a pastiche
against optimism
Ah, Philosophy! A grand pursuit, indeed, yet one so often stumbling in the mire of its own making. Unless, perchance, Falsehood herself be the very quarry we stalk, our noble efforts are doomed to miscarry, to fall wide of the mark like a drunken archer's arrow. Consider the teeming multitude of errors that infest the very marrow of philosophical discourse, springing forth from the quills and pronouncements of even the most vaunted intellects. To deem this vast ocean of wrong as utterly purposeless, a mere byproduct of simple mistake, is an absurdity fit to curdle the very milk of reason. Nay, each singular blunder, as it fells some intricate edifice of thought, may appear a singular event, an aberration. But I tell you, mistake, in its grand and protean generality, is the very rule of the game.
I know of no greater folly than that peddled by the self-satisfied jury of Whig historians, who would have us believe that failure is a mere negation, a void. Bah! Failure, I say, is the very stuff of positivity; it is a fertile ground, perpetually feeding its own generative process, like some monstrous hydra sprouting new heads with each beheading. Plato, bless his idealistic heart, was particularly keen to defend failure as a negative, to conjure an ethereal realm of Forms and eternal Truths, as if to banish the very shadow of error. And in his folly, he seeks to buttress his airy edifice through dialogues with a man who, by his own admission, knew but one thing: that he knew nothing. For Socrates, with a wisdom born of self-awareness, recognized that it is success, that smug certainty, which is the true negative; truth and fact imply some dissenting voice silenced, some vital inquiry brought to a premature close. If we possess the Truth, then where is the need for those stinging gadflies of doubt?
But when the gadfly's sting finds its mark, what solace remains for the inevitable mistake, the unavoidable wrong? Why, the comforting thought of those towering intellects of ages past, who, in their grand pronouncements, erred still more grievously than ourselves. A meager consolation, perhaps, yet one that remains perpetually open to all. But mark you, what a truly dreadful fate this portends for Philosophy as a whole!
We grasp at Truth like wide-eyed children clinging to a dizzying tilt-a-whirl, forever oscillating between the airy heights of idealism and the solid ground of realism, the fevered passions of the romantic and the cold precision of the classic, endlessly arguing in the epicycles of generations and the vast, echoing circles of millennia. And so it is that in our fleeting moments of self-congratulation, the gentle breeze of progress ruffles our hair as we blithely ignore the impending bend in the track – our cherished school of thought, our pet dogma, rotating inexorably out of fashion, destined for the dustbin of intellectual history.
In the tender dawn of our philosophical awakening, as callow freshmen contemplating the lofty heights of a philosophy degree, we are akin to children seated in a darkened theatre before the curtain's grand ascent, naively awaiting the glorious revelation of Truth itself. A blessing it is, indeed, that the cruel hand of history remains veiled to our innocent eyes. For could we but foresee the lessons it will relentlessly impart, there are times when these eager students might well resemble Sisyphus, condemned to eternally push the ponderous boulder of rational demonstration up the treacherous mountain of Knowledge, only to witness its inevitable, crushing descent, all the while blissfully unaware of the true meaning of their Sisyphean sentence. Nevertheless, every fledgling philosopher yearns to stand triumphant atop that elusive peak, to "learn to comprehend the language" of the First Philosophy, that which "is written in this grand book – I mean the universe – which stands continually open to our gaze." Instead, they merely come to realize the manifold errors of their present convictions, only to discover, with the relentless march of time, that their errors of tomorrow will be even more profound.
He who diligently studies the history of philosophy is much like a man for whom the velvet curtains reveal a conjurer upon the stage, yet he tarries to witness the same tired performance not once, but twice, perhaps thrice in weary succession. The tricks, you see, were intended for a single gasp of astonishment; and when the fleeting novelty of certainty morphing into falsehood has vanished, its illusory effect is utterly gone. The metaphors, perhaps, become somewhat entangled, but the relentless, sickening spin of the tilt-a-whirl remains, alas, all too obvious.
Should two philosophers, once bosom companions as freshmen, chance to meet again after years of separation, their minds sharpened by the disparate grindstones of their doctoral studies, perhaps even separated by the narrow straits of the English Channel during their graduate pursuits, the dominant sensation arising from their renewed dialogue will be one of profound disappointment at the utter elusiveness of certain knowledge. For their thoughts will inevitably drift back to the halcyon days of PHIL101, to the shared certainties they once envisioned lying just beyond the curtain, those grand pronouncements promised to unlock the very riddles of existence. And yet, now, they cannot even agree upon which questions are worthy of their strained inquiry. This pervasive feeling of disillusionment will so utterly eclipse all other sentiments that they will not even deem it necessary to give it voice; but on either side, it will be silently, mournfully assumed, forming the unspoken, crumbling foundation for their growing conviction that their chosen craft is, in its very essence, utterly pointless.
If theories were truly born into this world through an immaculate act of pure reason alone, untainted by the messy realities of human bias and the seductive allure of preconceived notions, would philosophy, in its current, endlessly self-questioning form, continue to exist at all? Would not a man, possessed of even a modicum of intellectual sympathy, be inclined to spare a nascent theory the brutal burden of falsification? Or, at the very least, refrain from taking it upon himself, in cold blooded intellectual detachment, to impose that crushing weight upon its fragile existence?
I shall be told, I suppose, that my view of this grand endeavor we call philosophy is utterly comfortless – that I am, perhaps, afflicted by an excess of skepticism; and that the common rabble, in their blissful ignorance, prefer to be assured that we can, indeed, possess certain knowledge of this bewildering world. Very well, then! Let them flock to the mathematicians, those peddlers of precise but ultimately sterile abstractions, and leave us poor philosophers to our endless, and perhaps ultimately futile, contemplations in peace! At any rate, do not, I implore you, demand that we formulate our doctrines as some sterile sequence of lemma-theorem-proof or a tedious series of equations. That, my friends, is the domain of those rascals of science. Ask them for certainty, and they will gladly furnish it, presented with a spurious authority. Your science professors are, by their very vocation, bound to preach the gospel of a relentless optimism; but for me, it remains an easy and, dare I say, agreeable task to stand aside and observe as the relentless march of history gleefully, and repeatedly, upsets their smug certainties.