sifting the important from the unimportant

I had a look at the New APPS COMMENTS on my Laruelle review, and found one point in particular that would be worthy of a long and interesting discussion. It comes from a rather negative comment by J.C. Berendzen (with whom I am not personally acquainted):

“I realize I am picking on a small part of the review, but I was pretty irked by the claim that we have been going through a ‘long yet temporary historical phase in which frenetic activity in Paris has been matched by an ebbing trickle of original continental thinkers from the German-speaking world, and the failure so far of important new capitals to emerge.’ I guess Honneth, Beck, Joas, Brunkhorst, Forst, etc. (to focus just the ‘3rd Gen Frankfurt School’) are either just a trickle, unoriginal, or not continental. One also wonders about recent Italian philosophy, Danish phenomenology, Zizek, but whatever…”

At any given moment, hundreds of different things are going on in philosophy. We all orient ourselves amidst those hundreds of things according to some internal model of what is important and what is less important. And here we can probably all agree on two basic principles:

1. Not all of the things happening at any given moment in philosophy are of equal importance. Some will turn out to be decisive, others will eventually pass away without a trace.

2. None of us has the God-like power to know for sure which is which. Mistakes of this sort are constantly being made. Since I have the Matisse biography before me now, let’s recall that in the early 1890’s, the world’s most celebrated artist was possibly the academic painter Bouguereau, who in turn anointed a painter named Paul Baudry as “destined for immortality.” The same thing happens in philosophy all the time, and any of us can make misjudgments about importance on this or that occasion. We even misjudge and misrank our own students, after all. There’s just no avoiding it. We are all of finite intellectual power.

Nonetheless, we have to orient ourselves according to some sense of where the really important things are happening. It’s not surprising that Berendzen would be “irked” that our respective senses of this would differ. That’s just human nature. I’m equally irked when people say things like “Heidegger is nonsense,” when I (like many others, but not everyone) happen to regard him as the hands-down choice for the major philosopher of the 20th century.

What Berendzen would need to do in response is not just rattle off a list of names that I never mentioned, with the implication that all of those names are being insulted through omission. Instead, Berendzen would have to give an alternative account of what the important trends in recent philosophy really are, as against my own version. From the looks of it, that account would rate the Frankfurt School as of far vaster importance than I do. Fair enough. That’s a good debating point.

Germany is loaded with very smart people in philosophy. But personally, I think it would be hard to make the case that German philosophy has ever resumed its level of innovation as found from 1900-1930. If you disagree with that assessment, getting “irked” is only a start. You need to make an argument that the German names cited by Berndzen are just as important, or more important, than Husserl and Heidegger. Or at least of equal or greater importance in comparison with those in post-1945 France.

The same goes for his other examples. One could make a case, for instance, that “contemporary Italian philosophy is far more important than most people realize.” Very good. I think it would be awfully hard to place it on a par with Paris to the point of being “an alternative capital” (which is all I claimed), but there’s always room for dramatic counter-readings of the present and recent past of philosophy, and these are sometimes persuasive. Let’s hear the reasoning.

As for Danish phenomenology, it’s been a very prolific scholarly flowering, but I’m not aware that even the direct participants are claiming to be of Husserl’s own stature. (Perhaps I’m wrong about that, but I’ve not heard so.)

And as for Žižek, my admiration for him is already on record in numerous public remarks. But even Žižek has been quoted as saying that “nothing is happening in Ljubljana” except that he and a few friends get together to chat. “We get caught with our pants down whenever people come to Ljubljana,” he said (I’m quoting from memory, not from the published conversations). So there you have it: even Žižek himself is not claiming that Ljubljana is an “alternative capital” to Paris, of which personally I do not see one at the moment, with the caveats listed above (I don’t expect analytic philosophers or Frankfurt Schoolers to agree, for instance).

For my own part, I’ve been fairly straightforward about showing my cards, both in my published works and here on this blog. As is well known, my orientation is basically “continental,” and basically Husserl/Heidegger-oriented at bottom– though in an unorthodox manner, and with quite a bit of Whiteheadian and especially Latourian influence. Unless you’re very skeptical of continental philosophy in general, or unless you’re one of those continentals who think all recent French philosophy is sophistry, I think it’s hard to escape the conclusion that in the post WW-II period Paris has been a unique dynamo, generating new figures and ideas at a dizzying rate. It’s not a question of worshipping that process; I happen to think that Heidegger still hasn’t been surpassed.

In any case, this sort of situating of the reputations of various authors is not a minor aspect of what we do, nor is it something to be passed over in polite silence so as to avoid invidious comparisons. It’s the very heart of critical intellectual life, as well as the very key to how we go about deciding what (among the thousands of books surrounding us) to read first and in greatest depth, and what we decide to skim and what to ignore completely. All of us are wrong in these decisions at times. All of us evolve over the years and change our tastes in one way or another. But there’s no avoiding the decisions. None of us load all philosophy books into an empty drum and choose our summer’s reading at random. We all have some sense, one that is constantly in development, of what we need to read and learn most urgently.

To turn now away from Berendzen and towards those who think Laruelle is more important than I have reason to think so far, there’s plenty of blog and journal room available to make your case. Let’s hear that case, rather than complaints about the messenger.