When I reflect on my motivations for engaging in philosophy and theology, I find that they’re almost entirely negative: a view sounds wrong, or it makes no sense, or it’s boring, or I’m simply tired of hearing it so often, etc., etc.
Despite the party line that philosopy begins in wonder or theology begins in awe before the majesty of the divine, I suspect I’m not alone. In fact, I suspect I’m part of a significant majority.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 9:29 am
I find that I can’t really reflect on my motivations. Every notion rings hollow for me, be it annoyance or wonder. The beggining of philosophy is foreclosed? I guess when I engage with a new thinker it is because something about it captures my attention, either by at first seeming to address a question I’ve been struggling with (so the relation between immanence and transcendence in philosophy of religion is what first brought me to Laruelle) or seeming crazy, but also holding some bit of allure (like this new stuff with Lardreau and Jambet’s work, which is completely anti-Deleuzian and so completely contrary to my normal ways of thinking about desire and politics, etc.).
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 11:16 am
This sounds like Deleuze, but less intense: thought begins with an encounter that does violence to recognition, or perhaps just annoys recognition a bit.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 11:21 am
The beginning of philosophy is utter boredom. I’m more like a mischievous child home alone than a cantankerous old man on his porch.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 12:13 pm
Actually i think not – the beginning of philosophy is coming across an idea that is attractive, that interests the reader. This is obviously something closer to Anthony Paul Smith’s comment, though there are cases, Heidegger, Husserl etc where the original comment works. So perhaps its both…
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Is it just pure annoyance or annoyance at… type of thing? I’d say that annoyance can be a kind of wonder, no? “I wonder how anyone can think this is a good argument, God, I must write something about it!”
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Mikhail is a true philosopher.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Can you imagine Plato saying what you’re saying? Do you think we’d pay ANY attention to him if he had?
Anyway, our 21st century miserabilism will end.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 1:03 pm
Don’t the early Socratic dialogues basically take a similar starting point?
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 1:41 pm
Socrates calls himself a gadfly (i.e., a spur to annoyance, not to awe); but a gadfly to others. What spurred him to philosophize was… well, I suppose wonder. Or at least perplexity: “What the hell could that oracle have meant, ‘Socrates is wisest’…?”
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Agreed with skoliast.
Definitely the elenchus is not the whole story with him. I doubt Plato would have written the Symposium if it was all about that: a lot of “spontaneous” lively imagination going on there (even if it is a text).
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Colin has it right: it starts in boredom. Philosophy is what is unavoidable once one need not worry about the necessities of life. Philosophy is clearly a luxury phenomenon and that’s one of many positive things that can be said for luxury.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 2:36 pm
I believe Adorno said somewhere that philosophy is resistance to the given. I like this. Meaning that philosophy begins with the desire to push back against / free oneself from what surrounds one.
It’s for this reason that I disagree with Guido. I’ve had plenty of students who are quite far from a life of ease, and who are striving in every way to philosophize.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 3:04 pm
dbarber, let me apologize for being provocative. I am sure a great many excellent women and men choose philosophy at significant cost to their ease of life. But ‘to free oneself from what surrounds one’ does seem to me to imply a distancing of what is commonly held to be necessary; for me it means getting bored with (not so much the given but) the powers and expectations that be.
What I wanted to do was to plot a line between luxury and philosophy. I know luxury is looked at pejoratively but if it’s interpreted to be the ability to choose instead of being kind of driven by circumstance I think it’s quintessentially part of philosophy – and I prefer a philosophy driven towards some positive outcome to a philosophy that is driven out of some frustration with the negative of the now.
So, I don’t necessarily disagree with you or Adorno.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Badiou and, tangentially, Deleuze seem to disagree with that view and also, in a different way, agree. A philosophical response is to ask a different question when posed with a paradoxical situation, not just to serve as a doubting critic. More eloquently…
“It seems to me that the problem with philosophical commitment is that it is often thought to be primarily critical. Very often, one equates philosophy and critique. So that philosophical commitment would ultimately amount to saying what is evil, what is suffering, of saying what’s not acceptable or what is false. The task of philosophy would be primarily negative: to entertain doubt, the critical spirit, and so on and so forth. I think this theme must be absolutely overturned. The essence of philosophical intervention is really affirmation. Why is it affirmation? Because if you intervene with respect to a paradoxical situation, or if you intervene with regard to a relation that is not a relation, you will have to propose a new framework of thought, and you will have to affirm that it is possible to think this paradoxical situation, on condition, of course, that a certain number of parameters be abandoned, and a certain number of novelties introduced. And when all is said and done, the only proof for this is that you will propose a new way of thinking the paradox. Consequently, the determinant element of philosophical intervention is affirmative–a point on which I agree with Deleuze. When Deleuze says that philosophy is in essence the construction of concepts, he is right to put forward this creative and affirmative dimension, and to mistrust any critical or negative reduction of philosophy.” -From “Philosophy and the Present”, p. 80
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Just to clarify: wasn’t trying to say that it’s a matter of simple negativity; to push back against something entails that one has the power to do so, hence the affirmative aspect.
I’m not invoking an “ability to choose” as some kind of achievement. The point is that one is always already choosing, and thus that one can turn “choice,” or the capacity to choose, against the choices in which one is already involved (whether passively, actively, whatever). So this last sentence is what i mean by resistance. (And fwiw this role of resistance, in Deleuze, has a constitutive role in concept-creation, which is not simply direct affirmation.)
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 3:59 pm
Quoting from the Philosopher’s Stone http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2010/12/wisdom-of-ages.html: “most people do most things the way they do most other things”
One suspects this post tells us more about the philosopher than philosophy itself.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 4:00 pm
I think philosophy starts when you begin to exhaust the resources or hit the boundaries of a given discipline or methodological framework–all of a sudden certain axioms or presuppositions are placed into question, and philosophy is the only way to move forward. At least that is how I came to it. I’m not sure I would say that I was motivated by annoyance, that I think came after. Boredom seems more likely as the initial impetus.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Is it you who suspects it, or just the indefinite “one”?
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 4:17 pm
To be fair, though, it does seem like my evangelical background may have influenced this position….
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 5:51 pm
Whenever I find myself extremely annoyed at evangelicals, I remind myself that I too once held those views with sincerity.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 6:11 pm
I’m not annoyed at evangelicals now, but I was at the time.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 7:20 pm
re: Is it you who suspects it, or just the indefinite “one”?
Does it matter? (Which question itself is a prime impetus of both philosophy and theology.)
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Reason itself rejects my theory about annoyance!!!
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 8:30 pm
Reason may reject it, but I don’t. “I keep hearing this, but it can’t be right” is the beginning of both theology and philosophy for me. Now, that may say something about the end toward which I do philosophy and theology– comfort. I want rest. So I’m like an oyster, secreting layers of philosophy and theology around that irritant until I have my pearl (and a good night’s sleep). Someone else might think pearls are pretty, and try to make them (or at least admire them) for that reason, but that isn’t why I do so.
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Glenn Beck and Kierkegaard both agree with Adam (which annoys me).
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 4:21 am
Nothing more to say than: I endorse this post and it’s contention.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 7:05 am
I hate Simon Critchley’s variation on this matter: that philosophy begins in disappointment. As if I would want to live a questioning and thoughtful life solely in the aftermath of a disappointment.
Gillian Rose, whom you’ve been reading, says in a brilliant interview, “It’s a passion. You don’t become a philosopher, you discover you’re a philosopher.” Sounds right.
Basically I want to say that Socrates was touched by the gods. Or that if he wasn’t, Diogenes is de facto a better guide to life. (But he isn’t.)
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 7:49 am
Are wonder and annoyance really that much different, though? In the case of wonder, you get an intuition that there’s something higher or better. In annoyance, you get an intuition that your current state of affairs isn’t as good as it could be. How is this not just two sides of the same coin?
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 9:17 am
For me, it was wonder that got me interested in Religion, in general. It was wonder that made me dabble in all things mysterious: being, religions, spirituality, and even ecology.
But it was something like annoyance that made me want to pursue academic philosophy/theology. After dabbling, I came to some conclusions, and then I became irritated with other people’s inconsistent conclusions, biases, and sloppy thinking.
For me, though, the biggest annoyance is that most people do not see the connection between ideas and reality. They do not see that ideas shape/determine the way things are done in everyday practice. So, I am driven to theorize and talk about it…even if no one listens…perhaps I am romanticizing the notion of the “holy fool!”
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 11:19 am
It seems true that annoyance is the beginning of philosophy for Adam, but I don’t see how anyone gets from there to it being the beginning of philosophy itself. Just because it’s true for Adam doesn’t mean it’s universally true.
His mom, for example, isn’t everyone’s mom.
On a related note, I like Adam’s philosophy, so I encourage everyone to do whatever they can to annoy him.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 12:15 pm
The beginning of philosophy is an attempt to get laid.
I think we need to define what “the beginning of philosophy” is. In the traditional Platonic dialogue, Socrates is a philosopher already and interacts with non-philosophers. We don’t see a young pre-philosophic Socrates and we don’t often see Socrates in dialogue with other philosophers (he dialogues often with sophists, but not philosophers).
Even further, there is no dialogue where Socrates talks with someone who we later know becomes a philosopher themselves. Crito later writes dialogues of his own, but there is no dialogue that shows Socrates as training a potential philosopher. Rather, the dialogue is primarily between an already very advanced philosopher (Socrates, the Athenian Stranger, etc) and someone who is vaguely attracted to……..something. We have three different dialogues about Alcibiades (one from Plato, one from Aeschines of Sphettus and one spuriously from Plato), who never even remotely becomes a philosopher, yet is somehow very attractive for the dialogue-writers to depict.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 12:30 pm
I can’t help but feel that the original intention of this post was talking about the impetus for philosophy today, not the history of philosophy or its origins deep in the heart of man’s tormented soul, or, as is the case, Socrates’ tormented loins.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 12:49 pm
“I can’t help but feel that the original intention of this post was talking about the impetus for philosophy today”
Oh, that’s much simpler. For philosophers of the analytic school, the primary impetus for philosophy is a desire to avoid becoming a corporate finance attorney. For philosophers of the Continental school, the primary impetus for philosophy is that it’s a lot more fun than any other day job out there today. For the general populace, the primary impetus for philosophy (as the general population understands philosophy) is that reading Ayn Rand in high school gets you beaten up much less than joining the drama club. And, let’s be honest with ourselves here, Ayn Rand is the philosopher beyond all others for our fellow citizens, just as the scholastics called Aristotle the philosopher in their time.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 12:55 pm
A brief commentary on my own post (emphasis added):
When I reflect on my motivations for engaging in philosophy and theology, I find that they’re almost entirely negative: a view sounds wrong, or it makes no sense, or it’s boring, or I’m simply tired of hearing it so often, etc., etc.
The bolded phrase seems to indicate that my motivation for writing this post was to talk about my own personal experience of what drove me, personally, as an individual, to philosophical and theological reflection.
Despite the party line that philosopy begins in wonder or theology begins in awe before the majesty of the divine, I suspect I’m not alone. In fact, I suspect I’m part of a significant majority.
The bolded phrase implies two things. First, I am talking about a “significant majority” of individual philosophers/theologians, since I was previously talking about myself as an individual philosopher/theologian. Second, the phrase “majority” implies a minority of people who disagree — hence I am not suggesting my position commands universal assent.
Where is the apparent confusion coming from? Presumably from the title, which is a kind of sarcastic paraphrase of the commonplace that “the beginning of philosophy is wonder.” At no point in the post, however, do I talk about the beginning of philosophy as such, only about individual philosophers (myself and the “silent majority” I suspect agree with me).
[I should do this for all my posts!]
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 1:30 pm
“In fact, I suspect I’m part of a significant majority”
There’s a big difference between being a teacher of philosophy and being a philosopher. The motivation behind “I want to get a paycheck from teaching philosophy” may have little relevance to the motivation behind “I want to understand [x]” – [x] being whatever philosophy’s supposed to understand.
Further, it’s unclear how much overlap there is between “teacher of philosophy” and “philosopher” there is. It’s not certain that the two sets of things will even necessarily intersect.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Your most recent comment seems to me to be of very limited relevance, burritoboy.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Adam, I have certainly argued with individuals from a starting point of annoyance: not just that the state of affairs isn’t what it could be, but that the person you’re talking to isn’t as wise as he could be.
But wonder is surely the certainty that things are already pretty amazing: it is there before you get to the specific passerby. For this reason Socrates is often undergoing the elenchus on his own.
I wouldn’t say two sides of a coin; surely more annoyance is a denomination of wonder?
Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 11:07 am
Here is the two part interview of Gillian Rose, by the way, at the bottom of the page. I’ve just been struck with it recently.
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/dialogue/1043490.html
A number of very funny moments in it.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 11:11 am
My one recent difference with her: we needn’t really fear antinomianism. People are too bound at the mo. Did look a lot more plausible back then though.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 2:17 pm
@dbarber (although well out of time, sorry): I don’t think it’s true to say that one is always choosing. I think most people don’t have the luxury to choose anything. They simply strive to survive. I guess you could call that a choice to survice but that would be stretching the word choice so as to render it entirely meaningless.
The start of philosophy (the start of any thinking at all) is at the point in time there is at least one duration in which one is bored in the sense of having to make a choice that is not immediately survival-impacting.
I made the choice not to risk full-time philosophy. I am most probably financially the better for it, so I have respect for all people that made the riskier choice. That being said, I can’t just stick to that choice black and white (even if it would be better in a material way) because I am bored out of my wits in merely sticking to the traditionally laid out careers.