The Dealing of Philosophy

by John Clark Philosophy is in decline. You hear it all the time. The evidence is regularly trotted out: fewer graduates; no jobs; no prospects; a …

The Healing of Philosophy

——- Physician, heal thyself!
I love this post. Not only is it a Nice reflection upon the situation, but I also think it indicates a problem in philosophy: it has no body !

I think one of the things that we found out in late 20th century Philosophy. and coming into the 21st-century, is, that human beings have an ability to cast its self it’s ideas, upon the world and make the World answer to its ideas.

This is particularly a 20th century phenomenon. To the extent that many of us are not able to read philosophy that arises outside of the 20th century within its own temporal manifestation. We simply are unabke to conceptualize what they were talking about in the proper sense of what they were talking about becuase of the manner that philosophy is prefugured now in the ideological context of nothingness; we hear everything, read all text, in the context of an atemporal yet universal code of words, of idealized thoughts of definition.

The issue with 20th century philosophy ever since Wittgenstein , but I might even say ever since Kierkegaard pointed it out rather specifically, without actually naming it I would say (lol. Kierkegaard talked about it specifically but never named it in a way that the 20th century could understand)– it is that we are able to become enamored with ourselves and us see the world in our own image. (Lacan’s mirror stage). And this is so much the case that we are unable to even consider philosophy that didn’t arise in our 20th century understanding of it: that is the definition of the end of philosophy that we had been dealing with for the past 20 years at least. namely, that philosophy argues its own self reflection as the valid point across all philosophical dimensions, time being that main component, that main dimensional feature of being.

And without going into the further discussion of this discrepancy that makes Philosopher is so adamant and adherent to their own view, as though ones own view is able to argue with someone else’s view, that is, is even able to encounter it– this is the definition of modern subjectivity that brings about the end of philosophy, anyway we want to put it, this is the fundamental and basic issue that we are dealing with. And, We might say, is the reason why “realism” has become so popular lately: as though suddenly we can change our interests and be able to change how we see things. We’ve been so caught up in ideas and thoughts, now we are trying to find what is actually “real”. 

But my point is less intellectual. philosophy argues itself into its own ontological corner through its reliance upon epistemological identity, which is to say, where we see and understand terms as identifying some thing that exists between people who think, but also between the thought in the world, thereby are we are caught ultimately in an idealism. For any other name.

This is what Michel Foucualt and perhaps others, were dealing with in their works; this particular issue that keeps coming up over and over again. Recall Kierkegaard’s work “repetition”.

The body was “cut away” by the surging force of the intellect, until the ‘gaze’ that the intellect identified with the object became the whole of interest: This is clinical medicine. The body was replaced with a holistic version of the intellectual gaze of sense. Disease became positive and the body negative until we now no longer even an ability to ground knowledge except in the gaze-idea, the knowledge-power of the subject of reality.

And philosophy has supported the whole notion the whole way. The basic issue is that Philosophy has removed itself from the body by which it originally gained credence.

Yet, in contrast to the modern ideological development and to point the view to where it does not want to look: I will go so far as to say that there is nothing that exists in the universe that does not have a body. And this is to say that everything and anything that has any sort of truth that we work with is a body. Hence we find many authors talking about this very thing, even though they might not put it in terms of “a body”. Many authors talk about how Philosophy. has just become subjective abstraction, various idealisms caught in their own subjective worlds asserting themselves over other peoples essential Transcendent represented in words.

The problem is that we are talking about nothing; we are talking about talking. That philosophy has become an eternal argument about vacuous idealism.

thanks post guy!

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