on temperaments in philosophy

The first time I read Latour, it took only about 10 pages to realize I was really going to like him, even though I still had no clear picture of where he was headed. (We Have Never Been Modern was the book I was reading.) Something made him feel like a kindred spirit. I liked his sense of humor, his irreverence, and the unmistakable mood of ontological pluralism in the first few pages of the book. It didn’t surprise me later that we also hit it off well personally.

There are other authors that you know you’re never going to like very much, even if you respect them. The first time I read Agamben, for instance, I felt that this was a serious person not full of hot air. But there was a certain grim tone, accompanied by an erudition that didn’t slide into pedantry, but which seemed to me rhetorically excessive. Since that time I have read relatively little Agamben, though without having deep negative feelings toward his work, simply because I don’t feel especially inspired by the world he evokes in his books.

For some other authors, thinking isn’t thinking unless it allows us to denounce. We either have to be denouncing Christians, or neo-liberals, or some other group. In these cases there seems to be a temperamental need to attack and deny and disown. This attitude certainly has its golden moments, both historically and in the present time, but if all philosophy were denunciation I can say for sure that I would never have chosen philosophy. This is why I can only enjoy Richard Dawkins for about 5 pages at a time, usually when he’s speaking of specific facts I never knew about, because I simply grow tired of his deep need to ridicule the benighted and the gullible of the earth.

Zizek is an interesting case for me personally, because I disagree with virtually everything he says, and yet on a temperamental level I adore him (in a way that I do not adore Badiou, despite respecting him). The intensity and out-of-control excitability of Zizek are so appealing that I hardly even care what he says. I simply have the feeling that “this is how philosophy ought to be conducted”.

The opposite case for me would be Heidegger. In this case it is the content that draws me to Heidegger. His bombastic, condescending tone is wretched enough even when it comes from his own mouth, and it becomes simply unbearable when copied by others.

Gadamer, for me, is a similar case to Heidegger, but a much less intense one since he interests me less. But I find that Gadamer quite often has very interesting things to say. Yet the tone puts me off… It’s something like: “I am a very learned German university professor, and to be a philosopher means to be a very learned German university professor.”

Meillassoux for me is a case similar to Zizek, though different in the details. It is rare that I find myself agreeing with Meillassoux, but with him as with Zizek I’m cheering him on every step of the way while reading. But of course Meillassoux’s appeal is not that of the unfettered Zizekian wild man, but rather that of someone who begins with a handful of lucid but paradoxical points and soon pushes them to places much stranger than our earth, and in friendly and understated fashion. And this is why he can make his conclusions as unusual as he wants, and I won’t like his work one bit less, because I was never on board even with the more plausible of his conclusions. By contrast, some of Heidegger’s strange conclusions do make me like him a bit less.

Levinas… An interesting case, but I feel temperamentally drawn to him while others I know feel temperamentally repelled. What they see when they look at him is a sanctimonious do-gooder trying to tell us how to live our lives. But I don’t get it. I simply never feel that way at all around Levinas. What I feel when reading him is: “This is a serious guy who never blows smoke, and by God, he really is very original, and he really does live life seriously and lets philosophical problems emerge directly from his personal contact with the world.”

I’ve also never been quite as impressed by Foucault as everyone else seems to be. I may be missing something, but again I think it’s a temperamental dislike. He always seems to be telling you too loudly that he’s spent a lot of time in the archive, and then the stories don’t even flow that well in the end.

Deleuze is another Zizek-like case for me. I love his tone, and probably was contaminated by it through my early experience with Anti-Oedipus, though it was many years before I dug back into Deleuze again. (In 1990 he still wasn’t taken that seriously by most people, though I know it’s hard to believe that now, if you’re young. Lingis did a class that included both Deleuze and Baudrillard, and at the time they felt equally interesting and equally peripheral to the Derrida-Foucault core of avant garde continental thought.) But I rarely find myself on board with anything Deleuze actually says. And in fact while Zizek is often accused of simply making paradoxical inversions of mainstream wisdom, I get that sense a lot more often with Deleuze.

Somehow, all of this is probably a variation on the wider ethical theme of how everyone “gets away with” different things. Ethics is not primarily about the content of our behavior, just as philosophy is not primarily about the content of our thoughts. But neither is it a relativistic “everything goes”. We make rigorous demands on people and on authors, but those demands only sometimes have to do with explicit content.