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in The Catholic Herald, October 24, 2014
Poseurs, frauds and pseuds have taken over philosophy
The elegant writers of old are gone, says Patrick West. Now philosophy is full of exhibitionist gobbledygook
Philosophy at 3:AM
by Richard Marshall
OUP, £20
What’s
the point of philosophers these days? Not much, if you ask your average
lay person or journalist. Philosophy, most of us would say, has become
arcane, obscure, too technical and trivial. Such a perception was made
manifest during the notorious Alan Sokal hoax of 1996, when the
scientist concocted an essay of pure gibberish and successfully
submitted it to an academic journal. It seemed to confirm the view that
modern philosophy has become obscurantist, and a repository for frauds
and pseuds.
It’s this impression that Philosophy at 3:AM seeks
both to explain and to redress. Based on the cultural/literary website
3ammagazine.com, it’s a collection of question-and-answer interviews
with 25 contemporary philosophers of all hues, from metaphysicians and
logicians to ethicists and linguists.
The cry that “philosophy
has become too obscure” is akin to “the young are badly behaved” or
“our language is becoming debased” – it’s ancient and eternal. Sure,
modern analytical philosophy can seem overly technical, and the
continental variety can veer into exhibitionist gobbledygook. This
appears especially so when you compare both schools to the beautiful
literary philosophy of yore: Camus, Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau.
But
there has always been dry, technical philosophy: Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason, Hume’s Treatise, Aristotle, Aquinas and Hegel. As the
America metaphysician Eric T Olson argues here: “Philosophy is hard.
That’s its nature. No one would expect serious works of physics or
mathematics or economics (as opposed to popularisations) to be
immediately accessible to intelligent readers with no training in the
subject. Why should philosophy be any different?” Philosophy
at 3:AM thus emerges less as a book on philosophy than one about it. And
here lies a problem – or perhaps the problem.
I’m not sure a
lay reader would want to read a book in which philosophers talk about
their own discipline. Such navel-gazing only seems to reinforce the
perception that philosophers are out-of-touch. This collection is thus a
symptom of the problem it’s trying to address.
The use of the
impersonal female pronoun from the outset is a case a point. When
speaking hypothetically, I would prefer an alternating “he” or “she”, or
even a “s/he”, to a question-raising, flow-stopping impersonal “she”
and “her”. Keep it simple: the first rule of good writing. There is also
the name-dropping. “Philosophical enquiry,” asks one philosopher, “is
that the sort of thing Aristotle and Hume were doing, or the sort of
thing that Kripke and Gettier were doing?” The last two are hardly
household names. Add to this, the often sycophantic tone of the
interviewer: “Your ideas blow away many so-called radicals such as
Foucault, and your conclusions, couched in very cool, precise language,
belie their corrosive impact...” Yuk!
It’s a pity, because if
you persevere, there is much interesting matter here. Patricia
Churchland suggests that moral behaviour preceded religion by 200,000
years and religions evolve into monotheism – yet Confucians, Buddhists
and Taoists continue to live without deities.
While Gary
Gutting rightly derides Derrida’s writing as needlessly obscure and
repetitive, he defends him as a serious and valuable philosopher. The
meaning of words are forever unstable, and we shouldn’t be afraid to
accept this. Brian Leiter dismisses Derrida as a “poseur”, while
standing up for Foucault, who diagnosed how “individuals in the modern
era become agents of their own oppression”. To be sure, Foucault belongs
to the category of seductive literary philosopher, but it was Freud who
first truly elaborated how people internalise rules, becoming the
oppressors of themselves.
Eric
T Olson explores the Theory of Forms using the tale of Theseus, the
mythical king of Athens who builds a ship and goes to sea. He
occasionally returns to port to replace the ship’s worn pieces until
eventually every one of them has been exchanged. In the meantime, the
local museum has been collecting the cast off pieces, which it manages
to assemble just as they were when Theseus first set sail. So there are
now two ships: the repaired ship at sea and the reconstructed ship in
the museum. Which of the two is Theseus’s original ship? Olson concludes
that both are.
Michael
Lynch regrets the rejection of objective truth in modern philosophy.
“It is not just a metaphysical mistake; it is a political one,” he says,
while Graham Priest delves into motion, contradiction and paradox: “For
something to be in motion is not for it to be in one place and one
time, and another at another, but at one and the same time to both be
and not be in a place.” It can indeed be difficult to resolve place and
movement: this is why prepositions are so different and difficult in
foreign languages (in Italian you say you are “at” a city, irrespective
of whether you are going there or situated there; and you say you are
“in” a country whether you are heading or actually there).
Finally,
Eric Schwitgebel asks why professors of ethics slam doors, talk rudely
during presentations, leave behind rubbish at their seats – and why
among university libraries, textbooks on ethics are stolen more than the
average.
This is all
very interesting, but it’s also very bitty. What could have been a good
book is ruined by its presentation in a deeply unsatisfactory format.
in The Catholic Herald, October 3, 2014
The Middle Ages make us look uncivilised
We're told the medieval era was full of flat-earthers, witch-drowning and deaths by Iron Maiden. But that's pure fiction, says Patrick West
It’s customary among journalists today to describe
barbaric and senseless behaviour as “medieval”, and the reaction to
recent beheadings at the hands of Islamists in the Middle East has been
no exception. In the Times Matthew Syed applied the word to Islamic
fundamentalists’ treatment of women, while a Daily Express headline
spoke of “The chilling medieval society Isis extremists seek to impose
in Iraq”. Perhaps Pulp Fiction is to blame. In Quentin Tarantino’s 1994
film Marcellus Wallace famously exclaims: “I’m gonna get medieval on
your ass”, reinforcing the cliché of the Middle Ages as an era of
savagery. Still, today’s hacks do history no favours by repeating this
lazy and misguided stereotype.
If only Islam in the Middle
East would return to medieval values. A thousand years ago, the Muslim
world was far more civilised than Christendom, with Islamic civilisation
the torchbearer in the fields of chemistry, medicine and astronomy.
Though relatively backwards by comparison, Christian Europe was
relatively free of ISIS-style extremism and barbarism. Religious fringe
movements such the Lollards in England or the Anabaptists in Germany
were either short-lived, tolerated or expelled to the New World.
Islamic
State-style religious extremism was not a feature of the medieval era,
but rather of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. It was the
16th and 17th centuries that saw Puritanism, the Inquisition, the
massacre of Huguenots and Irish Catholics, witch-drowning, the burning
of heretics and holy wars across Europe. The Middle Ages were relatively
civilised by comparison. Indeed, medieval Canon Law stated that witches
didn’t exist.
Of course, journalists alone aren’t wholly to
blame here. We’ve all been subject to this myth of medieval barbarism
ever since the Renaissance, and Europe’s consequent desire to depict the
interregnum between the Fall of Rome and its rebirth as a dank and
brutish time.
The Victorians reaffirmed this caricature in
contradistinction to their own times (albeit with a large element of
romanticism – hence the Gothic Revival). They created the legend that it
was common belief in the Middle Ages that the world was flat. As J B
Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth, Columbus and Modern Historians
(1991) explains, the Greeks determined that the Earth was a sphere by
500 BC. Most educated European maintained this to be true thereafter. In
his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas gave the globe’s spherical nature
as a standard example of scientific truth.
While Aquinas did
ponder in his great work “whether several angels can be in the same
place at the time”, neither he nor any other medieval scholar agonised
over whether how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The first
reference to this comes in 1618 (by a Protestant). There was no taboo
on dissection in the Middle Ages (a practice imported from the Middle
East), and spices weren’t added to mask the foul taste of rotten meat:
such spices from the Orient were vastly expensive and instead the
practice of smoking, curing and salting was widespread. That
quintessentially “medieval” torture device the Iron Maiden was an
18th-century invention, the first citation of it being in 1793.
The
Church and monks in Ireland preserved knowledge of Roman civilisation.
It was the Church that helped to establish the first universities in
Bologna, Oxford and Paris. The medieval era also gave us writers that
are still read today: Boethius, Boccaccio, Dante, Petrarch and
Machiavelli.
The
Church was not the censorious tyrant of Hollywood legend. As the
historian David Linberg writes: “The late medieval scholar rarely
experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded
himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason
and observation wherever they led.” Again, it was later, darker era that
saw the Church become more intolerant: Copernicus wasn’t persecuted in
the 16th century, but Galileo, in the 17th century, was.
While
some Muslims and Christians are prone to dwell on the dogmatism and
brutality of the Crusades, it was these adventures in the Holy Land that
brought Christendom into contact with Muslim advances in science and
technology – not least with what we today call Arabic numerals. The
medieval epoch was a thoroughly outward looking one. In 986AD the
Icelandic seafarer Bjarni Herjólfsson was the first European to spot
America, while Leif Erikson was the first to set foot on it.
In
more recent times, film and television, from Braveheart to Game of
Thrones, has perpetuated the popular misunderstanding that the Middle
Ages was a time of constant fighting, bloodshed, torture and execution.
In reality, the most common forms of punishment in Europe were exile,
public humiliation and fines. When execution did take place it was
usually through hanging rather than beheading – a fate reserved only for
the nobility and rarely the public spectacle of lore. In England,
medieval civilisation also saw the institution of trial by jury.
Of
course it’s easy to swing the other way, as did G K Chesterton and
19th-century anarchists, romanticising the Middle Ages, and depicting it
is as an era of agrarian simplicity, freedom, chivalry and banquets.
Nevertheless, to brand something abhorrent as “medieval” is a historical
hangover from the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Victorian eras. Such
arrogance and lofty thinking is particularly misplaced considering the
violent world we live in today or of the horrors of the last century.
That which we abhor as uncivilised and abominable should really be
called “Baroque” – or perhaps “20th century”.
Patrick West is a columnist for spiked-online.com
in The Catholic Herald, September 12, 2014
The Iron Duke needed a little help from his friends
Patrick West on a book that shows that Britain actually had a rather minor role in the great Battle of Waterloo
Waterloo
By Gordon Corrigan
Atlantic Books, £30
A common complaint made by
First World War historians is that our perception of that conflict has
become distorted by Blackadder Goes Forth. This was the 1980s comedy
that reinforced the poets’ narrative that it was a needless and horrific
conflict conducted with great incompetence and callousness. Yet
Blackadder was equally guilty of reinforcing another stereotype: that of
the Duke of Wellington being an aloof autocrat. In Blackadder the
Third, set in the Regency, Stephen Fry interprets Arthur Wellesley as a
overbearing bully who enjoys thrashing his servants and duels with canon
(“only girls fight with swords”), and whose guiding principle for
leadership is to “shout, shout and shout again”.
We have read
and heard much about the First World War in this centenary year. No
doubt we will hear much about the Duke of Wellington – and Napoleon –
next year: the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo. So it is timely
to deflate some of the common misconceptions surrounding the Iron Duke
and the battle itself.
Far from being the bellicose boor of
Stephen Fry’s incarnation, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was
a cautious and conscientious figure, who was willing to be at one with
his troops on the field of battle. “He planned meticulously and well
understood the importance of logistics, of being able to feed, house,
tend and transport an army,” writes Gordon Corrigan in Waterloo: A New
History of the Battle and Its Armies. Wellington was a calm, methodical
leader, and it was his consequent victorious track record in Iberia that
had won him the position as head of the Anglo-Dutch army.
Corrigan
is eager to puncture another illusion: that Waterloo was essentially a
British victory. The British were actually a minority in the Anglo-Dutch
coalition of 110,000 men, which in turn was smaller than the 117,000
Prussian force. The Russians were to provide 150,000 and the Austrians
close to 300,000, but by the time both were close enough to take part
the fighting was over. Britain’s main contribution was £5m and the Royal
Navy’s blockade. And at Waterloo, were it not for the late arrival of
the Prussians under Field Marshal Blücher, Napoleon might have
triumphed.
So how did this victory come to be perceived as a
typically British affair? Hindsight and subsequent Anglo-German
relations, argues Corrigan. The year 1815 marks the start of the British
Century and the last throw of a French imperial era. Between the two
world wars of the next century, and after the second, there was little
incentive to credit the Germans with anything. Most books on Waterloo
after 1945 were allegorical. In writing of the gallant, outnumbered and
outgunned British holding the foe until the last, before defeating the
mighty dictator and thus saving the world from tyranny, they actually
spoke of a much more recent conflict.
Waterloo is not all
historiography. Far from it. It’s an old-fashioned romp, in which the
emphasis is on detail, tactics and character rather than theory or grand
narrative. The lack of primary sources will disappoint the more
rigorous reader and orthodox historian. But as this book is primarily a
yarn, it doesn’t really matter.
Inevitably,
the author compares and contrasts Napoleon and Wellington. Both were
born in the same year in peripheral parts of their nations. Both were
the product of feckless fathers and domineering mothers, and rose
through sheer ability and minimum of patronage. But here the comparisons
end. In contrast to the prudent Wellington, Bonaparte was a gambler and
opportunist who was careless with the lives of his troops.
Corrigan
doesn’t, however, cast the battle as a simple duel. Blücher emerges not
merely as a first-rate leader, but also as the most colourful of the
three commanders: “A quaffer of copious quantities of gin and brandy,
Blücher would swig coffee, munch raw onions and smoke a huge meerschaum
pipe as he rode along”.
We
later learn of Blücher and Wellington’s first encounter after victory.
With both generals on horseback, Blücher threw his arms about Wellesley
then kissed him. We also discover that only 10 per cent of British
officers had been commissioned from the ranks. The bulk of officers were
of the middle classes, educated at grammar schools and the sons of
professional men. More revealing still is the number of English and
Irish Catholics in the British Army, making up 20 per cent by the time
of Waterloo. This preponderance was due to the anti-Catholicism that had
been institutionalised in 1688.
While the ban on Catholics joining the
Army was lifted in 1741, they were still debarred from holding any
“office of profit under the crown”. But this wasn’t enforced in the
Army, as long as they didn’t make ostentatious displays of their faith.
As a consequence, the Army became one of the few outlets for a Catholic
gentlemen. This legacy continues today: in 2012 Catholics made up
slightly more than eight per cent of the population but 20 per cent of
Army officers. So much for disloyal papists.
More
sensitive readers might flinch at the passages on amputation, while
perhaps the most appalling disclosure is that riflemen deliberately
picke out drummer boys. They were deemed so important because when
shouted orders were drowned out by ambient noise signals were given by
the beat of a drum.
The
Battle of Waterloo is further demystified when we read of looters on
the field in its aftermath. Wounded men who tried to resist thieves had
their throats slit.
Corrigan’s
manner can be a bit gruff. There is a non-sequitur complaining about
the RSPCA and a breezy comment about the French soldier’s predilection
for rape sits uneasily. His use of “England” to mean Britain is
felicitous to historical usage, but it’s just plain wrong to the modern
ear. Nevertheless, Waterloo is a hugely enjoyable, illuminating and very
gory read.
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