Analytic philosophy wants to rejoin the human race
Kay
by Mark Vernon -- A Dutch philosopher, Eric Hoekstra, recently spent
seven days in a wooden barrel. The burly academic from Leeuwarden
University occupied a large, upturned tub, placed next door to a
bookshop, as part of the Netherlands' celebration of a '?national
month of philosophy'.
Hoekstra (left) spent the days chatting to interested passers-by:
"?Lots of people visited me, some were shy and just sneaked a look in.
Children laughed out loud. Others talked for a while, expressing a
more profound interest in what I was doing."? The most popular topics
of conversation were stress in western society, the modern addiction
to luxury, and our habit of repeating pleasures so often that they
stop being pleasurable--genotsbevrediging, as the Dutch call this
feeling of let-down.
This highbrow conversation with strangers was in keeping with the aim
of Hoekstra's experiment--to remind people of the origins of
philosophy in ancient Greece. "?The idea first came to me as a
consoling fantasy. I thought about having no obligations, not having
to do anything, and the fantasy cheered me up. Then, the idea struck
me that I could develop the fantasy into something different, a feat
for drawing attention to the month of philosophy, to different and
simpler ways of living, and to ancient philosophy."
The original man in a barrel was Diogenes, the founder of the Cynic
school of philosophy. The label '?cynic'? comes from the Greek word
for dog--after Plato, a philosophical rival of Diogenes, accused him
of living like one. Diogenes adopted his alternative lifestyle after
watching a mouse scurrying about in the gloom. The rodent was not
bothered by the dark, nor by discomfort and dreary food. And then
Diogenes had a revelation: self-sufficient simplicity is the key to a
happy life.
This experiment was unlikely to have happened in England or the US.
While many continental philosophers have broadly followed the ancient
Greeks in seeking answers to life's big questions through thinking
about who they are and what they experience, English-speaking
countries have concentrated instead on analytic philosophy --testing
propositions through logical analysis. They explore abstruse ideas
such as 'conceptual clarification'? and '?logical consistency'. It is
a process deliberately divorced from personal experience.
The difference in approach led to a frequently acrimonious split among
the ranks of Big Thinkers. It's a fight that's largely happened in
private, but in recent years many interested, ordinary people have
started to take an interest in popular philosophy and what it can
teach us. As a result, the tensions long hidden in academia are coming
out into the open for the first time, and it's already changing the
way philosophy is viewed by both ordinary people and the academic
community.
The last great British philosopher who linked experience and thought -
and wrote about it in an accessible way - was Bertrand Russell. But by
the 1950s the connection had broken. A new mood about philosophy took
hold: it should be more rigorous. These philosophers called their
philosophy '?analytic philosophy'? - to underline the belief that
philosophy's proper subject material is not the personal but, rather,
logic and propositions. Many students entering universities in the
English-speaking world between the 1950s and 1970s would have felt the
disconnection between the personal and the philosophical was obvious,
right and permanent.
Now the mood seems to be shifting, slowly, mainly because high-profile
academics working in the strongholds of English analytic philosophy
want their discipline to become engaged again. "?Philosophy has become
far too professionalised," says Sir Anthony Kenny, a former Master of
Balliol College, Oxford, and one of Britain's most distinguished
living philosophers.
He laments that much of the work done in philosophy departments today
is inaccessible to other philosophers, let alone the public at large.
In some subjects, such as physics, such complexity is unavoidable
since the '?raw material' of the subject takes years to master. "But
philosophers don't have information that is unavailable to others. In
philosophy the best of it should be available to all. It is for this
reason that I admire Russell, even if I don't always agree with him,
because of the way he could write serious philosophy that was readable
to a wide public," Kenny says.
The author and philosopher A.C. Grayling believes philosophy itself
risks becoming impoverished when it doesn't care about its wider
application. "?Spending time contributing to the public conversation
is a kind of duty. And philosophical ideas and perspectives become
impoverished when there is a lack of it,"? Professor Grayling
observes. "?Ten years ago when I started writing for a popular
audience, it was looked down upon. Now this does not happen. We are
recovering a sense of philosophy as taking part in a popular debate."
There's now a huge public interest in popular philosophy, with Alain
de Botton the best-known author in this genre. He covers issues such
as friendship, desire, death and children, but has a profound
ambivalence towards contemporary philosophy. "?Around 2000, when I
wrote a book on philosophy [The Consolations of Philosophy], the
academics became hysterical that I was an interloper on their hallowed
ground,"? he says. "?Philosophy is largely owned by the academy and
defined by its interests. These interests tend to be narrow and the
way one is allowed to write in academia almost guarantees that no more
than a handful of people will bother to investigate subjects. That's
why philosophy is largely irrelevant in this country. However, there
is clearly a great appetite among people to know what philosophy is.
My own feeling is that this curiosity is generally abused."
Havi Carel, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of the
West of England, goes beyond the war of words to show how great
thinkers can make a real improvement to modern lives. She has LAM
disease, an incurable lung condition. When she was diagnosed, it was a
brutal shock. However, reading the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus
and the German thinker Martin Heidegger - who sought to address the
ancient questions afresh - she found new strength.
"?Philosophy gave me the capacity to reflect not just emotionally but
rationally on my illness," Dr Carel says. It enabled her to take a
broader perspective on her feelings of anger and envy, lessening their
destructiveness. Epicurus taught his followers not to be afraid of
death, since death is non-existence, that is, absolutely nothing. He
also pursued things that produce happiness, such as friendship and
small pleasures.
Carel says: "?The good news is that although we are shackled by some
objective features of life, such as our health, we can choose to focus
on these other good things. It is not only me who has realised that
much of what worries us is, in fact, trivial and meaningless. Both
philosophy and being ill enable you to apply this insight to your own
life."
(c) The Financial Times Limited 2007
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