11/06/13

A Plea for Folk-Philosophy - Justin Erik Halldr Smith

Justin Erik Halldr Smith

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A Plea for Folk-Philosophy

There is a well-known div ision between two camps of academic philosophy , often called 'analy tic' and 'continental', with each side more or less conv inced that what the other side is doing is not really philosophy at all. This is a prov incial and mandarin dispute, and I do not wish to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider those ex pressions of interest in fundamental questions that one might find in monasteries, madrasas, tea houses, y urts, around campfires, late at night as the seal blubber burns. Can such interest count, I want to know, as philosophy ? Once I took part in a conference in a mid-sized prov incial city in Transy lv ania. As part of the opening ceremony , the local Orthodox bishop was inv ited to hold forth on the v alue of philosophy . He seized the opportunity to denounce Marx ism, ex istentialism, and ev en rap music, and praised all in attendance for guarding the flame of spirituality in a corrupt and materialistic world. His loge dragged on. The most distinguished member of our delegation could be heard snoring. I passed the time looking ov er the paper I was going to present, which as it happens was on 1 8th-century materialism. The bishop had heard there were some philosophers coming to town, and he assumed he shared a common language with us. I can only guess as to his ex act background, but I imagine this man had spent time in a seminary , and that he read there at least some of the authors academic philosophers would recognize as constituting the Western philosophical tradition: Origen, Clement of Alex andria, probably Augustine, may be ev en the pagan Plato. This man had probably incorporated what he learned about these authors into his understanding of questions such as, What is the fate of a person after death? Am I essentially or only contingently associated with a phy sical body ? What is infinity ? Now on most reckonings those are philosophical questions, y et the reaction of the v isiting party (my self included) was to dismiss the bishop as something of a y okel. I suspect this would be the reaction of the v ast majority of professional academic philosophers in the West, and a fortiori if it were not a Transy lv anian bishop, but rather, say , a Mongolian shaman, who deigned to hold forth on the questions on which we take ourselv es to be ex perts. While at the time I went along with this prev ailing sentiment, it now seems to me that this encounter was in fact nothing other than a clash of prov incialisms. The problem might simply be that the term 'philosophy ' is used in two v ery different senses: one to describe a well-defined tradition of sy stematic and methodical inquiry , which appears to hav e dev eloped independently in human history only in China, India, and the eastern Mediterranean; the other, which might be called 'folkphilosophy ' or 'ethnophilosophy ', on the model of ethnoastronomy , ethnotax onomy , etc., to describe the set of cultural v ariations on a range of beliefs about nature, the self, etc., which humans qua human cannot help but hav e. But one way of mov ing bey ond prov incialism might be to consider the possibility that all philosophy is in a sense ethnophilosophy . After all, the minds of non-literate pastoral peoples are ex actly the same as those of seminarians mastering Thomistic doctrine. The difference is that the pastoral people's minds hav e different prostheses and institutions to support and to mirror their thoughts. A rev ealing parallel case is law: does law begin with Hammurabi, and receiv e its first mature ex pression in the Roman period? Or were these milestones simply
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11/06/13

A Plea for Folk-Philosophy - Justin Erik Halldr Smith

the ex plicitization of something that was already there, that cannot not be there wherev er there is a society that is organized in some way or other according to a set of --perhaps unspoken-- rules and prohibitions? Is a written legal code the coming-into-being of a new way of thinking, or is it the transfer of a familiar way of thinking into a different, ex ternal storage medium? If we are prepared to accept the latter possibility , we are thereby enabled to think about, say , Roman law, in fruitful comparison to, say , Hausa law (generally called Hausa 'custom'). And similarly with philosophy . Philosophy in our narrower sense might be more rigorous than folk-belief, y et still indebted to folk-belief in way s that it ought to be part of the philosophical project to uncov er. An analogous uncov ering has been undertaken in recent decades in the cognitiv e-scientific study of folk-tax onomy . It has become clear, in particular, that the modern sy stem of Linnean biological classification, while more ex act and rigorous than pre-scientific and pre-literate sy stems throughout the world, is not for that so much a rejection of the earlier sy stems as it is an outgrowth of them. This discov ery tells us something not just about the history of science, but also about the way that science at present continues its project of carv ing up the world. The distinguishing feature of Indian, Chinese, or European philosophy , on this approach, would turn out to be not some greater clarity or depth of thinking. Instead, it would be a by -product of the way certain, principally Asian, technologies, abov e all writing and the reproduction of written tex ts, are incorporated into a society . The presuppositions and aims of inquiry might be different for, say , an uncontacted Amazonian tribe, and the technologies and institutions for pursuing these aims are certainly different. But there are still human minds there puzzling out the nature of reality and of humanity 's place in it. This activ ity ought to be of interest to philosophers not out of some nav e celebration of cultural div ersity , but rather for the hard-headed scientific reason that it giv es us a real measure of the full scope and range of humanity 's responses to the questions we call 'philosophical'. Taking this measure is one way of deepening our understanding of these questions. -Follow me on Facebook. in Philosophy , The Grav ey ard of Words that Went Bey ond the Editor's Word Limit | Permalink
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I think this is an excellent and im portant point of v iew on what is philosophy . Wisdom has to be som ething inherent to the orientation of people, period... people any where. The best question we can ask, when we ask what is philosophy , is how do people in general approach wisdom and liv e wisely ? What do people already do, generally , that can giv e us insights into what wisdom is? This to m e is rem iniscent of what was popular am ong Ancient Greek philosophers - this idea that m ankind had a long tradition of wisdom that was at som e point lost and only barely recov ered by the likes of Parm enides, Socrates etc. I think this train of thought is im portant, and I think Heidegger was close to agreem ent with it. Posted by : John Hughson | October 2 2 , 2 01 2 at 07 :2 5 AM
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A Plea for Folk-Philosophy - Justin Erik Halldr Smith

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