What It is Like to Be a Philosopher: Simon Critchley

The APA blog is working with Cliff Sosis of What is it Like to Be a Philosopher? in publishing advance excerpts from Cliff’s long-form interviews with philosophers.

The following is an edited excerpt from the forthcoming interview with Simon Critchley which will be released in full next week.

When and why exactly did you decide to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy?

Towards the end of my third year at Essex, I decided to apply to the British Academy for a PhD grant. At that point, you didn’t need to do an MA. My devious plan was to get the money and then go and live in the South of France with my girlfriend and never come back. The plan worked. I got a first class honours degree, which was hard to get back then, I got money for a PhD and we left to go and live in Nice.

What was the dissertation on?

My plan was to write a dissertation on the use of transcendental argumentation in Derrida, with lots of Kant and Husserl. But then things changed. I learned French. I began to write everything in French and learned to do serious research and take notes. Taking good notes is the most important part of learning, I think. I had an extremely kind teacher in Nice called Dominique Janicaud, who was a big influence. He got me to write an M.Phil thesis on Heidegger and Carnap, which was really important as a learning experience. It was 200 pages in French. Ugh!

Describe Janicaud.

Janicaud was a scholar of Hegel and Heidegger, but – unusually for French Heideggerians – he was hugely interested in questions of the nature of rationality, the philosophy of science and the link between the latter and technology. He got me reading a lot of Popper, but also Whitehead. He also wrote and thought very clearly and was a very kind man. I have tried to write about his work in different places and made sure that his last book, which was an introduction to philosophy written for his daughter Sophie, was translated into English.

What was the jist of the Heidegger/Carnap thesis? Stand by it today?

Yes, I do. A version of argument found its way into Chapter 6 of my VSI to Continental Philosophy. Basically, my question is the status of the overcoming of metaphysics in logical positivism, especially early Carnap, and how Heidegger’s work can be seen as persistent polemic with Carnap or what Heidegger calls ‘Logistik’. I set out Heidegger’s and Carnap’s positions as clearly as I could, and then tried to use Wittgenstein’s work as a mediating third term between that opposition. The thesis ended up being a critique of both Heidegger and Carnap, and I see this – together with philosophers like Michael Friedman – debate as the key event in the parting of the ways between philosophical traditions in the 20th Century. In order to understand that division between tradition, you have to understand the Heidegger Carnap debate

How would you describe the 80’s in general?

For those who are younger, it is difficult to understand how much my generation were completely certain that a nuclear war would break out and that the UK – or Airstrip One, as Orwell called it – would be the first country to be fried. For me, there is one word that captures the 1980s: darkness. I just remember everything being dark, and cold and not having enough money. But I did get an education.

Why on earth did you leave Nice?

I did my BA, M.Phil and PhD in 6 years, I think. I don’t know how I did it. but I worked really hard at writing and using the mediation of French was incredibly useful in honing my ability to write clearly in English. I ended up with an academic job at 28, first at Cardiff and then back at Essex. I was paid to think. It is an immense privilege that I never take for granted. I hate academics who moan all the time. Having an academic position is an extraordinary luxury.

I was very determined to try and do good work. That’s all.

I would not have felt at home in Oxbridge and was convinced by the intellectual project we were trying to bring about at Essex, which led to journals like The European Journal of Philosophy. I was also politically and personally very close to Ernesto Laclau, who was a big influence on my work and there was a fascinating school of discourse analysis at Essex. He was terrific fun and I learned a lot from him, about how to think theoretically or systematically about social and political questions in a way that was sensitive to empirical research. He was also just interesting to be around. We used to fly to places like Poland and give talks together, drink whiskey and talk to the strangest people. I miss him very much. As I miss all my mentors.

This was when you started getting back into Derrida, right?

I read Derrida from my second-year undergrad and became deeply preoccupied with his work. For me, it felt like the real philosophical avant-garde and I wanted to understand what he was doing and argue that it was motivated by an ethical intention, provided that ethics is understood in the sense given to that word by Emmanuel Levinas.

What is ethics “in the sense given to that word by Emmanuel Levinas”?

Ethics is the name that Levinas gives to the relation of infinite responsibility to the other person. This moral personalism is the core of ethics for Levinas, and is not captured by any of the dominant moral theories of deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. In terms of moral theory, Levinas is closest to Kant’s second version of the categorical imperative, respect for persons, but Levinas is much less of a rationalist than Kant.

Got it, so what’s going on in Derrida, ethically?

My claim is that Levinas’s concern with the other is at the heart of Derrida’s entire philosophical enterprise. There is a duty to the other at the core of deconstruction, which is its undeconstructable basis; this is what Derrida calls ‘justice’.

Does working on Derrida pose unique philosophical challenges?

Not really, as long as you are prepared to read a lot of his work and understand the primary texts he is working from.

Among analytic philosophers, he is notorious!

I know. I find it all rather sad and stems from ignorance of his texts and the tradition from which they emerge and with which they engage.

Tried to get into Derrida as an undergrad, but it seemed like a lot of word play. Couldn’t get a handle on the substance.

It helps if you read French. It helps a lot. And you have to understand Heidegger, particularly Heidegger’s later work on the history of being before understanding what he is trying to do. And Hegel in the French context and Husserl and the debates around Saussurean linguistics, and Blanchot and 20th Century French literature. OK you need to know a lot.

That said, I’m sure I misunderstood it as I misunderstood, and misunderstand, many things!

Don’t we all, darling?

Truth. How would you sell Derrida to a skeptic or explain Derrida to an undergrad?

I wouldn’t try to sell him. Philosophy is not retail. And it is important to understand that Derrida was not a skeptic, but someone trying to understand the formal logic and philosophical systems and to show how those systems, at the maximum point of their coherence become incoherent and contradict themselves. And he did this by simply reading carefully. For me, Derrida was first and foremost a reader of texts.

So it seems like there’s a tension between the idea that understanding continental philosophy requires a ton of study even for analytic philosophers like me to understand—like I need to read it in French and be familiar with 20^th century French literature—and that it is for working class people…is that tension illusory?

It’s illusory and completely misunderstands the deep auto-didactic traditions of working-class life that have been well-documented, especially in the 19th Century. I remember Arthur Scargill, former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, the most powerful union in the UK at the time, talking about his father coming back from the pits every day, washing his hands and reading the dictionary. The ruling class has always been stupid. Education in areas like continental philosophy, political theory, economics, and literature is a weapon to use against them.

How did philosophical study change you, overall, as a person?

Philosophical study provided a focus for my basic existential anxiety and cleared my mind. Once I had realized that I wasn’t going to be a rock star (ha ha) or a great poet (ho ho), I devoted myself to reading, making notes (the most important thing one can do – it sounds silly. But it’s so important, particularly as many of the texts I was working with were not translated) and then writing. I guess I was a little calmer in the early 90s. But I went fast, maybe too fast, but I was allowed to develop quickly in a kind of greenhouse atmosphere at Essex where experimentation was encouraged, and the standard felt high. I felt constantly unable to perform at the level that was expected for me for around a decade. And when I felt comfortable, I did everything I could to leave for a new challenge. It took a while and I nearly went to Notre Dame (which was a deeply impressive place. I am a devotee of Alasdair MacIntyre), but then I went to New School. When I got there, surrounded by some amazing minds, I had to really raise my game.

You see, it surprises me that you are fan of MacIntyre. What’s the appeal, for you?

His historical sensibility, his sense of the problem of nihilism, his marginal and indeed working-class status with regard to mainstream analytic philosophy, even his Catholicism. There are two paths through philosophical modernity: Aristotle or Nietzsche. One has to choose. He chose Aristotle. I choose Nietzsche. But maybe he’s right.

I can see that. Team Nietzsche, over here. What philosophical projects were you contemplating?

Thanks to a man called Stephan Chambers, I got a contract with Blackwell for my first book, The Ethics of Deconstruction, which came out in 1992, around the time of the Derrida affair in the UK, when he was initially denied an honorary doctorate at Cambridge. Stories about deconstruction as value-free nihilism were on the front page of newspapers. And then my book came out, arguing that there was an ethical demand in Derrida’s work and it got some attention. Then I was clear that I wanted to write something completely different, both more ambitious and weirder. That became Very Little…Almost Nothing.

So, after your kid, and your first book, you wrote “Very Little…Almost Nothing”… the thesis?

I begin from the problem of religious disappointment, namely what might count as a meaning to life in the absence of any transcendent source of meaning, like God. This leads me to work through the history of the concept of nihilism, which I see as the central philosophical problem of modernity. I reject the Heideggeriean or Hegelian view that an affirmation of finitude can redeem the meaning of life. Instead, I argue that the ultimate mark of human finitude is that we cannot find meaning for the finite, which leaves us open and dependent creatures. Rather, an adequate response to nihilism consists in seeing meaninglessness as a task or achievement, what I call the achievement of the ordinary or the everyday.  I develop this through readings of Blanchot, Cavell, German Romanticism, Wallace Stevens, and especially Samuel Beckett, whose work I consider to be of supreme philosophical importance.

Love it. And what were you doing for fun?

I went to the pub, I listened to the Smiths a lot, I watched and read a lot of comedy (which I still do), I was still a rather useless political activist for the Labour Party (until the early 90s and a series of crushing general election defeats), and I began the pointless activity of going to conferences and traveling too much. Something I try not to do any more, as it is a waste of time.

Relationship between comedy and philosophy?

I wrote a book on humour that deals with that. It is very, very funny.

haha so humble! What’s the premise of the book?

I argue that humour is philosophy in practice.

Did the world get a little brighter as you closed in on the 90’s?

I cleared my throat and found my voice and doors began to open. But I left some things and people behind which I regret very much.

How’d you get involved with NYTimes and the Stone?

I wrote something called The Book of Dead Philosophers, which became an NYT bestseller in 2009, I think. Anyhow, the book got around a bit and came to the attention of David Shipley who was running NYT opinion at the time. He asked me to write an on-ep, which I did and it came out of April Fool’s day 2009, which was appropriate. he then put me in touch with an editor working with him called Peter Catapano and we became good friends and thick as thieves. I wrote a number of things for Peter, which did well and then we were having a beer, Guinness I recall, in a bar on Smith Street in Brooklyn and had the idea for a philosophy column. That was early 2010. at that time, the online edition of the NYT didn’t matter nearly as much as the print edition and we were given great freedom and Peter and I work together very well. So, we launch the column with a piece called ‘What Is a Philosopher?‘, which was actually about the famous digression in Plato’s Theaetetus. it caused quite a stir and we realized that we were onto something quite big.

When the newspaper began to move more and more online, we already had an audience, indeed a community of readers and knew the medium well, so we were able to survive in a very tough media environment. I am in contact with Peter every day and read submissions all the time. Most of them are bad, but every now and then you find a gem, a new voice, and that’s really exciting. I’m very proud of the stone and the work that Peter and I have done. We have done our best to make philosophy accessible and jargon free without dumbing it down. I took a break from writing for the NYT for a year or so, but I am now writing a series of essays now called ‘Athens in Pieces’ and have been living in Athens for the last two months, which has been terrific fun to write, and a lot of hard work based on careful research. The point is to make it look easy. But it is not easy.

Any other interesting projects in the works right now?

A big new book on tragedy coming out in a few weeks, which is a statement, I hope, and an internal critique of the very enterprise of philosophical thinking through a return the Greek drama. After that, I don’t know. I never really know what I will do next.

You get to ask an omniscient being one question…shoot!

I have met thousands of omniscient beings, or beings who think they are omniscient in academia over the years. There is no point asking them anything.

Thanks for your time, Simon.

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]

This interview has been edited for length. The full interview will be available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?  

You can get early access to the interview and help support the project here.