In philosophy, as in comedy, there have been many great comebacks, ranging from the retort courteous and the quip modest to the reply churlish and countercheck quarrelsome, to borrow, if I may, some of the seven categories humorously established by Shakesepeare in As You Like It [1].
Personally, I've always liked Karl Popper's response when challenged by a poker-wielding Wittgenstein to produce an example of a moral rule: Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers [2]. It's an amusing and (a quite literally) disarming response; Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out the room after Popper delivered this zinger.
But I think my favourite debate-ending comeback involving philosophers is one reported on by Nicholas Blincoe and involves Nick Land leaving a fellow member of the faculty at the University of Warwick speechless when confronted by his inhumanism:
"Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick's first talk was entitled: 'Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,' in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea: 'How might we locate this description within human experience?' he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: 'I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.'" [3]
You can't argue with that.
Nor can you come to any kind of agreement with a thinker like Land, who, of course, gave up on that idea a long time ago. Like Deleuze and Guattari - and to his credit - Land is more concerned with the creation of provocative concepts rather than entering into interminable discussion [4].
Notes
[1] See Act V, scene IV.
[2] See David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (HarperCollins, 2001).
[3] Nicholas Blincoe, 'Nick Land: the Alt-writer', in Prospect (18 May 2017): click here.
[4] See what Deleuze and Guattari say about genuine philosophers having a horror of discussion in What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 28-29.
Well, provocations (anti-humanist or otherwise) are all very well but tend to reduce philosophy to a form of narcissistic/rhetorical entertainment. Rather obviously, and a little like the Cretan paradox, in this example Land is the ironic victim of his own statement - if no human discourse (or discourse about the human) has any philosophical privilege, neither can his!
ReplyDeleteDeleuze & Guattari talk in 'What Is Philosophy?' about philosophy as involving the 'creation of concepts', or, as I might prefer, 'creative concepts', i.e. those that are generative of an ontopoetic complexity that draws one in and feels both fertile and strange rather than 'clever', arrogant or dismissive etc. In the end, as Aristotle recognised, philosophy generates wonder, not slander.