The Moviegoer

Via Enowing, it looks like the undergraduate philosophy journal Contemplatio has an interview with Thomas Sheehan. While the whole interview was quite interesting to me, I especially enjoyed this last exchange:

C: What advice would you give to someone contemplating
philosophy as a career?

S: I really have no advice for anyone else. I can only tell you some
things that concern me when I do philosophy.
I try to keep in mind some of my favorite maxims,
beginning with Seneca’s primum vivere, deinde philosophari --
“Live first, philosophize later.” To me that means that your
philosophy will be only as good as your life. Live as good and rich
a life as you can, and only on that basis do philosophy. My second
favorite is a note that Lenin scribbled in the margins of Hegel’s
Logic, which he was studying in Zurich in 1916: “Only be as
radical as reality itself.”

Philosophy can become an addiction – in fact it is an
addition, and a radical one. Not a bad addiction at that, but
hopefully only as addictive as life itself, and only as radical as
reality itself.

Everything depends on the experiences we bring to our
philosophy. Whose experiences am I talking about when I claim to
ask “radical” questions? Presumably, my own lived experience,
both individual and social, and hopefully it’s an experience that
goes deeper than just ideas. Philosophers run the risk of living on
the highest (and thinnest) point of the pyramid of power: the realm
of ideas, the “ideological” world where we create and interpret
symbols, compare them, argue about them -- and then go home.

I try to remember that underneath the realm of ideas there
is a material order of power: the economic order with its winners
and losers, the social order with its in-crowd and out-crowd, the
legal, political, and policing order – power all the way down, with
us philosophers and culturati perched on top of it, either oblivious
of the power under our butts, or enjoying it, or critiquing it and,
when necessary, changing it.

I ask myself if anyone can do philosophy today with a good
conscience without knowing something substantial about the
economic, social, and political orders (globally at that), and at least
wanting to have something to say as a philosopher about those
issues. How can I avoid including those orders of power within
the experience that I’m reflecting on? Power is there, just under my
philosophical butt, and it is my experience. How can I ignore it?

Or something simpler: I wonder if I can seriously do
philosophy today without knowing something substantial about
evolutionary human biology, about brain research, about the
burgeoning literature on consciousness – topics that our colleague
Suzanne Cunningham used to quietly urge on us. That kind of
information was not available to Plato and Aristotle, not even to
Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre -- maybe not even to Derrida for all
I know -- but it is available to us. I think some of the most
challenging questions about phenomenology -- which after all is a
first-person ontology – are being asked by analytic philosophers of
consciousness, not Husserlians and Heideggerians.

Like the natural sciences, philosophy isn’t a body of
knowledge so much as a method, an idealized set of steps for
gaining knowledge, making good decisions, enriching human
encounters, and for a full enjoyment of life. As a method, it’s
governed by a set of “transcendental imperatives,” such as: be
awake, sensitive, and inquisitive; be insightful, reasonable, and
honest; and be courageous and wise in making judgments:
courageous enough to live out the consequences, and wise enough
to redo all those steps ad infinitum. That may sound like a sermon,
but I’m just paraphrasing what Lonergan calls the transcendental
imperatives of cognitive inquiry. There are different sets of imperatives for praxis, for interpersonal encounters, for aesthetic
experiences, for religious observance, for all the ways of living
responsibly. From my years in the guild, I think that’s really all
philosophy is and does – and it’s quite a lot. Philosophy is co-
extensive with life. It begins with as rich an experience as possible,
and then tries to enrich it further, for oneself and others.
Philosophy is a matter of living life as humanly as possible.

# posted by Moviegoer @ 8:21 PM