As many know I have a bit of an appreciation for Renaissance philosophy. Not that I'm an expert by any means. But I take a perverse pleasure in reading about it - despite what I find to be in my mind rather lax analytic capabilities. What is always most interesting to me was that people of the Renaissance primarily studied all these newly discovered Greek and Latin texts so as to speak well. It reminds me of that old joke (somewhat unfair, somewhat not) about French people. They don't care what you say so long as you say it well. (Don't worry about bias - I have plenty of American and Canadian jokes as well) Of course to be a good rhetorician we must not only have good form. We must have good content. Although to be fair the old form/content distinction always was blurry. But it's a general good separation to keep in mind.
Why do I bring this all up?
Well over at The New Statesman there's an interesting book review of Arthur Schopenhauer's The Art of Always Being Right. Now Schopenhauer is one of those German philosophers who's name I frequently encounter but which I've not yet had time to dedicate any real study to. What little I know comes largely indirectly via studying Nietzsche. I know he was an anti-Hegelian and that he was a monist who conceived of reality as will. Contra most readings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was a monist who (from my perspective at least) appears to have moved in a neoPlatonic direction within Kantianism. The many things-in-themselves become a single, unitary, thing-in-itself which is will. Not too different from the Jewish en-sof or primordial will or the Plotinian One. Clearly that play between Neitzsche's will to power, Hegel, and Schopenhauer still are at work within modern Continental philosophy. Of course not being a Schopenhauer scholar, I can't say much of exactly how.
But back to rhetoric and Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer takes a rather pessimistic view of rhetoric. (Perhaps echoing Plato's view of sophists and poets?) Within this pessimistic view, he takes what some might term a Machiavellian view of rhetoric. I don't mean by that how Machiavellian necessarily viewed rhetoric. (Although Machiavelli certainly was part of that Renaissance culture "of speak well" and not "speak truth.") Rather I mean that Schopenhauer had a ruthlessly "realistic" view of rhetoric and its aims. Rhetoric as power play. To quote a quote of Schopenhauer's from the essay in question:
We must regard objective truth as an accidental circumstance, and look only to the defence of our own position and the refutation of the opponent's . . . Dialectic, then, has as little to do with truth as the fencing master considers who is in the right when a quarrel leads to a duel.
So once again, why do I bring this up? Well I've been thinking a bit about the whole Posner debate about reasons and rationalizations. I wonder if perhaps Posner really isn't just expressing a kind of Schopenhauer position. How often is philosophy really about reasoning in terms of searching for the truth and how much of it is merely rationalizing what we already "sense" or believe - if only on an unconscious level?
I raise that because it seems that in terms of actual positions, philosophy doesn't seem to have solved anything. There are philosophical "fads" for instance. And one adopts associated positions with respect to the basic position one adopts. One won't, for example, find logical positivists discussing the ethics of the absolute other, except to heap ridicule on it. Likewise the free will - compatibilist debate has been raging for centuries with no end in sight. When one adopts one position over an other it seems to have less to do with the strength of the arguments than the particular background one comes from.
Is philosophy merely apologetics? Albeit apologetics adroitly argued?
Don't get me wrong. I don't mind apologetics. But apologetics is most explicitly rationalization. That is, it doesn't pretend to argue for what one ought believe. Rather it argues that one can believe. It is concerned less with change that with warrant for where one already is. In a sense, perhaps religious apologetics, of whatever stripe, is much more honest than what we find among philosophers. Although the great "first" philosopher has his death and philosophy marked by a dialog titled, "The Apology." (Yes, I know he wasn't first and I have books on the pre-Socratics)
Once again, why do I bring this up?
The one thing I note in Heidegger is how he isn't as critical of earlier philosophers as one often suspects from his criticisms of metaphysics. Plato, Descartes and others took up the question of being. From what I can see, that is what Heidegger demands. That we uniquely take up the question of being. But what is the implication of this? That what we say isn't really concerned with the "truth" as such. (Yes, I recognize how that sounds, but bear with me)
What I mean by that is that even when we think we are concerned with truth, true representation, and so forth, we often really aren't. We are engaged in just the kind of rhetoric that Schopenhauer discussed and that was so prevalent in the Renaissance. Speaking well. Winning. Will to power. A quote of Hegel's I've had up in my sidebar probably matches this. "We do not want a thing because we reason; we find reasons for a thing because we want it. Mind invents logic for the whims of the will." I'm sure that was a statement of Hegel's that Schopenhauer might have agreed with. Perhaps not - he was after all an anti-Hegelian. But it seems similar. It is certainly similar to what Judge Posner argued.
Heidegger has an other quote that is interesting though and which goes directly against Posner. In Introduction to Metaphysics he wrote,
. . .granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, do someting with us?
It is the classic issue of what is the point of rhetoric. Is it the other? Or is it the self? Do we use it to open up reality to us? Or do we use it to close it off? What is key, I think, is that we ought be opening it up. I think that in practice, even when we think we are, we are actually closing it off. Which gets back to Heidegger's take on the great philosophers. Did they change themselves? Might we not ask that of Heidegger? Did philosophy make him a better person? Did his questioning change his views? Did it improve him?
I don't know.
My sense is a deep distrust of philosophy and rhetoric. Not because I think reasoning is bad. But because I think that apologetics without humility, without inquiry, without reinvention is bad. Ideally we ought to be progressing, not staying in place.
But that means that for rhetoric and by extension philosophy to be more than Schopenhauer said, there must be a will-for-truth. Not a will-to-truth. Rather we have to always be open to new thoughts and new inquiry. And rhetoric ought be what brings us there. I wonder how often it does though.
What's the difference between a "will-for-truth" and a "will-to-truth"?
That's a good criticism since I usually encounter the two terms meaning more or less the same thing. As I meant it, a will-for-truth is a passive reception of truth while a will-to-truth is inherently part of our creation. But obviously that's not an easy distinction to keep in place.
Consider Nietzsche's old conception of will-to-truth as a kind of nihilism arises because the claim to have a passive reception of truth really hides a kind of violence. Really it is their will "creating" truth. That is, when we most think we are being open to truth we are really trying to master truth. The difference is, I think, a recognition of truth as a living truth. Thus any attempt to be passively "accepting" of truth that simultaneously sees truth as "had" or "complete" is really doing violence.
In the context of my discussion of rhetoric in the above, and especially Posner's comments on reasons vs. rationalizations, I think the same thing can be seen. Often when we think we're being open to truth (following reasons) we're really trying to master truth. That is we provide rationalizations for what we already believe. We're merely doing what Schopenhauer said and engaging in rhetoric as a kind of act of violence. (The analogy to fencing is quite apt in a way) Violence as defense, for sure, but a defense of our will and not really a living truth.
Yet at the same time, while Nietzsche speaks of a will to power, the latter Heidegger adopts a near mystic passivity of silence to let truth manifest itself. So exactly who is being active and who is being passive (or for that matter who is being Platonic) isn't a straightforward as it sometimes seems.
An other way of looking at the issue is in terms of hermeneutics. Is there the acceptance of a hermeneutic circle? Traditional foundationalism of whatever sort, asserts there is some kind of absolute element that is true independent of ones place, ones thought, or ones context. The other view is that we are always within a world. It takes seriously a holism wherein truth is never independent of the one seeking. One is always caught in a hermeneutic circle and thus truth is never unveiled in a complete once and for all revelation. Because it is always tied to living beings, truth itself is living in a sense and thus not static. The unveiling of truth is never finished, never can be finished. Truth is always a "yet to come" revelation of which we catch glimpses.
The question thus becomes, what does it really mean to be open? How can one be passive, especially if we are trapped in a hermeneutic circle? To know even in part might, to some, implying knowing something. Surely even a partial revelation is still a revelation. An incomplete presence a presence. The question of openness thus is caught up in this odd interplay between passivity and action, with both sides seeming caught up in the debate.
I don't know if that helps or confuses things. The point is that will-for-truth is this openness to truth, but in an other sense so is will-to-truth. One implies a passive reception, the other an active constitution of the reception. We all agree in a kind of openness towards truth, expressed in our common sense regular attitude. And we all recognize the problem of sophistry and propaganda. Yet, at the same time, the problem I see in Posner often appears. When we think we are open, depending upon reasons, we often are rationalizing. How on earth do we get ourselves to avoid rationalizing and stick to reasoning. To be true to the truth rather than attempt to "create" the truth based upon what we already believe or worse yet want to believe. I can't answer that, and this whole post is really just a reflection of that.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure we can have reasons without rationalizations nor rationalizations without reasons. We like to keep the separated, but we can't. Openness is less a kind of true passivity, but a kind of fallibilism and humility that always recognizes there is more and always worries that we are rationalizing and tries to overcome it.
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