speaking of novelty

Let’s say that, instead of rating the greatest philosophers of all time, we were to rate the most original philosophers of all time.

For instance, I’d call Heidegger one of the ten greatest philosophers of all time, and probably one of the ten most original as well. But if you know a bit about Husserl and the Asutrian School, you can make pretty good sense of where Heidegger was coming form, what lineage he was drawing from and how he transformed it.

But by originality in this context I’d mean something more like an author who makes you think: “where the hell did that come from? What’s going on here?”

And of the top Western philosophers, I would probably award that prize to Bergson. At times it feels as if he came from a parallel earth, from a different history of philosophy.

True enough, no one emerges entirely in a vacuum. But Bergson is as close to a bolt from the blue as it gets in the history of Western philosophy.

different ways of being difficult

Reading Giordano Bruno again, last night and this morning, reminded me that his literary and comic talents allow him to “get away with” being a relatively hazy developer of his philosophical position.

One of the biggest laughs I ever had while reading a historian of philosophy was when a Renaissance historian lamented Bruno’s early imprisonment for the additional works it cost us, before wryly adding, “but one has to wonder if a mature system was ever in the cards.” A mature system by Bruno! It’s sort of like a Kafka biographer lamenting his early death by tuberculosis before adding “but one has to wonder if an opera was ever in the cards.” The idea of a sober, upstanding Bruno, age 65, having put his youthful follies behind him and sitting down to plodding, diligent work is quite incredible for anyone who’s read even 10 pages of biography of the man.

Bruno can be difficult to read in certain respects. But to play on Tolstoy’s famous saying about families, maybe it should be said that “lucid philosophers are all lucid in the same way, but difficult philosophers are each difficult for their own specific reasons.”

For instance, I would say that Bruno the Nolan is difficult because he doesn’t have a clear enough sense of the key principles of his system. Hegel is difficult because everything keeps flipping upside-down, and wherever you’re standing gets negated just as soon as you’ve figured out where you are. Derrida is difficult because he tries very hard to position himself beyond any definite statement about anything. Heidegger is difficult (at first) only because he’s dense. Husserl is difficult because his tone remains pedantic even when his subject matter is juicy. Aristotle is difficult because his style is too clipped (hence the old “his books are actually just his lecture notes” rumor, though count me with the party of scholars who don’t believe it). Sellars is difficult because he doesn’t write very well. Quine is difficult because he bores me and I don’t enjoy spending any more time in his company than is absolutely necessary. Bergson is difficult because about 90% of his ideas are new, when as Marshall McLuhan was told by his publisher a readable book should only be about 10% new (I’d rather an author be 90% new, of course, but it does make Bergson harder to read than the 10% new author). Whitehead is difficult because, as has been said (by Stengers, or was she just reporting it from someone else?), reading him is like whale watching– “thar she blows!”, a beautiful sentence surrounded by paragraphs of mumbling and the shuffling of papers.

Actually, I can give a better explanation of what makes Heidegger difficult. It’s not just that he’s dense, it’s that he creates too much alternate terminological apparatus for what is really a fairly simple philosophical position. It’s as if Parmenides had generated 60 or 70 pairs of terms to say “being is, and non-being is not”. I’ll admit that’s a slight exaggeration of Heidegger’s simplicity, but not by much.