A couple of days ago friend of mine sent out a group email with a link to a Slavoj Zizek lecture on youtube.
Apparently Zizek’s incessant nose-wiping/grapping/touching was distracting to some of the recipients: “I checked out the video but abandoned it after the guy grabbed his nose for the 15th time. ” “Is that guy coked out or what? It makes it hard to follow. I’ll look for the transcript.”
I attempted to defend Zizek with this email:
Most people can simply wish to not gross people out, and that is sufficient to inhibit nasty nostril wiping behaviors, but you’ve got to remember that Zizek’s a philosopher. Before he can empathize, he’s got to establish a basis for subjective alterity, and clarify the meaning of an experience of disgust that is not one’s own — possibly a form of disgust not analogous what he feels when he uses the word “disgust”. Then he will probably be absorbed for some time wondering what an analogous experience even is, whether “analogous experience” is even a valid concept. Then he has to figure out the practical and ethical implications of causing an other to feel disgust. Why not inflict disgust? And are you actually inflicting it? When one person “causes” a feeling to arise in the other, is this not a different kind of causality than that used in the physical sciences? Or is all causality the same species of reification? Species…?
That’s a lot of work. It’s probably too much thinking to ask a professional philosopher to do for free. It’s sort of like asking a professional psychologist friend for free counseling.
To which a member of the group replied:
I can see how an intelligent man might become so self absorbed that he uses some sort of rarefied vocabulary to deeply analyze a series of related propositions before being distracted by something “really important” like religion (being sarcastic here). –But before I commit large blocks of time to such things, I have to be convinced that I’ll get a good return. His writings and video both turned me off within seconds. In fact, while watching the video, I had largely made up my mind during the elitist introduction. It doesn’t sound like you’re a big fan of Zizek either. (I think you were making fun of him.). Should I be concerned about the opinions of this man? Also, are there no good synonyms for such words as “reification” and “subjective alterity?”Unless you’re a mathematician, if you really have something worthwhile to say, you can probably say it fairly simply. I think I prefer natural philosophers–like Darwin.
To which I replied:
I’m making fun of Zikek, and all philosophers, but respectfully. Really, I am making fun of the situation philosophers and their victim-beneficiaries find themselves in together.
Philosophers have the most undervalued (anti-valued) job in the world: to show that what seems obvious and settled is not nearly as obvious as it appears. In that non-obviousness there is an otherwise. Where there was nothing or necessity there is now choice and freedom.
People tend to misunderstand what philosophy is doing, but blame the mode of expression rather than the material itself, which in fact is the source of the trouble. What philosophy concerns itself with is the way ideas are thought. The ideas as conceived factually are of secondary importance. And the applications of those thoughts in example or practice are yet another degree removed. You could say that philosophy is abstraction of abstractions.
Just as primitive minds have trouble conceiving of science as a method, and instead try to reduce science to a canon of true statements about the physical world (and therefore cannot understand how “intelligent design” could be a considered a reasonable belief but indisputably cannot be considered scientific), people whose understanding limits itself (often on principle) to facts and methods have a hard time imagining philosophy as the next step outward. Science (understood as a disciplined method for observing and relating physical phenomena) is only one mode of intellectuality among many — but intrinsic to its mode of understanding are certain types of reductionism and bracketing of experience in favor of a particular kind of explanation, which creates an artificial sense of completeness (which phenomenologists call a “horizon”).
Think about how scientists speak of beauty. They do not generally speak of it in the terms of the experience of beauty. They’ll talk about what happens to a brain when it experiences beauty. Or they’ll explain why humans might have evolved to experience beauty. Or they will demonstrate how instincts of attraction are useful in the life of an organism, etc. They might describe some of the characteristics of things that are called beautiful. But in the end the kind of being they discuss as related as it is to beauty generally stays within the sphere of what is externally observable, measurable, and mathematically expressible. And that is 100% right and proper… as far as it goes. Where science goes wrong is seeing itself as the last word on knowledge, and its account of reality as being the most fundamental. When science misunderstands itself as containing and underlying all other modes of knowledge, and sees the others as preliminary intuitions, or shorthand versions of its truths (or eventual truths), it falls into a characteristic unwarranted condescending naivete. The most profound scientists tend not to fall into that illusion, since they tend to work at the edges of thought enough to have some self-awareness of the role of creativity in discovery, and therefore more frequently manage to keep their work in its proper philosophical context — but to the degree they do this, they also end up sounding like nutty mystics.
Philosophy pursues the ideal of relating all these different modes of being with as little invalidation (claiming the mode does not need to be accounted for) or reduction (failing to account for the mode of being in terms appropriate to the material) as possible.
Philosophers are in a lose-lose situation. They can write less technically and more simply, but because philosophical ideas of necessity means to write mytho-poetically like Heraclitus of Ephesus, or worse, practi-poetically like Yeshua of Judea. Then they’re either presumptuously misunderstood as nonsensical (that is, the failure to understand is projected onto the thinker and his words are declared meaningless) or presumptuously misunderstood as making a kind of sense they did not actually intend. The philosophers who write technically are accused of obfuscation.
Admittedly, philosophers who write technically are often just bad writers. These “technical” philosophers are also accused of nonsensicality. (I think I remember the Mencken showing his own bare ass by publicly declaring that Emperor Heidegger wears no clothes.) Or they’re semi-understood by 20-year-olds — or at least their vocabulary is adopted and abused — until the general thrust and the lingo starts triggering violent emotional reactions of older, clearer and more irritable thinkers, who’ve already settled on their own ways of seeing things and probably didn’t really want to suffer the consequences of understanding someone else’s alien views. “Because the twenty-something enthusiasts of a thinker are unclear and annoying the thinker himself must also be unclear and annoying, therefore there is no need to bother reading him myself.”
The problem is not in the form. It is in the content. What we really want from philosophers is to be told more about what we already know and are already prepared to understand. We want them to use familiar words with normal definitions, to assert facts about the world that we can add to our existing stock of knowledge quickly, painlessly, effortlessly and nondisruptively. In other words, we want what we call a “philosopher” to conform to what we already think a philosopher should be, not the royal pains-in-the-asses they actually are.