This series invites seasoned philosophers to share critical reflections on emergent and institutionalized shapes of and encounters within philosophy. The series collects experience-based explorations of philosophy’s personal, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that will also help young academics and students navigate philosophy today.
The following is an edited extract from the introduction to a book on philosophy, Coming Round: Philosophy in the Fullness of Time, that the author, Dr. Brian Klug, is currently writing.
‘What is philosophy?’ If there is a beacon that, like a jack-o’-lantern or ignis fatuus, has lit my way down several decades of reading and writing, as well as teaching in university departments, it is this simple-sounding question. It is my leading question. While the question is easy to pose, I find it difficult to clarify its point and to explain the pull it exerts on me. But this is part of the pull: its elusiveness and yet ubiquitousness. ‘What is it about philosophy such that I keep coming back to this question?’ That is one way to paraphrase the question. ‘When is writing philosophical?’ That is another; which is as much as to say that this very writing too is in question to itself. Does it count as philosophy? Does it even approach it?
Whatever else, the word ‘philosophy’ stands for a tradition of thought and enquiry, a literature and practice that looks back (or fails to look back) to Socrates, the gabbing protagonist of Plato’s dialogues. (There is an earlier period, of course, but significantly we call it Presocratic, as though Socrates were the hinge on which the tradition turns.) Within these dialogues, Socrates frequents the market square (Euthyphro), pops up at a drinking party (Symposium), or walks with his friend in the countryside (Phaedrus), or speaks at his trial (Apology), or awaits execution in his prison cell (Phaedo); but never does he appear in a seminar room, giving a paper, nor in a study, writing one, nor in a lecture hall, holding forth on his area of expertise; for he has none. In short, he is not an academic figure: a scholar or a learned professor. He has no title—except the one he bestows upon himself: philosopher. He insists that he has nothing to teach: he is, quite literally, a professor of ignorance. If anything, he is the antithesis of an academic. Yet Plato makes him the presiding spirit of the Academy, the original university. (You could call this ‘Platonic irony’.) It seems like a contradiction. It is certainly a paradox, one that is worthy of Socrates himself.
Academic philosophy begins with this conundrum, which Plato bequeaths to posterity, throwing down the gauntlet. Here is how I see it. The figure of Socrates, the one inscribed in Plato’s dialogues, dwells forever at the threshold of the department, outside the university, perpetually wearing the smile of a satyr (the musical satyr Marsyas, whom Alcibiades says he resembles), never crossing over into academia, always remaining in the world outside. Philosophy begins and ends with this figure. That is to say, it has to keep finding a way back to Socrates, whom it keeps losing, as though it keeps forgetting how to begin, or how to derive itself from its own source. (The history of ‘western’ philosophy is largely the history of losing the figure of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, and there is more than one way to lose him.) On this reckoning, the key problem of philosophy is just this: How to read Plato in the light of his paradox? This problem—and the repeated loss of it in the tradition—haunts my work; it is the lead given by my leading question: ‘What is philosophy?’ This motion—from academia to Socrates—is the formula for all my thinking, its synthetic a priori form. All of which amounts to this: ‘academic philosophy’ is a contradiction in terms.
This certainly wasn’t how it struck me at first. I remember how, as a teenager at school, I held in my hands a university prospectus, thrilled by the description of the philosophy curriculum. It was full of alluring words, words that seemed intrinsically deep, words into which I wanted to cast my line to fish for wisdom: ‘metaphysics,’ ‘epistemology,’ ‘logic,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘aesthetics,’ ‘mind.’ Such a heady prospect! Here, I thought, is where I can pursue my burning questions, which, like acne, broke out unbidden: ultimate or fundamental questions, questions about the existence of God, the nature of reality, of self, of time, of truth, of good and evil, and the like. And yet, when I enrolled for a philosophy degree, I had mixed feelings, for I did not come bereft, like a clean sheet or a blank slate. There was something else, something aside from the thirst for wisdom: amorphous thoughts, grey shapes that swam below the surface—not thoughts exactly but more like desires wanting to become thoughts. I can’t explain this clearly but I felt them pressing on my chest, as though they would not let me rest until the day when, like a chorus of whales, they would rise to the surface and break into song or turn into birds: as though one day I’d have something to say. I was fearful on behalf of my nascent thoughts and worried that with formal education they would die before their time. Confiding in my notes, I saw a prospect of “crumbling decay and the birth of a dry learnedness.” This was on the one hand. On the other hand, I welcomed the opportunity to throw in my lot with like-minded people who, like me, were bitten by the bug. In any event, my qualms did not keep me from stepping inside the four walls of a philosophy department; and, in a manner of speaking, I am still there.
I refer to ‘like-minded people.’ I thought of it this way because I did not anticipate the extent to which the department could be a lonely place to pursue philosophy—lonely because so much of what went on seemed devoid of the sense of urgency that had brought me there. Soon I found myself having to study stodgy old articles in stuffy professional journals on such questions as these: ‘Is existence a predicate?’, ‘Are names disguised descriptions?’ If I found the articles arid, it was not on account of their abstractness per se, but because their sentences seemed to be in a state of stasis. I failed to see any agonizing over anything—without which I wondered what on earth would possess anyone to write them. (‘Was this philosophy?’, I wondered.)
Furthermore, I didn’t know how to take them. That is to say, over and again, in the course of my formal education in philosophy, I was befuddled: I couldn’t tell what was going on. There, in front of me, were pages covered with printed words in my mother tongue, and yet these words didn’t seem to take. It wasn’t so much the isolated proposition that mystified me as the article or paper as a whole. I had the same sort of experience in seminars, where other people would take contrary positions and thrash it out, while I sat there, mute and subdued, unable to see what, if anything, was at stake in these battles of wits. I felt like an ignorant bystander. Or a dope.
For some time I led a kind of intellectual double life, a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence that split off the department from philosophy. By day (so to speak) I was Jekyll, playing according to the rules of the game (as far as I could make them out) in the department. At night (as it were) I became Hyde, furtively following lines of thought whose vitality owed less to the syllabus than to the stimulus of events in my life—including my life in the department. As Jekyll, I dutifully wrote essays for tutorials. As Hyde, I hoarded notes that I wrote in private—notes that would not have passed muster in the department. Gradually, however, this state of affairs changed: the partition between my official and unofficial thinking was breached as I discovered certain philosophical works that reached me at last. Reading them, I no longer felt as if I were a stranger in a strange land. But while this made a welcome change, the fact was oddly unsatisfying, for I couldn’t put my finger on what it was about the works in question that made the difference. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is a case in point. I could tell that something—not to say everything—is at stake in its pages, and there were passages that definitely resonated with me. But I did not know what to make of it as a whole, partly on account of the unfamiliar jargon. Words like ‘nihilate,’ ‘interiorize,’ ‘being-in-itself,’ ‘being-for-itself’: was this the language of the love of wisdom or mere humbug? So, in a sense, I was no better off than before reading this text. Either way, whether a philosophical text left me cold or struck some muffled chord, I wound up feeling baffled: I couldn’t come to grips with it. I was at a loss to know, in the final analysis, just what to say.
My bafflement led to a subtle shift in my focus. When I first approached philosophy, I was seeking wisdom. Now what I sought was philosophy itself. I had a new set of burning questions. Philosophy: what is it? Where is it to be found and when do we lose it? If philosophia means ‘love’ (philo) of ‘wisdom’ (sophia), then what does the love that defines it consist in? When and why does this love lapse into indifference or even turn surreptitiously into its opposite: hatred of wisdom masquerading as philosophy? Wisdom: what’s that? Furthermore, my experience with reading philosophy was that certain works bring thinking to life while others kill it. How come? How is it that some works possess this power while others do not? I was also haunted by a cruel remark of Kierkegaard’s: “At every step philosophy sloughs a skin into which creep its worthless hangers-on” (Journals of Kierkegaard, 53). This struck me as true, but how do you tell the discarded skin from the living flesh? “Who are the true philosophers?” the young Glaucon asks Socrates in the Republic. “Those with a passion to see the truth,” is Socrates’ irritating reply, for it sounds like a truism. “Certainly. Right,” acknowledges Glaucon, then adding (with a trace of impatience, as I hear him): “But how do you mean?” (Republic, Book V, 475e). (emphasis added). Exactly. Glaucon’s question became my question—but with this difference: over two thousand years have intervened.
Where do the answers to these questions lie? I embarked on a new project: tracing works of philosophy to source by reference to other works within the philosophical tradition on which they drew or to which they reacted. But invariably the sources themselves turned out to be no less opaque than the works they spawned. I kept wanting to ask, with respect to a given textual source: “What lies behind this?” and “What are the sources upon which it is drawing or to which it is responding?”
The trail of clues led further and further back into philosophy’s past, all the way back to the baseline of Plato’s dialogues and beyond; back to the earliest fragments of ancient Greek philosophy, philosophy’s primordial era, long before Socrates confronted the Athenians in the fully-fledged dialogues of Plato; the period when Pythagoras coined the word ‘philosophy’ (possibly) and the solitary Heraclitus asseverated that the path that leads up leads down. I was hoping that the path I had taken down into the past would take me back up to the present day. Rather like the angels on Jacob’s ladder, I ascended and descended in time, going from rung to rung, picking up cues as I went along. But on none of my excursions into the past did I gain the firm foothold I was seeking. Then, what exactly was I seeking? Although I did not (and could not) formulate it at the time, it seems to me now that I imagined it thus: at some point, I would reach bedrock—basic texts, hard nuggets of meaning lying around like natural stone, the self-evident foundations on which all subsequent works of philosophy are built. But there was no bedrock, no hard nuggets, just a mess of tiny rivulets of thought that slipped through my fingers. But if my project was a failure, this very failure was a vital discovery that no work of philosophy can rest secure on the pedestal of a tradition, as there is no such pedestal or base or support—no self-evident foundations— which is terrifying but also strangely liberating. For, if no work can rest secure, then nor can any work of yours. You must venture to speak. In philosophy, if you are ever to have a voice, you must eventually muster the courage to turn and face and, with your back to the wall, say something.
When you approach philosophy, where does it take you? Socrates tells Euthyphro: “The lover must follow the beloved wherever the latter might lead” (Euthyphro 14c). From the outset, I was drawn to philosophy like a moth to a candle. Or perhaps a donkey to a carrot dangling in front of its nose, for I have followed it wherever it has led—from pillar to post, from project to project. It continues to lead me up the garden path. I was never entirely in the department and I have never completely left it. In a certain sense, I remain in it in order to find my way out—not via the door by which I entered, for I closed that door behind me, but by pursuing the carrot dangling in front of my nose. Where does philosophy lead? Back to life, back to the world, back to the fray of the market square where, bang in the middle, the singular figure of Socrates stands out against the crowd, leading the high and mighty on a merry dance, running rings round them, to the delight of the Athenian youth, of whom, in a way, he is one even though he is seventy and should know better.
I spot him quizzing Euthyphro, the self-proclaimed expert on piety, probing his pretension to be wise, unmasking him (or letting him unmask himself). Above the din of the stall-keepers selling their wares, the voice of Socrates is as clear as a bell. “So we must investigate again from the beginning what piety is” (Euthyphro 15c). (Da capo, Euthyphro! Da capo!) It is Euthyphro’s cue to leave. “Some other time,” he says, “for I am in a hurry” (15e), as though there was ever another time than now. Gathering up his toga, Euthyphro toddles off (presto), bumping into a donkey in his haste and prodding it with his thumb, causing the “great and noble” (Apology 30e) beast to bawl like a baby: hee haw, hee haw, hee haw. I find myself chuckling at the resultant brouhaha in the market. Socrates does too, our mingled peals of laughter ringing in my ears. Suddenly, I notice that he is crossing the square in my direction, his enigmatic smile sending shivers down my spine. I know I am in for a grilling. Nonetheless, I take my courage in my hands. Girding my loins, gritting my teeth, and swallowing hard, I approach him as he approaches me.
Brian Klug
Brian Klug is Honorary Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, Oxford, Emeritus Fellow of the Philosophy Facultyof theUniversity of Oxford,Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study ofJewish/non-Jewish Relationsat theUniversity of Southampton,and Fellow of the College of Arts & SciencesatSt Xavier University, Chicago.He was formerly Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford.His books includeBeing Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life(2011)and Children as Equals: Exploring the Rights of the Child(co-editor, 2002).Recent chapters inedited volumesinclude ‘Defining Antisemitism: What is the Point?’ inAntisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition(forthcoming, 2023) and‘Speaking of God: Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Paradox of Religious Experience’, inReligious Experience Revisited: Expressing the Inexpressible?(2016).
