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"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy

1/22/2008 10:52:15

On Winter Solstice of 2001, my childhood friend Mat Brown and I sat up all night in his basement taking shots of frappacinos (among other things) and talking about the meaning of the universe. (It was terrible torture for our dear friend Sasha, who fell asleep before dawn and may not have ever forgiven our ridiculousness.) The ball was in his court that night; he took the more powerful substances, and his was the theory that could hold us until dawn. There were strict rules: no sleep, no electric lights, and others that I forget.

We could spend all night talking about the theory because it covered everything. I can't possibly do justice to talk that made all the hours of the longest night of the year pass with no sense of their passing. To begin, will is equated with the laws of nature. The will of a thing is what all the forces acting upon it and within it cause it to do. A thing, furthermore, can be defined arbitrarily. It can be a human being or a subatomic particle, or the system of a human being plus one subatomic particle on the other side of the galaxy. The thing can be a rock—I loved this image above all—and its will is to sit and wait, to be attracted to the earth by gravity, and the rest. (Human consciousness is no obstacle. It only has the sense of being a special kind of will and a coherent being because of the peculiarities of the nervous system the brain. It is a thing that happens to preserve some internal notion of its thingness. We know, anyhow, how illusory that impression can be, considering how many tiny creatures live in our bodies.) Mat's final move, which struck me as a fabulous climax, is that God's will is real. God is the thing of all things combined, and God's will is how those forces act and how the universe unfolds.

I spent the next few years thinking hard about that conversation, though maybe less and less each year. It was genuinely mind-altering. But the next year at all-night solstice I announced I was becoming Catholic, and so my metaphysical muddle altered somewhat as a result of that.

Now, after living apart ever since that first solstice, Mat and I are in the same city again, in New York. The other night we went to some bars with all their crowds. Standing around, eating old meat left over from a football party, we haphazardly wandered into a debate about whether the whole universe can be described as an idea. I said no, he said yes. It began a night-long reconnection, which later moved to a pinball machine and then to the frozen streets. It turns out that he is still working on the theory from years ago.

It was and always has been quite beside the point that Spinoza had an idea of God as the will of everything, or that calling the universe an idea is labeled Platonism. There is a magic about discovering these worlds the right way, that is, by an urgent quest, by the need for conversation and the need for amazement.

Not since Plato, I think, has the sociality that lies at the core of philosophy been appreciated. The Socratic dialogs are conversations among friends, and the friendship is as much at issue as the ideas. And indeed, this social world was philosophy's purpose and destiny. If it hadn't mattered, Socrates would not have needed to die. He died surrounded by friends, his death a final message to them.

Vast arguments, I suspect, could be made on this account: that philosophy is first and foremost a gesture of friendship. This even helps explain its decay in a world that thrives on anonymity and technological knowledge. Philosophy is asked to be a wing of engineering, of a kind, and it fails miserably. It remains among friends, though, and it will - a language for speaking deeply, for sharing and competing, for an ancient grooming of minds.

The illustrations are drawn from an essay I wrote just after the solstice conversation, trying to capture it for one of my teachers.

re: The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy - 1/23/2008 12:51:30
Posted by Nabil

I think that's absolutely right. In fact, I'm very glad to encounter someone else who understands that. I know people who scorn the Socratic dialogues but love philosophy, and I just don't get it. I think the dialogues are a record of the kind of activity that's at the heart of philosophy. They're an enigmatic kind of document that lend themselves to a great variety of readings.

But at bottom, they're about discussion, the kind of discussion that philosophy depends on. You can't really have ideas unless you've tried to hammer them out through dialogue with others. Until you've done that, you've done nothing to assure yourself or others that you have a grasp on truth or reality.

http://unabgeschlossenheit.blogspot.com/2007/10/futility-of-philosophy.html
http://unabgeschlossenheit.blogspot.com/2007/10/hegel.html

re: The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy - 1/23/2008 23:34:37
Posted by nathan

I appreciate your comment so much, as well as the links. I'll have to pop you on my "step out" section, since I see I am on yours! The following I will post as a comment on the first article you link to:

You write, optimistically, "In a post-metaphysical culture, philosophy is ultimately about standards of debate." This is true, just as I think it is in a "metaphysical" culture (though I take your point that a metaphysical culture might give philosophy a broader range of purview by default). But I think the problem returns to who is listening. Take the most persistent, vocal, and (surprisingly, sometimes) articulate public debate going on now, the presidential elections. Even there, while the standards of debate are constantly in question and conversation, philosophers are not present.

Is this merely a mistake? Should the philosophers be listened to more attentively?

In fact, few philosophers are clamoring for the job of moderating the debates. While some, like John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, focus specifically on questions of public discourse, this cannot be said of others, such as Heidegger, Hegel, or Searle.

I do not think that "Philosophy" (as some eternal, ahistorical discipline) has anything specific to offer the world for all time. Even an envied discipline like physics changes its ways and means with time. Rather, it is a community and a lineage that Western culture has built, an ongoing conversation and a series of relationships: friendships. In some places (like Western Europe) this conversation has more public relevance than others (like the U.S., where philosophers get their chance, if they're lucky, with a few short years of college).

Yet, as you say, philosophy is deeply about the standards of debate - but most of all its own debate, the debate of the philosophical community and its associates. This is not as cyclic and self-defeating as it sounds, precisely because of the beauty, the erotics, and the power that philosophical ideas have carried. In truth they have been part of the great political ideologies, and they have become nested in ordinary people's thinking, however unnoticed.

If philosophy, which we love and want to share with our friends, is to be relevant, it is our job to give our ideas pregnancy, poignancy, and vitality. This is how the great philosophers have won their influence, and deserved the readings and rereadings of later scholars. They shook their times. Their gift, in the larger scheme of things, was not simply the gift of Philosophy acting through them, as if by some divine impulse or Form, but the creativity of the individuals and the communities that inspired them.

In search of relevance, philosophers today should not bother fighting for (or against) the relevance of some abstraction Philosophy, but for their philosophies, the terms of their friendships, and the hope they see in them.

Socrates should reveal this above all. The eroticism about him, especially evident in the Symposium, explains why he became the paradigmatic Philosopher: he was relevant because his intensity, his insistence, and his clarity made even this ugly man incredibly beautiful.

re: The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy - 1/24/2008 16:40:24
Posted by

In this video from Beyond Belief II, Scott Atran, one of my favorite anthropologists, suggests that terrorism, as well as philosophy, is fundamentally grounded in systems of friendships.

Is this offensive?

re: The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy - 1/24/2008 16:41:21
Posted by nathan

Correction: Atran does not say that philosophy is grounded in friendships, he speaks only of terrorists. But I think jihadi philosophy and Western professional philosophy operate in some similar ways.

re: The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy - 1/30/2008 20:25:18
Posted by Nabil

The following is linked to a post on my blog:

Nathan, thanks very much for your comments.

My suggestion that philosophy is ultimately about standards of debate addresses the question: where does philosophy stand as a body of knowledge, given its inability to provide a metaphysical ultimate grounding?

You're right to point out that, as a concrete institution, philosophy is utterly marginalized. I take this point seriously, and have pursued it on this blog, because of its practical implications for me, as a student of philosophy.

Indeed, only a minority of philosophers make issues of public discourse central to their work. This is due primarily to disagreement about the premise of my question above: that philosophy is incapable of providing metaphysical grounding for knowledge qua knowledge. Hegel certainly disagreed with me, though he provided the seeds of anti-foundationalism. Heidegger is a tough case. Philosophers have often disclaimed metaphysics without abandoning metaphysical thinking. For what it's worth, Rorty - a paradigmatic anti-foundationalist in my mind - claims Heidegger (with Dewey and Wittgenstein) as a crucial influence.

Searle did his most famous work on speech acts, which have been essential to discourse theory.

Philosophy is more than a conversation; it is a conversation about something. Certainly, I don't claim to be able to set the agenda for eternity. Nonetheless, it seems to me that, at this historical juncture, there are a finite set of options. My sense of which of these is most legitimate and promising necessarily depends on my substantive views - that is, my particular stake in the conversation.

I think your aestheticized defense of philosophy and your desire to see philosophy have an impact work somewhat at cross purposes. You say philosophy must "shake its times" to deserve to be read, but in order to do that it must make itself relevant to the times.

I haven't read the Symposium, but I should.

re: The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy - 1/30/2008 22:46:30
Posted by nathan

In certain ways, I think this discussion proves both of our points!

On the one hand, there is a social aspect connecting us. I have been enjoying the conversation a great deal. I do it out of pleasure, very much out of the desire to connect with someone.

In the course of that, we are struggling with the problem of speaking a language we can agree on: setting the terms for discussion. I find myself agreeing with what you say, yet articulating disagreement.

I also don't think that what you claim is contradictory at the end is so at all. As any good Hegelian knows, relevance like everything else is a dialectical event.

re: The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy - 1/31/2008 09:42:13
Posted by nathan

I guess in some respects (Socratic ones, as I understand them), I am resistant to declaring that Philosophy Is About ____, if only because philosophy is at its best when upsetting onto-theologies. For that reason I am more interested in exploring it sociologically, socially, and so forth.

My teacher Tom Carlson often seemed to be pushing the idea that philosophy is about framing questions. I carry this idea to an extreme in my final paper for him at UCSB.

re: The Wills of Rocks: Friendship and Philosophy - 4/03/2009 12:44:17
Posted by

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