Philosophical Tales: Being an Alternative History Revealing the Characters, the Plots, and the Hidden Scenes that make up the True Story of Philosophy

283 Pages·2008·6.72 MB·English

by  Martin Cohen(auth.)

Philosophical Tales
Philosophical Tales: Being an alternative history revealing the characters, the plots, and the hidden scenes that
make up the True Story of Philosophy Martin Cohen © 2008 Martin Cohen ISBN: 978-1-405-14036-2
Martin Cohen is a teacher and writer specializing in philosophy, ethics,
and education, with a special interest in computing. His books include
101 Philosophy Problems (3rd ed., 2007) and 101 Ethical Dilemmas (2nd ed.,
2007), Political Philosophy (2001), No Holiday (2006), and Wittgenstein’s
Beetle (2005). He has been editor of The Philosopher since 1995.
Philosophical Tales
Being an alternative history revealing the
characters, the plots, and the hidden scenes that
make up the True Story of Philosophy
Martin Cohen
Illustrations by
Raúl Gonzáles III
© 2008 by Martin Cohen
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First published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2008
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohen, Martin, 1964–
Philosophical tales / Martin Cohen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-4036-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-4037-9
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy–History. I. Title.
B72.C58 2008
190–dc22
2007038433
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CONTENTS
Forward! viii
How to Use this Book x
Philosophical Illustrations xiii
The Tales
I The Ancients 1
1 Socrates the Sorcerer (469–399 BCE) 3
2 The Different Forms of Plato (ca. 427–347 BCE) 7
3 Aristotle the Aristocrat (384–ca. 322 BCE) 14
II More Ancients 27
4 Lao Tzu Changes into Nothing (6th–5th C. BCE) 29
5 Pythagoras Counts Up to Ten (ca. 570–495 BCE) 33
6 Heraclitus Chooses the Dark Side of the River (ca. 5th C. BCE) 41
7 Hypatia Holds Up Half of the Sky (ca. 370–415 CE) 45
III Medieval Philosophy 51
8 Augustine the Hippocrite (354–430 CE) 53
9 St. Thomas Aquinas Disputes the Existence of
God (1225–1274) 61
IV Modern Philosophy 73
10 Descartes the Dilettante (1596–1650) 75
11 Hobbes Squares the Circle (1588–1679) 82
12 Spinoza Grinds Himself Away . . . (1632–1677) 89
V Enlightened Philosophy 97
13 John Locke Invents the Slave Trade (1632–1704) 99
14 The Many Faces of David Hume (1711–1776) 107
15 Rousseau the Rogue (1712–1778) 123
16 Immanuel Kant, the Chinaman of Königsburg (1724–1804) 132
v
CONTENTS
VI The Idealists 139
17 Gottfried Leibniz, the Thinking Machine (1646–1716) 141
18 Bishop Berkeley’s Bermuda College (1685–1753) 155
19 Headmaster Hegel’s Dangerous History Lesson (1770–1831) 163
20 Arthur Schopenhauer and the Little Old Lady (1788–1860) 171
VII The Romantics 179
21 The Seduction of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) 181
22 Mill’s Poetical Turn (1806–1873) 188
23 Henry Thoreau and Life in the Shed (1817–1862) 193
24 Marx’s Revolutionary Materialism (1818–1883) 199
VIII Recent Philosophy 205
25 Russell Denotes Something (1872–1970) 207
26 The Ripping Yarn of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) 214
27 Heidegger’s Tale (and the Nazis) (1889–1976) 221
28 Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Color Pinker (ca. 1900–1950) 231
29 B eing Sartre and Not Defi nitely Not Being Beauvoir
(1905–1980 and not 1908–1986) 239
30 Deconstructing Derrida (1930–2004) 245
Scholarly Appendix: Women in Philosophy, and
Why There Aren’t Many 251
Key Sources and Further Reading 259
Acknowledgments 268
Index 269
vi
Philosophers are kind-hearted sorts of chaps, willing to help others into
“the paragraphs,” but there is still something mad about them, with their
“ludicrous stiff solemnity and air of paragraph-importance.” They pity
past generations, who lived when the System was presumably not fi nished,
and when therefore unbiased objectivity was not yet possible. But when you
ask them about the new System they always put you off with the same
excuse: “No, it is not yet quite ready. The System is almost fi nished, or at
least under construction, and will be fi nished by next Sunday.”
(Søren Kierkegaard, Postscript)
vii
FORWARD!
Why does anyone start to read philosophy? Yet I myself was introduced
to philosophy by three books. The fi rst was André Malraux’s Man’s Estate
(La Condition Humaine) in translation. The second was Bertrand Russell’s
History of Western Philosophy, and the third was Plato’s Republic.
Naturally one did not read these books. Man’s Estate is a typically
French ornate work of little purpose. Wordy, complex, and dull. Russell
is far, far too long, like a lecture that should have ended an hour ago. And
Plato’s Republic, although full of ideas, seems to be written in a kind of
code. Nonetheless, each book served a useful purpose. The fi rst, although
unreadable, was small and imposing enough to carry around. The second
was informative, if rather soporifi c, and the third was somehow fascinat-
ing if rather strange and resolutely obscure.
But here we have Philosophical Tales, which I hope can combine all
three functions. The three positive ones, that is. It is small enough to carry
around (and impress people). It is quite informative, and lastly (most
importantly), it is full of strange and obscure philosophical titbits.
Now some people will say that they are too advanced to need titbits,
they want full-blown lengthy treatises. Why should someone who wants
to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in the original gobbledegook need
to know that he considered coffee to be poisonous and rolled himself
three times in his sheets every night before sleeping? Why would someone
who could understand Hegel’s Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit) want to know that he came up with his theory that society
is rooted in confl ict while working as a schoolteacher? Or why even that
that quintessential British rationalist, John Stuart Mill, exponent of the
dry theory known as ‘utilitarianism’, actually considered poetry to be the
“most philosophic of all writing”? So what, if Mill wrote to his friend,
Wordsworth, author of the “daffodils” poem, to say that he had shown
him that poetry “is truth,” not individual and local, but general; not
“standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by
passion.” For this, the conventional histories tell us, was an aberration, a
momentary weakness.
So here is an alternative account of philosophers with human frailties,
a portrait that may sometimes undermine their status as moral arbiters,
sometimes as path-breaking theorists. But then, for all people tell us,
viii
FORWARD!
philosophers are not a separate race. They are creatures like the rest of
us, created on this planet (even if they often claim authority over it),
children growing into men and women with experiences, infl uences, and
most evidently, prejudices. Aristotle did not refl ect Greek views of racial
superiority – he invented them. ( John Locke and Bishop Berkeley were
also aware of the dubious nature of their profi ts from the slave trade.)
Marx did not spend his time solely in the British Library, but liked his
cigars, his beer, and his women too, more so in fact than providing for
his children (several of whom died of malnutrition).
These personal details do not speak only of unimportant trivialities,
but give insights into the ‘big picture’. For as Sherlock Holmes remarked,
in the Case of Identity, “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little
things are infi nitely the most important.”
At the same time, the ‘true story’ of philosophy is less the story of
individuals than of ideas, and more particularly, ideas being stolen, bor-
rowed, and twisted. It is interesting to see that Descartes’s great cogito
really came from Augustine, whose interests were not the foundations of
knowledge at all. (Augustine was content to think his thoughts were
divinely inspired.) Or more recently that Wittgenstein borrowed his mys-
terious category of ‘things that must remain silent’ from another Austrian
fantasist called Otto Weininger.
And it is the story of ideas lost too, so that although Plato had raised
the possibility that women might have the ‘same souls’ as men, Aristotle
successfully came up with good philosophical reasons as to why only
men’s ideas should hold court (explaining that women have fewer teeth,
no souls, and their hearts do not beat), and it is his assumptions that have
shaped philosophy ever since. So here women will play only a bit part.
Hypatia, Harriet Taylor Mill, Mrs. Marx, and Sartre’s companion appear,
but only fl eetingly, only in the background. Would that it were not so!
But men wrote the history of philosophy, and history is where our tales
come from.
ix
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Did Plato really write those Socratic Dialogues – or was it Socrates?
Why is it a bit doubtful that Descartes ever really said “I think therefore I
am”?
– and what has Sartre got against waiters anyway?
Philosophical tales: stories, fi ctions, falsehoods. Untruths, misrepresenta-
tions, canards, lies, fi bs, whoppers. Or merely mis-statements, prevarica-
tions, narratives not entirely based on fact. This is a book that collects,
deconstructs, and relates the great philosophical tale. And although I have
tried to be ‘scrupulously accurate’, there is far less agreed upon about
philosophers, let alone philosophy, than its professors and luminaries
would have us believe, and so nothing in this book can be taken uncriti-
cally, as the end of the matter. It is, instead, an attempt to open up the
debates, to open up the decisions that the ‘powers-that-be’ like to impose.
In other words, it is a kind of ‘alternative’ history of philosophy – the
philosophical approach applied to philosophy itself. Do not look here for
the generally accepted view, the ‘everyone agrees’ version – that is for
the other ten thousand books, the ten thousand experts to repeat. Here
we want something interesting precisely because it is different. After all,
philosophy is a lot more interesting than many of its dull exponents would
have us believe.
Where do great philosophers come from? And where do they get their
ideas? Who decides what is important, and what is not? Is it just happen-
stance that there are almost no women, just lots of wealthy, aristocratic
men? Did the Chinese and Indian philosophers really have so little infl u-
ence on Europe? Why is Descartes’s ‘modern’ philosophy full of back-
wards-looking references to God? Is Hegel (as Schopenhauer alleged) a
fool who could not write, or simply too diffi cult for most of us? Or is
there a need for some Marxist-style deconstruction of the whole edifi ce
of knowledge to be undertaken?
Philosophy is supposed to be about asking diffi cult questions, taking
‘nothing for granted’. Yet this is not, it turns out, the approach that phi-
losophy wants applied to itself. Instead, the ‘debates’ of the subject are
handed down from on high, carved in stone, as are the great philosophers.
x