what philosophers want

Since last night I’ve been trying to formulate why I think the tail end of that Bill Simmons basketball column can be applied to philosophy, and today I’ve gotten a bit closer, I think. It has something to do with Levi’s various thoughts over the past year on how the pre-philosophical jouissance is different for each philosopher, and also his notion (for which he credits Badiou) that philosophy has no object and hence is motivated by something outside philosophy. (I’m not even sure I agree with the latter point, but it’s a useful hypothesis for the present exercise.)

The Simmons column was saying that each NBA superstar is motivated by something slightly different. Jordan = winning. Kobe = greatness. Shaq = fame. LeBron & Dr. J = to amaze people. Barkley = fun. Nash & Stockton = team.

Now, if you were to ask philosophers what they want, you’d probably hear “truth” as the answer a boring number of times. But that’s too self-congratulatory and unrevealing, so lets disqualify “truth” as an answer, and think instead about the particular conditions that one demands the truth should meet.

One way to tackle the problem would be to ask what non-philosophers a given philosopher most admired. In Heidegger’s case the easy answer is Hölderlin, and that does shed a lot of light on who Heidegger was. With most analytic philosophers you’d probably hear the names of scientists as their most admired non-philosopher. Also revealing.

You could even possibly get at the question by asking of philosophers: what is your favorite philosophical book? Not “the greatest,” in your opinion, but your favorite? What’s the one that really charmed you into being the philosopher you are today?

For Heidegger, you could say Brentano’s dissertation or, more plausibly, Husserl’s Logical Investigations. For Giordano Bruno you could say it was somethoing by Nicholas of Cusa, and for Nicholas of Cusa it was Proclus’s commentary on Plato’s Parmenides.

It’s actually more interesting if someone’s favorite book is not among the greatest philosophical books of all time, because then that will teach us something about some of the unstated “jouissance” conditions that a philosophymust meet to satisfy a given human character.

Yet another way of tackling it, though, is to ask of a philosopher, which classic book of philosophy would you most wish to have written yourself, and which ones are you glad you didn’t write, even if they are classics?

Consider posing this question to Nietzsche, for instance. There’s no way Nietzsche would have wanted to write Kant’s three Critiques. It couldn’t possibly have satisfied Nietzsche’s temperament. That’s not even a product of his disaste for Kant: Nietzsche really admired Spinoza, but I doubt he would have wished to write Spinoza’s Ethics either. He would have been more likely to want to have written Pascal’s Pensées, or Montaigne’s essays, or even Emerson’s essays.

Many people may say they want the truth, but the fact is that people will quickly turn their heads away from truths that don’t meet a certain sort of longing, and that’s going to be different for each person. We are surrounded by truths as by a sandstorm, but zero in on specific ones. Engineering and economics are full of truths, for instance, but they didn’t interest me enough to devote my life to them.