the three texts

NICE ESSAY by Levi, and I didn’t disagree with any of it.

And yes, Sartre is ripe for a comeback. I agree with that estimation.

A year or more ago, I was speaking about the “stock price” of philosophers. Some of the trolls in the blogosphere pretended to believe I was saying we should always jump to the hot stock of the moment and buy it, and then there were a number of rather stupid related posts about Ponzi schemes and bubbles qnd so forth.

However, that was precisely the opposite not only of what I meant, but even of what I explicitly said. The point of the stock exchange metaphor was to focus on the stocks that are not hot at the moment. The goal is to look for value, not hot trends.

My educational background is deeply classical, and my view of how philosophy evolves is deeply classical as well– but here I mean the real classicism renewed each century by daring innovators, not the false, dessicated classicism of imaginationless pedagogues and enforcers.

But I do agree with another implication of Levi’s post, which is that shifts in philosophical fashion are a healthy phenomenon. Academia gets stuck in ruts, and every rut is a half-truth, just as every statement of truth is a half-truth. We need to get out of the ruts from time to time. I wouldn’t mind a Derrida revival in about 2030, to see if maybe we’ve been unfair. But as for 2010, he ought to be swept away into the shadows in my opinion. His Reign of Terror is too recent, and incidentally it made us all into laughingstocks, which at least needs to be considered. We need to forget about that horrible period in order to allow for the re-emergence of some of the wonderful things the era of deconstruction suppressed.

I don’t think quite as highly of Sartre as Levi seems to, though I do think it would be interesting to have a mini-Sartre boom right now. If nothing else, people might start to place a higher premium on writing well. He also has a versatile intellect that we could all benefit from.

But the really out-of-fashion great philosopher is still Aristotle. Yes, Aristotle’s stock price is too low. Almost no key Aristotelian thesis can get much traction in continental philosophy these days, unless it’s some pseudo-Aristotelian theme filtered through early Heidegger fanatics.

What has been the least popular thesis in continental philosophy for over 200 years? What will the supposedly “Aristotelian” early Heidegger people never even consider allowing? The existence of autonomous individuals that can bear shifting qualities at different times. This must be retrieved, but in much weirder form than we have seen from Aristotle’s disciples over the centuries. The theory of substance is in no way commensensical, as they have often falsely claimed.