a general reflection

I’ll have to restrain the impulse to turn this into a 90% Gibbon blog, because he’s even better than I remembered.

One thing that occurs to me is that Gibbon’s speed and allusiveness are things we all need more of in our intellectual lives. Both mainstream scholarship and the postmodern love of textuality have contributed to a vast overvalaution of the method of “close readings” in philosophy. Some of my colleagues brag to me that while I always go through the whole of the Hackett Plato Five Dialogues in a month, some of them will spend 4 or 5 weeks on the Meno alone. One of them generally straightens up, grins, and makes a dismissive joke about my syllabus whenever the issue arises.

One could certainly make a case for this method of teaching, but what is most interesting is that they always seem to assume that I should be the one feeling on the defensive for teaching five short dialogues (well, the Phaedo isn’t so short) in a month. Intellectual fashions rise and fall across the centuries, and we are now very much in a period that assumes that close readings of the details of a text are automatic signs of intellectual seriousness.

I disagree. First, there is the purely accidental fact in the present case that we’re talking about an introductory class. Our 17-year-old Egyptians are encountering philosophy for the first time, and I don’t much see the point in doing either Straussian or Derridean gem-cutting with them. If aliens came to earth from outer space and wanted some idea about life on earth, it would be idiotic to confine them to a “close reading” of Paris for a month while showing them nothing else on the planet. You’d want to give them an idea of the full map, and only then give them some notion of what the details of an individual city are like. Close readings are good for graduate school when training specialists, but nowhere else. Scholarship is already far too bloated with specialists on minutiae who miss the big picture.

This is not an isolated idea in my head, but fits in with my general view that expert specialization and the avoidance of error are not the essence of thinking. The essence of thinking (in philosophy, at least) is differentiating between the important and the unimportant.

Here I would repeat my assertion (Whitehead agrees) that logical errors are the most gratuitous of blunders. They can generally be corrected, and often have fewer ramifications in the rest of our thoughts than one might assume. Here again I cite Whitehead, who laments the oppression of philosophy by the mathematical-axiomatic method of thought since the 17th century. This is not how philosophy works– philosophy is about drawing our attention to ultimate generalities, and these are usually not best discovered by proceeding from a supposedly unshakeable first principle. (And Whitehead, who obviously knew a thing or two about mathematics, observes further that even mathematics is no longer so clear about its first principles.)

It is always possible to pose as ultra-serious by claiming that “Author X is so richly detailed that it is impossible to cover all of his/her works in a single volume.” Anyone who tries to sum it up will tend to look like an amateur when viewed by way of the mainstream professional credo.

Which is precisely why I was so delighted that the chance to write Heidegger Explained came my way. Not only was I forbidden to use footnotes (great rule!) and discouraged even from making quotations in accordance with the series format, I was also given the personal leeway to cover all of Heidegger’s career in a single 170-page book.

And the thing is… it wasn’t hard to do. Heidegger specialists will of course claim that “there is no way to include all of Heidegger’s basic concepts in a single introductory book,” but the counter-proof is found in the pudding: I did it. One reviewer continued to claim that it was impossible, but he was simply paying more attention to his own initial biases than to the accomplished fact.

And, I do believe I wrote the best introduction on Heidegger that one can find– precisely because I didn’t go into pedantic “close reading” mode. Heidegger’s basic ideas are really fairly simple. I did my homework and spent the better part of a decade reading all of the dozens of volumes in the original German, and for doing so I believe I’ve earned the right to say: “Heidegger is not a very complicated philosopher. Anyone who mystifies Heidegger is really just posing as an indispensable mediator of salvation. It is a fundamentally selfish act.”

It is now incumbent upon us, not to wring our hands and talk about how Heidegger is so complicated that it will be decades before we can fully understand what the Master meant, but to try to see what is most important in Heidegger’s rather tiny circle of basic concepts, and to appreciate the genius of those concepts while not groveling before them like courtiers.

In other words, there are limits to Heidegger– not because he “made mistakes” (everyone does), but because any particular set of philosophical theses is bound to be an exaggeration that leaves out much of importance. And it is strange that Heidegger, who was more aware than anyone of the historical rootedness and transient character of all fleeting expressions of philosophical truth, should spur so many to spend entire careers merely trying to clarify his words.

It should be obvious what this has to do to Gibbon. Yes, it’s true, every single chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is worthy of a lengthy book in its own right, just as every country on the globe is worthy of a lifetime’s research and scholarship. But no one wants to make globes illegal for being “superficial”, and no one sneers at books that attempt to cover 1,200 years of Roman history.

Why, then, is it still considered so horrific to cover the entire history of philosophy in a single semester? I think it could be done; several good texts exist that could be used for this purpose.

It is valuable to watch events unfold at several different speeds. Slow-motion is fine (and Deleuze recommends it) but I prefer the idea of speeding up a film, so as not to be distracted by passing incidents that obscure the underlying glacial movements.