on expansiveness

Somewhere, Zizek makes an interesting stylistic link between Fichte and Husserl, calling them both philosophers who continually rewrote the same introductory text. While this characterization could easily be nitpicked, it is basically true.

With Husserl in particular, though his stock is now grievously undervalued by the young, one gets the sense that the phenomenological method had somewhat stunted results. There aren’t all that many classic phenomenological analyses, and even those that do exist don’t lead as far as they should. If this sounds too harsh, compare Husserl with, say, Freud. Freud also worked from a basic core of central ideas and might conceivably have rewritten the same introductory text over and over again. (Though admittedly a psychologist could not have gotten away with this as easily as a philosopher could.)

A certain amount of repetition is needed in philosophy, a certain devotion to the whirlpool that circles around a small core of fundamental concepts that any philosopher aspires to identify at work amidst all the diversity of the world. But this can start to mimic a kind of mental illness unless a certain breakthrough is made into more concrete subject matter. Now that I think of it, Heidegger is at least as guilty as Husserl of failing to make such a breakthrough. For all of Heidegger’s tens of thousands of pages, most of his readings of the history of philosophy sound very much alike no matter which thinker he is discussing, and much of the supposed concrete subject matter in his texts (such as the excellent analyses of boredom) are little more than local applications of his threefold temporal structure.

The importance of repetition in philosophy (which Zizek often praises) is partly as a control on premature concreteness. Some philosophers feel the need to express opinions about topics on which they have no interesting, personally worked-out ideas to share, and are merely choosing from among the various available options. That’s what I mean about premature concreteness. If someone asks “But what do you think about X?”, I’d rather say “I have no interesting ideas about X as of yet” instead of spouting plausible dogma that is really no better than the opposite dogma.

Nonetheless, failure to push beyond this guarded repetition of two or three central insights can also become a form of procrastination, and procrastination is a horrible enemy lurking inside all of us– perhaps the very worst internal enemy shared by all humans of a certain cerebral type.