwhile (299), it might in conditions of ecological devastation simply meet its ultimate demise.

Finally, it seems worth asking, What, if anything, makes (or has made) Western philosophy valuable? Characteristically, no direct answer is given. This question becomes all the more pressing when one notes that each chapter -- except perhaps the final one, on Adorno -- ends with what appears to be a decisive critique of its philosopher's project. Perhaps, however, an indirect answer can be found by attending to an unmistakable feature of Geuss's tracing the course (and possible demise) of Western philosophy. There are books that assert the catastrophic fate of Western philosophy that have the effect of turning its readers away from it for once and for all, extinguishing in them any desire to engage positively with the ideas of the (mostly) dead white males who created and sustained that tradition. Geuss's book has precisely the opposite effect. His lively and witty but still rigorous accounts of the undertakings of some of Western philosophy's main protagonists will generate in most of its readers only a thirst for more. As I have discovered, this book makes an excellent gift for bright and curious non-philosophers who want to understand what it is that philosophers do (or have done). It is also a perfect remedy for harried professional philosophers -- there are enough of us -- who, swallowed up in the Betrieb of academia, sometimes forget why they fell in love with philosophy in the first place.

MORE: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/changing-the-su...to-adorno/
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