The Stone Reader Page 2

  One of the Happy Days writers was a philosopher I’d recently read, Simon Critchley, who wrote two pieces for the series—one on the relationship between water, contemplation and happiness, and one on money. These were, in journalistic terms, “think pieces” or even meditations that, in the tradition of Montaigne or Rousseau, combined present-day commentary within a historical framework of philosophy. I found this mix of elements to be both immediately engaging and meaningful, not only in Simon’s work but in the others’ as well. Still, I had no idea whether Times readers—a famously well-informed, opinionated and exacting group—would agree.

  On the whole, they did, and appeared, judging by their comments, not to find the writing “too intellectual” or abstract. Some were surprised to discover something in The New York Times that addressed not just external events like politics or health-care policy but aspects of their inner lives—their ethics, faith or lack thereof, their desires, anxieties and imaginations. It seemed that these issues were just as important to them as what had happened in the West Bank, Iraq or Washington and could often inform their views of these events.

  At the end of that project, Simon and I began discussing a series that would focus more distinctly on philosophy—why not? We met one day in 2010 at Ceol, a now defunct Irish bar on Smith Street in Brooklyn, to see if we could hatch a plan. He pointed out how many great writers and thinkers in the field were not being read in mainstream publications, and I quickly saw how right he was. Over a number of pints we talked it through. It seemed viable. We made a list of philosophers we wanted to work with and subjects we hoped to cover. Then we bandied about series titles for a while, none very good, until The Stone—a clipped reference to that legendarily transformative prima materia, the philosopher’s stone—dropped into our laps.

  Within a few weeks, I proposed the project, got a go-ahead from our editorial page editor, Andy Rosenthal, and our Op-Ed editor at the time, David Shipley, and we went to work.

  Simon wrote the first piece: “What Is a Philosopher?”

  And when it appeared online on May 16, 2010, we received a shock. By our humble expectations, it was wildly popular. It became the most e-mailed article on the Times site within a day—840 people replied, an almost staggering amount. Also notably, everyone had a different answer to the question posed in the title.

  The intense reader engagement was a revelation to us: we saw that essays like this could offer more than just an unquestioned voice of authority; it could be a public platform for large numbers of people to argue and discuss questions of political, social, cultural and humanistic importance—a massive, bustling, sprawling electronic version of the ancient Agora.

  Perhaps most exciting, we saw that by reaching readers in all walks of life (we had the foundation of the Times’ enviably large readership to thank for that, of course), most of them outside the academic and professional precincts of philosophy, we had the opportunity to engage the person “on the street”—or what I like to call “the naturally occurring philosopher”—in an activity typically confined to universities.

  Here is one reader’s response to “What Is a Philosopher?” that illustrates this point beautifully:

  Before we talk about philosophy and its role in the advancement of human understanding, we first have to know what a philosopher is. Try this on for size, folks: a philosopher is anyone who thinks about existence and takes a whack at trying to explain it. Just ask the guy seated next to you on the subway what he thinks—then duck, just in case he’s had it up to here with those who think one has to turn philosophy into sticky treacle with Socratic anecdotes before a spark of interest can be coaxed from the masses.

  Next question. Why are we here?

  That’s an excellent philosophical point of departure, considering where this column left us! Having myself sat in a subway car at the crack of dawn, I have asked that very same question many a time. Indeed, had Socrates sat next to me, we would have had a grand time: he questioning me, me responding until, all of a sudden, my answers revealed even to me the foolishness of my assumptions about existence, not to mention the intelligence of my seat-mate.

  Seriously, tho’, now there was a philosopher! Someone who refused to accept even the sacred judgment of the Delphic Oracle when it pronounced him the wisest man on earth! And then it hit him like a knuckle sandwich: maybe true wisdom was knowing that you know nothing at all about anything.

  Sounds like he coulda written one helluva column. But then, he knew better than to try.

  In some ways, engagement like this from many thousands of Times readers are the foundation on which The Stone was built.

  III.

  In publishing The Stone, we try to abide by a few basic principles. We do not presume editorial authority and, as much as possible, let the writers say what they want the way they want, provided their facts are clear and reasoning sound. We ask the readers and philosophers to meet halfway—at the intersection of a traditional newspaper op-ed and true philosophical inquiry. We avoid dumbed-down philosophy—“watered-down versions of arid technical discussions and inspirational/self-help pieces with no philosophical spine,” as our frequent contributor and adviser Gary Gutting once put it—and strive for sound, well-wrought and jargon-free philosophical essays and arguments that speak in some way to the present moment, each adhering to the long-established editorial standards of the Times.

  The strong positive response to this entire range of essays is a confirmation that readers are not looking only for “big name” philosophers. They want thoughtful, penetrating essays, no matter the author’s resumé or professional rank. This was a lesson we learned quickly, and one which also taught us that behind the best of these essays is the conviction that philosophy can in some cases function as “literature”—meaning an essay on moral relativism or logic or free will can be a “good read” and potentially give aesthetic pleasure comparable to that given by a short story or a poem. Rigorous philosophical writing, we found, could put forth a provable or persuasive argument and provide a sense of exploration and delight at the same time.

  Philosophers are more than just exceptional thinkers. They tend to be—whether in the mold of rationalist, poet, gadfly or seeker—fascinating people. As a result, readers of this book will hopefully gain a deeper appreciation of the insightful (sometimes even wise) writers and doers living among them, and a sense of where they fit in the scheme of things, in both public and private life.

  IV.

  Readers who come upon The Stone for the first time are often puzzled by the mixing of philosophy and old-fashioned media commentary. They can’t be blamed, of course. A typical newspaper reader generally won’t flinch at an article by a doctor, economist, politician or policy expert of some sort, but they might be surprised to see one by a philosopher. How often do we find any brand of philosophical thinking in newspaper and magazines, or in mainstream media of any kind?

  But in a broad sense, philosophy and journalism are a natural fit. Both possess a license to tackle any subject. If it occurs in the course of human experience, it is fair game. And in many cases, their methods are similar. A reporter will gather facts objectively, analyze them, break them down and present what he or she sees as the truth of a situation. With some variations, that’s essentially how a philosopher works.

  Philosophy and journalism also complement each other. Each gives the other a quality it may be missing. Journalism has an urgency driven by events that philosophy tends to lack, while philosophy relies on analysis or contemplation that journalists often don’t have time for because of the demands of the profession.

  Finally, there is the idea of philosopher as a “gadfly,” as Socrates described himself, an agitator of conventional wisdom, an annoyance to state power and the status quo, which is very much in keeping with the role of the media as a watchdog—the fourth estate. In this volume you’ll find that philosophy did indeed respond to crucial events as they occurred: an urgent series of pieces on guns and violence in the wake of the Newtown school massacre, and essays coming to terms with the Occupy Wall Street movement, radical Islam, the crisis of privacy, hacker culture and the racial anger simmering and sometimes exploding in the United States.

  Despite all this, philosophy seems to retain that bad rap out in the “real world.” People like Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson have called it essentially useless when compared to science and other more “practical” subjects. Those who persist in this folly will tell you that the problem with philosophy is that it is too insular, that it does not “solve” real problems and makes no effort to be useful or even understood to the majority of the human race it is supposed to inform. But that is a too simple assessment of the situation. The intense interest in The Stone, and these writers’ deep engagement with the world in which we live, belies that narrow-minded take.

  This, like all truly interesting questions, will be debated for as long as we have the capacity to argue with each other. But I’d like to close with a few passages from an assessment Simon wrote after the series’ first year, one that offers a more generous and expansive definition of the meaning and use of philosophy. The Stone, he wrote, offered some proof “that philosophy still matters. That it is not some otherworldly activity conducted by a handful of remote individuals safely incarcerated away in institutions of higher learning.” He continued:

  Philosophy assesses and presses public opinion by asking essential questions: “What is knowledge?” “What is justice?” “What is love?”

  The hope that drives this activity is that the considerations to which such universal questions give rise can, through inquiry and argumentation, have an educative or even emancipatory effect. Philosophy, as the great American philosopher Stanley Cavell puts it, is the education of grown-ups.
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  It is my view that philosophy must form part of the life of a culture. It must engage the public and influence how a culture converses with itself, understands itself, talks to other cultures and seeks to understand them.

  That’s what we try to do each week in The Stone. And that’s how, and why, this book was born.

  So, who cares?

  —Peter Catapano,

  New York,

  2015

  PHILOSOPHY IS A NOTORIOUSLY SELF-REFLEXIVE DISCIPLINE. OFTEN, a lifetime devoted to it begins and ends with the question, what is philosophy? This leads to the common accusation of navel-gazing or armchair-pondering. But such accusations are shortsighted.

  Philosophy in its recognizable form begins in ancient Greece with the person of Socrates. Before his eventual trial and execution by the city of Athens on the charges of impiety toward the gods and the corruption of the young, he spent his days talking to people and engaging them in dialogue. Often these dialogues would be with people sometimes called “Sophists” because they claimed to provide wisdom (sophia). Socrates would simply ask them questions that revealed that they didn’t really know what they were talking about and that the wisdom they sought to retail was bogus in its claims.

  Philosophy begins by asking difficult questions of a very general form (What is knowledge? What is truth?) and by using critical techniques of argumentation in order to show that those who “know” are often advancing questionable claims. But this doesn’t imply that the philosopher him-or herself possesses knowledge or wisdom. Socrates was pronounced by the Oracle at Delphi to be the wisest man in Greece, but he constantly professed to know nothing. Philosophy, then, commences as a movement into perplexity about the most general and fundamental issues that concern human affairs.

  This perplexity is directed most fiercely toward philosophy itself. It is therefore appropriate that The Stone Reader opens with a series of questions about the nature, scope, history and identity of the discipline. Good philosophy should never be hidebound by tradition or stuck in its past.

  In the first two parts of Section 1, “New Impressions of an Old Profession” and “The Geography of Philosophy,” the reader will find various attempts to define and redefine the nature of the philosophical task. Does the fact that philosophy began in ancient Greece with Socrates entail a bias toward men over women? Does the entire history and study of philosophy betray a geographical prejudice toward the West, particularly Europe over the rest of the world? Such questions are engaged pressingly here, and this is in line with the mission of The Stone, which is not only to show what philosophy can do, but also to try and expand the domain of its inclusiveness. It is our modest contention, very simply, that philosophy is for everyone.

  The study of philosophy will often be focused on the reading of canonical texts, such as those of Plato, Spinoza and Hume. But once again, this activity is not pursued out of some antiquarian interest. It is a question of constantly rereading those texts in order to both question the way in which they had previously been interpreted and offer new interpretations that speak to our contemporary condition. In “Rethinking Thinkers,” a number of our authors take on this task.

  Philosophy at its best is simultaneously old and new, both showing the persistence and the difficulty of basic themes and questions and the need to adapt those questions to the pressing demands of the surrounding world. In the fourth part of this section, “Old Problems, New Spins,” the reader will find investigations of absolutely classical philosophical themes, such as the nature of time, free will, truth and logic. But there are also reflections on life in the digital world and how philosophy might adapt to the experimental techniques of cognitive psychology.

  Often people speak, sometimes with good reason, of philosophy as an activity that is distinct from literature and fiction. On this view, philosophy is seen as a good example of bad writing. Some of the essays in the final part of this section, “Philosophy, Literature and Life,” show the inadequacy of that view. Philosophy has many of the same virtues as literature and can even be a form of literature itself. And if literature does indeed tell us something profound about our existence, then this is also true of philosophy, which is not simply a professional or narrowly buttoned-down academic pursuit, but a way of life that can permit us to raise again the question of our significance and the possible pursuits of happiness.

  —Simon Critchley

  What Is a Philosopher?

  —Simon Critchley

  THERE ARE AS MANY DEFINITIONS OF PHILOSOPHY AS THERE ARE philosophers—perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach a consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture—The Stone—is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: What is a philosopher?

  As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, Theaetetus, in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does.

  Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’s expense—that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.”

  What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absentminded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes’s The Clouds to Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I. Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly.

  But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’s philosopher’s stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently pressed his basic philosophical claim.

  But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like to peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock, or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them.

  By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’s interlocutor, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

  Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at your back. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.