Probably a fair number of my posts the last couple of weeks have touched on the notion of what philosophy is, what its value is, and so forth. I think part of that is my historic cynicism towards philosophy in general. No doubt partially due to my physics background and too many readings of Feynman. (He was notably critical of philosophy after an apparently disastrous class he took at MIT) I think with Feynman the problem was that he was naturally a pragmatist and felt the philosophers he encountered ignored the dictum of "for a difference to be a difference it must make a difference." As I think I remarked, it was always funny to me that Feynman's son became a philosopher. Anyway, I've been making the nature of philosophy a question of mine for a while, because I frequently wonder what the point is. It was in this context that I came upon a discussion of Putnam and Kant that I found quite interesting. The discussion arises out of the following passage of Kant's.
Hitherto the concept of philosophy has been a merely scholastic concept - a concept of a system of knowledge which is sought solely in its character as a science, and which has therefore in view only the systematic unity appropriate to science, and consequently no more than the logical perfection of knowledge. But there is likewise another concept of philosophy, a conceptus comicus, which has always formed the real basis of the term 'philosophy,' especially when it has been as it were personified and its archetype represented in the ideal of the philosopher. On this view, philosophy is the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason. (Critique of Pure Reason, 866)
Later on Kant says, "to neither of these powers may a preference be given over the other." These two "powers" are called by Kant the Schulbegriff or scholastic concept and the Weltbegriff or universal or cosmic concept. The old scholastic concept is the move towards making philosophy a science. You might recall that I touched yesterday on how artificial the divide between science and philosophy is. It seems people try to make philosophy more like science at times (Quine and before him the positivists being classic examples). However there is then the other move which attempts to take aspects of philosophy that appear unlike science and then show that this is always present within science. I think Kuhn, Feyerabend and others do this. This "other than science" is what Kant is getting at with Weltbegriff. One might call in the "human" in philosophy. When people start talking about meaning not in dry linguistic terms but in terms of notions being meaningful for us and for society, it is this second sense of philosophy they are appealing to.
Of course in the history of philosophy it often seems that the scholastic concept often rules over this other sense. Thus people look at philosophy (especially Analytic philosophy IMO) and ask, "so what?" The question becomes, what is the point? The tradition has become dead and dry, mere logic without content in a sense. The life of philosophy has died.
But when the opposite happens (as I think occurred far too often in the so-called postmodern tradition) we lose rigor are carefulness. Philosophy becomes akin to late night musings over life in the Freshman dorm. And that is just as bad.
I think Kant's second comment is quite apt. These two powers have to both be balanced within philosophy. In order for philosophy to flourish we have to have the rigor and the logic as well as the concern for a living meaningfulness to our philosophy. Putnam put it best I think.
If any further evidence were needed of the state of philosophy today, it would be provided by the hordes of intellectuals who complain that philosophy is overly 'technical,' that it has 'abdicated' from any concern with 'real' problems, etc. For such complaints have always occurred precisely when philosophy was significant and vital! . . . The sad fact is that good philosophy is and always has been hard, and that it is easier to learn the names of a few philosophers than it is to read their books. Those who find philosophy overly 'technical' today would no more have found the time or the inclination. . .to read one of the Critiques, in an earlier day. (Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, 132)
To that I'd add a Heideggarian point. It is not enough to simply read the important philosophers. One must take up in a serious way their questions. That is we must read them as if we were truly struggling with the issues and questions they were asking and investigating. That entails reading them closely with an eye to the phenomena itself, and not merely repeating their analysis. I think that's how Heidegger reads philosophers. Derrida too. However that also is exactly where they are criticized, with their readings being called misreadings. Which I think misses the entire point of reading philosophy.
As Kant puts it, speaking of the Weltbegriff, philosophy is concerned "with the relation of all knowledge to the essential aims of human reason." When we neglect the aim of a philosopher, we neglect the philosopher. I think that this entails that Weltbegriff is the aspect of philosophy that problemitizes questions and answers. That's what I think the Socratic Method was getting at, as I mentioned the other day.
Thus one might see the two essential powers of philosophy to be the side that answers, resolves, and systematizes in a rigorous "rational" fashion and the side that undercuts, questions, and looks for what is "transcendent."
Note that the above was inspired from the introduction to Putnam's Realism with a Human Face. I'll fully confess to getting the quotes from there as well. While Putnam is right about people being too lazy to read Kant's Critique I must confess that I find Kant to be the single most difficult philosopher to read. I can get lost and enraptured in philosophers famous for being difficult to read. I love reading Heidegger and Derrida, for instance. But Kant, I don't know what it is, but man I have to reread ever paragraph a dozen times to make even vague sense of it.
I tend to agree with your statements about Kant - I find him obscure to the point of tearful bordom at times, and at others, prone to complicate his - truly valuable - insights overly with his dialect. Then again, over two-hundred years of elapsed history will do that to most authors. As a generalized rule, I find anything between Aristotle and Nietzsche to be incredibly hard to appreciate, at least to the extent that I do feel they deserve.
This brings me to your comments of Heidegger and Derrida, which I also agree with. So often is the critique levelled at Derrida that he has misread something, that it seems the critics have very little sense of Derrida's entire project in his readings. Same goes for Heidegger, though I am less familiar with his works than Derrida's - it is unfortunate that inherited preconceptions about the overall gist of these thinkers popularly denegrates the validity of their actual work, which I am inclined to think that many fewer people have read than have claimed to have read - though it hardly precludes these people from offering their own negative opinions of these philosophers.
I tend to appreciate Rorty's assessment - which may possibly fall in line with Putnam's, who I have not read - that philosophy allows us to undercut the problematic issues bequethed us by tradition through new and creative adaptations of our language games, which are, afterall, the ground from which these problems flourish. That this process may be difficult is no slight to philosophy itself - for, the ability to understand the culturally embedded norms of our language and customs, to the extent that we may put them to novel and progressive uses, requires an acuity of thought and a rigorous examination of things that we have been given as "commonplace" or "common sense." And any attempt, within any social institution, to publically challenge the assumptions of common sense are likely to extremely difficult.
Now, I do not hold that 'difficult' must equal 'obscure.' I love reading Wittgenstein, personally, and I find many of his remarks to be quite challenging. But, though the initial rigor of digesting the material can be trying, it is in the application of his concepts to lived experience that gives his work its [astounding] value. John Dewey, another favorite of mine, comes to mind as well, as being a writer who can be difficult - in his more technical work, such as Experience and Nature - but who is always stressing the need of returning the results of philosophical inquiry to its use in human and social life. Although, for Dewey, he does much of the "application leg-work" himself, and produced an impressive ouvre of work that addresses both the abstract notions in philosophy and their very real ramifications for the experiences of "everyday" life. Dewey is often criticized by those of analytic training - much as Heidegger and Derrida are - for precisely this "grounding" of his philosophy, and dismissed by some as non-philosophical as a result.
With any hope of concision lost in this comment, I will end here. I suppose my overall point, which I take to be along the line of your post's, is that the purpose of philosophy cannot be so easily and narrowly construed or interpreted as many would hold it to be.
I tend not to be a fan of Rorty. I think Rorty's big failing is that he ends up making everything a reading in terms of "folk ideas" with an eye to then eliminating them. I think Peirce offers a way out of this. Further it really isn't clear to me that Rorty's irony solves much. Rorty often says that he basically believes what Putnam does and then Putnam goes and says all the ways he doesn't believe what Rorty does.
With regard to older philosophers, I honestly don't find them as bad as Kant. Leibniz and Descartes are, to me, extremely easy to read. Some of the Renaissance figures are difficult, mainly because they are using so much irony and imagery though. (Bruno's the worst of that lot IMO) Some of the medievals are difficult, but that's more because the style of philosophy they do is so alien to the modern world. Once you figure out the style of thinking then the prose isn't that bad. Aquinas isn't bad at all (IMO).
But I do agree that the greatest difficulty in philosophy is in getting people to think in fashions that aren't our common sense. In general the difficult philosophers with odd neologisms or unique uses of words are doing so precisely to avoid traditional thinking. That's also an other reason for my big dislike of appeals to intuition, which seem merely to be an appeal to common sense and then ignore the vagueness inherent in common sense.
I really need to read more Dewey too. I've been told that most characterizatiosn of him are false. Further he's one of the few pragmatists I've not engaged with carefully.
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