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It’s not reality, it’s just THE ONION, of course.

bad day for Atlanta

And I’m not referring to the upcoming OOO conference. Here is Ulysses S. Grant, speaking with devastating brevity:

“Atlanta was destroyed so far as to render it worthless for military purposes before starting [on the march to the sea], Sherman himself remaining over a day to superintend the work, and see that it was well done.”

“most overrated philosopher of all time”

The phrase is placed in quotation marks because I just saw this as a discussion topic on Amazon. I didn’t open the thread, fearing that I might be annoyed by the answers people give, and it’s never good to start a day annoyed. (It’s just short of 6 A.M. in Cairo.)

In this post I won’t pretend to give a definitive personal answer as to the most overrated philosopher of all time. But I think it’s possible to set some ground rules as to how the answer would be obtained.

1. The most overrated philosopher is probably fairly recent. One can imagine all sorts of opinionated answers along the lines of “Aristotle is the most overrated” or “Hegel is the most overrated.” But these judgments of “overrated” would largely boil down to disagreements. There is a fairly large class of intelligent people who regularly confuse their judgments of correct and incorrect with those of high and low quality. These people tend toward the opinionated and the dogmatic, are easily impressed by those who agree with them, and generally unfair to those whose views they dislike.

So, if you find yourself tempted to say something like “Aristotle is the most overrated philosopher of all time,” then chances are high that you’re giving your own personal dislike of his ideas too much weight in comparison with the many centuries of tremendous influence that he has had. This is not to say that the judgments of the past are always correct, just that the people of the past were not idiots. If some major figure repeatedly has decisive influence on intellects as mighty as those of Aquinas and Leibniz, then if you see nothing of value in Aristotle, perhaps the problem is yours.

The same holds, perhaps to a lesser degree, for any of the major thinkers who have gained a foothold in the pantheon of Western philosophy. Chances are high that if they have stood the test of time for multiple centuries, then something is probably there.

It’s quite different with thinkers of the 20th and 21st century. Here the chances are relatively high that a thinker might just be a “pseudo-event” who happens to address the Zeitgeist in clever fashion without striking deep roots.

Ironically, these very reasons suggest that the most underrated philosopher in history is also probably a recent figure. It is somewhat unlikely that a thousand-year-old author would languish on the margins for that long before being fully appreciated.

Time itself does much work in sifting the important from the unimportant. It is often much more difficult to assign accurate relative weights to things that have happened to the world (or to us personally) in the recent past.

2. The most overrated philosopher must be rated by many as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. This sounds like a tautology, but is worth noting. There’s little point saying something dumb like “Richard Rorty is the most overrated philosopher of all time,” because despite his wide influence, only rarely does anyone call him one of the five most important philosophers of the century, and I don’t think anyone has called him one of the most important ever.

So, what we’re probably looking for is a 20th century thinker viewed by many as one of the most important philosophers of all time.

3. As a corollary, the most overrated philosopher of all time is probably not completely worthless.

Anyone who is viewed by large segments of the educated populace as one of the greatest philosophers of all time surely can’t be third rate. There must be some virtue there of some sort. But if they are the most overrated philosopher of all time, then by definition they are second rate rather than first rate.

So, we’re looking for someone subtly second rate who seems first rate, not someone laughably third rate, because only a few people would be likely to fall for that.

To sum up: the currently most overrated philosopher of all time is probably a 20th century thinker, viewed by many as one of the greatest philosophers of all time, and one who is somehow subtly second rate rather than absurdly third rate. It won’t be a bad philosopher, then. It will be a pretty good philosopher who happens to be inflated by admirers into something much bigger than the reality.

I have an idea who it is. But it’s not anyone I’ve regularly criticized on this blog, so don’t assume you know who I mean. I’ll keep it to myself for now, because I’m considering writing a provocative essay on this topic.

But you can do this exercise yourself… Make up a list of all the 20th century philosophers who are often classed, by one group or another, among the greatest philosophers of all time. And then try to ask yourself which ones might plausibly be as respected 800 years from now as Aquinas is today. In a few cases, I think you won’t be able to keep a straight face. And those will be your finalists for the Most Overrated Philosopher award.

“less Indian and more Chinese”

That’s what THIS BLOGGER says about speculative realism. (In fact, something similar was recently said by my colleague who specializes in Asian philosophy. Though on the level of individual travel, I’ve been to India three times and China never.)

zerO hits Sweden

A nice-looking SWEDISH RIFF on several recent and forthcoming zerO Books titles.

I don’t read Swedish, but there are some similarities to Dutch and some to German and that’s enough to get the gist sometimes.

Mark Fisher interview

K-Punk is INTERVIEWED HERE, with a brief mention of speculative realism as part of the festivities. Here’s a passage of interest:

“…I started blogging as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD. PhD work bullies one into the idea that you can’t say anything about any subject until you’ve read every possible authority on it. But blogging seemed a more informal space, without that kind of pressure. Blogging was a way of tricking myself back into doing serious writing.”

That’s why I’ll put this under the “advice” heading. The Ph.D. can indeed be traumatic– one of the longest and most cruel initiation rites ever described by anthropologists.

ugly factories and hideous banks

And on the next page of Dewey:

“The ugliness, for example, of most factory buildings, and the hideousness of the ordinary bank building, while it depends on structural defects on the technically physical side, reflects as well a distortion of human values, one incorporated in the experience connected with the buildings.”

temples, colleges, palaces, homes, as well as ruins

More Dewey on buildings, from the very next page (after this, I wish he had written a whole book of architectural criticism):

“Temples, colleges, palaces, homes, as well as ruins, tell what men have hoped and struggled for, what they have achieved and suffered.”

I love the inclusion of “colleges.”

another nice Dewey sentence

It’s not so much that I agree with this sentence (or even know exactly what it means). I’m just delighted that such a sentence was ever formulated. From p. 239 of Art as Experience:

“For this reason, buildings, among all art objects, come the nearest to expressing the stability and endurance of existence.”

I don’t think Dewey is a great philosopher of art, but how many great philosophers of art are there? Not too many.

Santayana makes a great point: beauty is a major factor in day-to-day life. Many of our choices are aesthetic choices. Yet aesthetics has remained a sideshow in philosophy.

An interesting experiment would be to construct all of philosophy on aesthetics for 20 or 30 years and see what happens. It would certainly beat constructing it on brain science.

the object-oriented Dewey

It’s a passage from Dewey that I like for obvious reasons, and also another of those passages that might conceivably have been written (with slightly different terminology) by Merleau-Ponty. It also contains a couple of brief Latour Litanies:

“…an artist uses color to define an object, and accomplishes this individualization so completely that color and object fuse. The color is of the object and the object in all its qualities is expressed through color. For it is objects that glow–gems and sunlight; and it is objects that are splendid–crowns, robes, sunlight.”

Emphasis here is Dewey’s own. From Page 211 of Art as Experience.

My verdict remains the same: Dewey is one of those philosophers who ought to have written a bit more densely. Density isn’t always bad, since it at least has the merit of letting the reader see what your main points are.