A teacher in France kindly wrote to say how much she enjoys reading Torpedo the Ark.
She also shared an insight into the kind of questions her pupils sitting their philosophy exam this summer are expected to answer and closed her email by suggesting I might find it amusing to address one or more of the topics myself.
And so, not wanting to disappoint and always happy to accept a challenge, I've selected three of the six questions that Mme. Stas sent and provided (brief) answers ...
She also shared an insight into the kind of questions her pupils sitting their philosophy exam this summer are expected to answer and closed her email by suggesting I might find it amusing to address one or more of the topics myself.
And so, not wanting to disappoint and always happy to accept a challenge, I've selected three of the six questions that Mme. Stas sent and provided (brief) answers ...
1. Is desire the sign of our imperfection?
No: desire is a term of folk psychology and is thus a sign of our clinging to false beliefs concerning human behaviour and cognitive states. In other words, it's a sign of superstition (and idealism) rather than imperfection (or Original Sin).
2. Is it necessary to experience injustice to know what is fair?
No: the necessity (and value) of experience has rightly been interrogated within philosophy. Kant, for example, famously wrote: "Nothing, indeed, can be more harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called experience." It is thanks to our ability not only to reason but to empathise that we can recognise injustice without having to suffer such ourselves.
3. Does culture make us more human?
This is what Mona Lisa Vito would describe as a bullshit question. For it presupposes the human condition outside of culture, whereas humanity is purely a cultural effect; a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea, as Foucault would say.
For Nietzsche, meanwhile, the human being results from a moral-rational overcoding of the flesh and the internalisation of cruelty; i.e., a cultural experiment in discipline and breeding that makes of man an interesting animal.
1. As in all things, definitions are crucial: it depends on how 'imperfection' is construed. If it is taken to be co-extensive, or even synonymous, with something like 'incompletion', the 'desire as lack' hypothesis has been self-evidently well-rehearsed from Plato to Lacan. Fairly clearly, most of us can't live (alone) with ourselves, so to that extent it is the fantasy of self-sufficiency that appears narcissistic and idealistic. If Sartre is right and consciousness invariably asserts its objects, desire is difficult to do without in human life. (In the words of The glorious Sundays, 'I know desire's a terrible thing / It makes the world go blind / But I rely on mine'.)
ReplyDeletePS What is 'folk psychology' when it's at home? It seems a dated and dusty piece of terminology at best.
2. To be true(r) to Kant, his transcendental philosophy was an attempt to steer a course between reason and empiricism, in which context it's not for nothing he also famously spoke of Hume as having roused him from his 'dogmatic slumbers'. How much of our knowledge derives from the world and how much from our minds is a classical philosophical question - for the Platonists, and the Romantics who followed them, a child brings his/her own myth into the world, which grows like a tree from its acorn. Hence, on this account, all learning is actually remembering, just as Mnemosyne was the mother of poetic music.
As for 'empathy', the same problem arises: how much of it is instinctive and how much does compassion have to be imaginatively 'learned'? The truest answer here is therefore surely a dualism, an epistemic fissure.
3. One might think here of Simone de Beauvoir's famous statement in The Second Sex that 'one is not born a woman, one becomes one'. (Suppose truth to be a woman, what then?) 'Culture', as we understand it, might rather be said to be the hallmark of the human. The animals and birds and insects have instincts, to be sure, but the extent to which they enjoy and develop 'culture' (aesthetics, beauty, mores, manners) appears rudimentary at best, if indeed we can speak of it all. However, as complex animals themselves, human beings are clearly part-angels and part-beasts, both 'natural' and 'supernatural', 'material' and 'artificial'. The crucible of sex, along its continuum of base desire through to its subtlest sublimations (see Tantra), is the usual illustration. We make culture, and culture makes us, and in so doing, we unmake and remake ourselves.