The Thinkers : Today (1)

"Two octopuses are talking," said Swara when she came after saying Basmalah and Salaam.

"First octopus: 'What do you like least about being an octopus?'

Second octopus: 'Washing my hands before dinner.'"

"Sometimes we excuse ourselves, 'We can't please everyone!'" Swara proceeded, "Nicholas Rescher writes, 'A canon is not only a contraption that goes 'boom' and projects shells—or an official in a cathedral church—but also a list of works accepted as authoritative in a certain field. And while the tales of the Greek fabulist Aesop (ca. 640–ca. 560 BC) do not figure on the established canon of philosophical books, they are nevertheless full of instructive philosophical ideas and lessons and in consequence not infrequently cited in philosophical discussions.

A splendid instance of the philosophically instructive stories we owe to Aesop is his fable about 'The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey.' It runs as follows,

'Once upon a time, an elderly man and his son were going to market with their donkey. As they were walking along by its side, a countryman passed them and said, 'You fools, what is a Donkey for but to ride upon?' So the Man put the Boy on the Donkey and they continued on their way. But soon they passed a group of men, one of whom said, 'See that selfish lad letting his father walk while he rides.' So the Man ordered his Boy to get off, and got on himself.

After a short distance they passed two women, one of whom said to the father, 'Shame on you for making your poor son walk while you ride.' And so, the Man puzzled about what to do, but at last took his Boy up before him on the Donkey. By this time, they had come to the town, and the passersby began to jeer and point at them. When the Man stopped and asked what they were scoffing at they replied, 'Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor donkey of yours with your hulking son?' The Man and Boy got off and tried to think what to do. After much thought they at last cut down a pole, tied the donkey’s feet to it, and raised the pole and the donkey to their shoulders. They went along amid the laughter of all who met them till they came to Market Bridge, when the Donkey, getting one of his feet loose, kicked out and caused the Boy to drop his end of the pole so that the Donkey fell off the bridge, and his fore-feet being tied together he was drowned. 'That will teach you,' said an old man who had followed them, 'Please all, and you will please none.'

The first and most obvious lesson here is that there is just no way of pleasing everyone: different people are going to have different opinions about how to proceed in any given situation, and no one resolution among such alternatives is going to satisfy everyone. So what to do?

Perhaps one can manage to minimize dissatisfaction. As we look the alternatif, the preference is that neither the man and the boy rides the donkey. So let us rule them out of contention. And as between (1) only the man rides; and only the boy rides (2), the superiority of (2) stands: the Man/Boy situation being symmetric here, one might as well let the Donkey decide—reflecting that larger truth that what matters is not just voting but who gets to vote.

The situation is also instructive in illustrating the limits of rational decision theory, which will, of course, yield the right output only when one provides the right input. In the end the key operative principles here are—or should be—as that the interests of people trump those of animals; frail elders can bear strain less well than healthy youths.

Presumably, then, the old man should by rights ride and the lad walk along. The focus on preferability rather than mere preference makes the approach of the philosopher not something rather different from that of the decision theorist.

And a further lesson also looms in the background. The donkey story is in a way profoundly emblematic of the situation of philosophy. It pivots on the fact that there are several mutually exclusive alternatives: the number of riders on the donkey can be 0, 1, or 2 and that’s it. But no matter which alternative is selected, there will be problems and possible objections—no alternative is cost free in this regard. The challenge is to carry out a costbenefit analysis—not to find an unproblematically cost-free option but to identify that alternative whose balance of assets over liabilities, advantages over disadvantages, plusses over minuses is optional.

Philosophy is much like that, says Rescher. Its issues always admit of alternative resolutions and none of them are without their problems and difficulties. The challenge is not that of finding the flawless resolution but of finding one that is preferable vis-à-vis the risk because its balance of assets over liabilities—of instructiveness over oddity—is an optimal one.

The philosopher’s work, is thus, primarily, one of assessment and evaluation. Often—and especially when the issue of modes of living are on the agenda—the philosopher is not called in to identify the alternatives: others (novelists, for example) are often better able to do that. The philosopher’s concern is criteriological—to explain and implement the standards that define the reasons for accounting one alternative as better than another. The task is to provide the materials on whose basis one can reasonably decide which side of the question has the strongest case in its favor.

"Philosophy, by tradition, is the field of inquiry that addresses 'the big questions' regarding our human nature and our place in the world’s scheme of things.

'The Greek Philosopher Pythagoras (ca. 570–ca. 490 BC) placed mathematics front and center in the field of philosophical deliberation. Aristotle tells us that the 'Pythagoreans, seeing that many structures of numbers characterized sensible bodies, supposed real things to be numbers .... For the attributes of numbers are present in the musical scale and in the heavens in many other things.' As Pythagoras and his school saw it, the ultimate realities of nature are not the transitory sensible items that fi gure in our everyday experience but the stable and unchanging quantitative regularities that characterize their operations. On such a doctrinal approach it is not Newton’s fallen apple but the Law of Gravity that always obeys, along with everything anywhere, that yields us insight into the nature of the real.

This line of thought, runs straight through the history of scientific philosophizing down to the present day. One of its most pointed articulations is the oft-cited dictum of the English physicist Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), 'When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.' The idea that only what is quantified can count as real knowledge of reality has been astir from philosophy’s earliest days. It is, however, far more often maintained than argued for. There is, after all, no really decisive reason for denying the qualitative dimension of human experience its instructive place in the cognitive scheme of things. The idea that if you can’t say it with numbers, then it’s not worth saying is hardly defensible. To paraphrase Hamlet: there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in mathematical philosophy.

The American poet and journalist, John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) was the nation’s most notable humorist before Mark Twain. A Washington hostess regarded him as 'deserving capital punishment for making people laugh themselves to death.' He earned lasting fame with his poem 'The Blind Men and the Elephant,' which tells the story of certain blind sages, those

Six men of Indostan

To learning much inclined

Who went to see the elephant

(Though all of them were blind).

One sage touched the elephant’s 'broad and sturdy side' and declared the beast to be 'very like a wall.' The second, who had felt its tusk, announced the elephant to resemble a spear. The third, who took the elephant’s squirming trunk in his hands, compared it to a snake; while the fourth, who put his arm around the elephant’s knee, was sure that the animal resembled a tree. A flapping ear convinced another that the elephant had the form of a fan; while the sixth blind man thought that it had the form of a rope, since he had taken hold of the tail.

And so these men of Indostan,

Disputed loud and long;

Each in his own opinion

Exceeding stiff and strong:

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong.

They conclude that the elephant is like a wall, snake, spear, tree, fan or rope, depending upon where they touch. None of blind men's description is correct for the whole elephant.

Philosophers are all too prone to accuse their colleagues of leaping to large conclusions on small evidence. The danger of this failing—detected more readily in others than oneself—is among the instructive lessons of this philosophical poem.

To be sure, one might attempt to overcome this circumstance via the idea that different accounts—seemingly discordant philosophical doctrines—all quite correctly characterize the truths of different realms of one all-embracing reality. Viewed in this light, reality is complex and internally diversified, presenting different facets of itself to inquirers who approach it from different points of departure. And with such an approach, diverse philosophical systems could seem as describing reality variably because they describe it in different aspects or regards. Everybody is right—but only over a limited range. Every philosophical doctrine is true more so—in its own way. In principle, the various accounts can all be superimposed or superadded. Apparently diverse positions are viewed as so many facets of one all-embracing doctrine; they can all be conjoined by 'but also.' Such a multifaceted reality doctrine would combine the several apparently discordant alternatives in a way that gives to each a subordinate part in one overarching whole. Reconciliation between diverse doctrines can thus be effected additively through the conjoining formula 'but furthermore in this regard,' even as the elephant is spearlike in respect to his tusks and ropelike in respect to his tail.

William James’s pluralism was of just this sort:

There is nothing improbable in the supposition that an analysis of the world may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts. In physical science, different formulae may explain the phenomena equally well—the one-fluid and the two-fluid theories of electricity, for example. Why may it not be so with the world? Why may there not be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all data harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choose between, or simply cumulate one upon another? A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as someone has said, a scraping of horses’ tails on cats’ bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different mode of description.

And so the sixty-four-dollar question arises: Are discordant philosophical views actually conflicting or are they mutually complementary—different components of one complex overall position?

It would, of course, be generous and irenic to take the view that everybody is right in part. But unfortunately this line does not look promising. For the reality of it is that philosophical views and positions are devised to conflict. Their very reasons for being of a given position in philosophy is to deny and contradict those discordant alternatives. And in the end we have little choice but to conjecture that the general reality of things is as our own limited experience of it shows it to be.

And so, now let's see 'Today's Thinkers' according to our contributors: Noam Chomsky, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zižek, Gloria Jean Watkins 'bell hooks', and Judith Butler.

Avram Noam Chomsky, born 1928, is a towering intellectual, famous for his pioneering work in linguistics. A rigorous American scholar and resolute campaigner, his influence extends from philosophy and cognitive science to international affairs. He was born into a multilingual, working-class Jewish family in Philadelphia. His father was a distinguished Hebrew scholar.

In 1945, Chomsky began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania and awarded a PhD from Pennsylvania University in 1955. In 1957, he published one of his most famous and influential works, Syntactic Structures. Over the next 20 or so years, Chomsky secured his reputation as 'the father of modern linguistics' in major works such as Aspects of The Theory of Language (1965) and The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1975), the latter a complex technical book that examines the underlying structures governing language use. However, Chomsky’s most significant contribution to the history of thought, developed from the late 1950s onward, relates to his theories on the human ability to master the complex rules of language.

In a radical departure from the prevailing view in the first half of the 20th century that language is learned, Chomsky put forward his groundbreaking theory of 'universal grammar,' arguing that in fact language is an innate human capacity that has developed out of the evolutionary process. He has further argued that certain rules of language structure are common to all languages.

Despite his towering academic status and the fact that he is a notoriously private person, it is Chomsky’s tireless political activism that keeps him in the global spotlight. Chomsky is a ferocious critic of US imperialism and in recent years has turned his attention to the Trump administration.The war in Vietnam (1955–1975) prompted his book The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967), which is a damning indictment of US intellectual culture. Since then, he has remained a resolute political and human-rights campaigner (highlighting atrocities in East Timor, Cambodia, and Turkey, for example). His focus has turned increasingly on the distortions and hypocrisy of Western ideology.

Jean Baudrillard, 1929–2007, a French guru of postmodernity, famous for his analyses of reality and simulation, he attracted media attention for his activism and provocative commentaries on global events and consumer society. His doctoral thesis was later published as his first major book, Le Système des objets (The System of Objects) (1968). In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), he made a radical break from his earlier Marxist-inspired economic analyses of consumer culture to focus more firmly on semiotics, signs, and society. But it was the publication of Simulacra and Simulation in 1981 that really launched his career.

Baudrillard questions the status of 'the real.' The 1999 film The Matrix, in which humans are simulated by machines, catapulted Baudrillard to cult status. The film makes various references to Simulacra and Simulation, though the philosopher claimed that these were based on misreadings of his text. In 1999 film, The TRuman Show, starring Jim Carrey, life is depicted as nothing more than a stage set, a simulation of reality— much like the replicated, 'hyperreal' worlds described by Jean Baudrillard.

Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004, most often associated with the form of textual analysis known as 'deconstruction.' A central concern of his was, by means of rigorous analysis, to unravel tensions and contradictions in different discourses. He was born in El-Biar, a suburb of Algiers in Frenchgoverned Algeria. His parents were Sephardic Jews, and he experienced discrimination from an early age.

In 1967, he published three of his most influential and important philosophical works: L'écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference), De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology),

and La Voix et le Phénomène (Speech and Phenomena).

Derrida is often closely associated with the concept of deconstruction.' As the name suggests, deconstruction is a philosophical strategy that aims to take apart the philosophical tradition, to dismantle common philosophical assumptions and prejudices to see the some of the puzzling but buried tensions that lie behind them. Later in his career, Derrida focused more explicitly on questions of ethics and was influenced by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Derrida’s way of thinking through ethical questions reveals something of his deconstructive impulses. For example, in his essay on the concept of forgiveness, he argues that what really demands forgiveness is the unforgivable.

Derrida died in a Paris hospital in 2004 of pancreatic cancer, which had been diagnosed the previous year. His work continues to provoke, to annoy, and to inspire scholars—not only in philosophy and literature, but in many other fields.

Richard Rorty, 1931–2007, was a philosopher in the American Pragmatist tradition. He argued ferociously against the claim that knowledge and language can simply and effectively 'mirror' the way that the world is.

Initially, Rorty worked firmly within the traditions of analytic philosophy. However, by the time of his first book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), he had turned his back squarely on this tradition, criticizing the idea of philosophy as a means of elucidating objective truths. The publication was an immediate success, projecting Rorty to fame, but it also caused major controversy. Rorty argued against the view held by philosophers since the 17th century that the mind could be considered a mirror that gave a true reflection of reality.

Susan Sontag, 1933–2004, one of the most famous American intellectuals of the postwar period, Sontag was a polymath: a philosopher, writer, filmmaker, and activist. Brazen and adversarial, she frequently changed her opinions and perspectives.

Sontag is known best for her essays and reviews that tackle a wide range of subjects, from modern culture and the media to illness, war, human rights, and politics. In 1966, she stepped into the limelight with Against Interpretation, a collection of essays that stages her assault on interpretative criticism: the role of criticism, according to her, should be 'to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.' The collection includes her first major work, 'Notes on ‘Camp' (1964), which analyzes 'high' and 'low' culture in the context of the gay community; it also includes reflections on the work of, among others, the writers and philosophers Albert Camus, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre and the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Later, in the 1980s, Sontag produced important commentaries on the philosophers Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin.

Hélène Cixous, born 1937, a leading voice in Poststructuralist feminist theory, she is a philosopher, novelist, poet, and playwright. She is best known for her écriture féminine, a theory of writing that focuses on sexual difference. Born in Oran, Algeria, Hélène Cixous is the daughter of an Austro-German mother and a French father of Jewish faith.

In the mid-1970s, Cixous wrote The Newly Born Woman (with Catherine Clément), 'Sorties,' and the work for which she is best known, 'The Laugh of the Medusa,' texts in which she developed the concept of écriture feminine (feminine writing). Influenced by the work of Derrida and by the belief that language can generate social change, this theory of writing focuses on sexual identity, difference, and bisexuality; it challenges the hierarchical oppositions on which Western epistemology is based (for example, man/woman, self/other, speaking/writing, nature/culture).

A hugely prolific writer, Cixous has produced dozens of works across diverse genres and disciplines, including philosophy, literary theory, poetry, and fiction. In France, she is especially revered as a playwright; her first play, written in 1975, was a reworking of Freud’s fascinating 'Dora' case. She has received several honorary doctorates and numerous prizes and awards, including, in 1994, the prestigious Légion d’Honneur.

We'll continue this on the next session, but before I go, let me tell you a joke, 'A mother mouse and a baby mouse were walking along, when all of a sudden, a cat attacked them. The mother mouse yelled, 'Bark!' and the cat ran away.

'See?' said the mother mouse to her baby. 'Now do you see why it’s important to learn a foreign language?'"

"And Allah knows best."

Citations & References:
- DK London, Philosophers - Their Lives and Works, Cobaltid
- Nicholas Rescher, A Journey through Philosophy in 101 Anecdotes, University of Pittsburgh Press
[Part 2]
[Previous Session]

Bahasa