Radix Philosophy and Knowing Your Kant

The Talk Around the Pub

It seems that the Kantian sore of Perverse Egalitariansm and Larval Subjects is festering a bit. It is it a symptomatic lesion in the Body of Philosophy, or just a bloggist scratch that got an impurity or two in it, and in need of a little antiseptic. It brings to mind though something about argumentation, even in a bloggist environment, that goes right to the body of a philosopher, the way in which we experience the wholeness of arguments with the very sense of our well-being, when we think that we understand what we are arguing for. 

In the comments section  of Larval Subjects attempt to deal again with Kantian normativity, Mikhael repeats the authority of his reading of Kant, after the claim that someone simply is an embarassment:  

“You either don’t get it, or your pretend to not get it – you don’t understand such simple matters as “form” vs. “matter” in Kant’s philosophy in general – are you serious? For such a great reader of Kant, you seem to be spewing nonsensical readings of him right and left, I mean you’ve become a joke around the pub with “Have you read this latest comment by Levi about Kant?….I interpret my Kant the way most of Kant scholarship does, I’m not a genius with innovative ideas, I’m dull and boring – if you knew your Kant, you would see how regular and annoyingly mediocre my views are.”

It is not particular to Kant that I want to speak, but to simply the way that philosophy is discussed. I suppose we all feel this way. If someone disagrees with us (or “us”), they simply do not understand us (it is not that we are wrong). When they show us that we were wrong, if ever, we realize that we didn’t understand us. We all grow frustrated when disagreement cuts to the very roots of our suppositions. And the same may be said when it cuts the very roots of a thinker we greatly admire.

Personally, I find it difficult though, in the particular case of the Kant Krew at Perverse Egalitarians, is that the appeal is ultimately to a kind of “you are an idiot”, “you don’t even understand the very basics of Kant” when Kant is criticized to the root. All this, while they also fall back upon the idea that they themselves are not even Kantians, that they are just telling the world the orthodox position of Kant, in fact regurgitating it in a fashion. It is not so much the entrenchment of such a position I am troubled with (“I am simply repeating Kant Orthodoxy to you, if you question it it is merely that you do not understand him”), but the unengaged nature of this kind of talk. It is as if one is no longer even actively thinking about Kant, taking a critical view, pulling the threads apart, running it through your fingers. If the thought is dead in your hands, and one is simply repeating Orthodoxy stuff you read in commentaries (and how much of philosophy is done like this, wherein one talks like one knows because one repeats what someone “who knows” says), what is the point?

The Inculcation of Vision

On the other hand, I too have had my difficulties with Levi’s appropriations, on occasion; they can seem wild, shoot from the hip, ripping passages/principles out from the rest of the living argument. And certainly many people grow frustrated with the pinpoints of my own criticism, not seeing the value that I see in taking down the building at this one particular mortis and tenon at which I may hammer endlessly. I think that part of the problem is that much of philosophy is actually ecstatic. That is, we go through the discipline of rigorous argument, architecturally linking an entire network of propositions, defitions, axioms, conclusions, so that we can SEE something. Once you have inculcated yourself within a philosopher, or a school/branch of philosophy, the world is seen differently. It glows with potentialities and connections it did not otherwise have. (Are these chimera, or radiations of the Real itself, how things really are but as hidden?) When others question the very foundations of our observatory edifice, hacking at the base before the argument can even get off the ground, they are questioning our experience, our visioning of the world, a world we see more coherently (ultimately, more beautifully) than before.

This is the case I believe even with the most austere of analytic school logic chopping, and of course with the poetic intoxications of Continental melodizing and remixing.

When people question to the radix, they cut to the Umwelt of the philosopher, perhaps we can say. Proponents find this disturbing because “Just wait! Look and see what it can do, before you try to destroy it! Let it get off the Ground!” Or, more so, “No, you don’t see it! You don’t see how it works!” The radical questioners though say: “Not that world!” In this way our philosophical disagreements are not much different than those that make up the rest of discussions with others. They are a question of seeing.