Unmourned Funeral: Chapter 1

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CHAPTER 1
GOING UNDERGROUND

Who killed philosophy?

Philosophy bestows this boon upon us; it makes us joyful in the very sight of death, strong and brave no matter in what state the body may be, cheerful and never failing though the body fail us.
Seneca, letter to Lucilius.

The term “Philosophy” is derived from an Ancient Greek portmanteau word. If we provisionally respect the famous comment by Alfred North Whitehead – who co-wrote the Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell – to the effect that all philosophy since Plato has been merely footnotes to the great Athenian (whose name means ‘the broad-shouldered one’) then we will also respect Plato’s etymology and understand the word as he and his peers would have understood it.

The word “philosophy” can be uncontroversially rendered from Ancient Greek as ‘the love of wisdom’. Philēin is a verb meaning “to love”, Sophōs a noun meaning “wisdom”. Note that it is wisdom philosophy pursues, not truth. Some truths cannot be known, and it is a mark of wisdom to know which ones. And so philosophy is a love of wisdom, with all the elopements and secret affairs and betrayals love can bring with it.

Diogenes Laertius, the 3rd-century Roman biographer of the preceding Greek philosophers, gives a charming lesson in etymology:

“For formerly what is now called philosophy (philosophia) was called wisdom (sophia), and they who professed it were called wise men (sophoi), as being endowed with great acuteness and accuracy of mind; but now he who embraces wisdom is called a philosopher (philosophos).”

Another vignette concerning the classical definition of philosophy can be found in George Stuart Fullerton’s 1906 primer, An Introduction to Philosophy:

“The Greek historian Herodotus (484-424BC) appears to have been the first to use the verb ‘to philosophise’. He makes Croesus tell Solon how he has heard that he ‘from a desire for knowledge has, philosophising, journeyed through many lands’. The word ‘philosophising’ seems to indicate that Solon pursued knowledge for its own sake, and was what we call an investigator. As for the word “philosopher” (etymologically a lover of wisdom), a certain somewhat unreliable tradition traces it back to Pythagoras (about 582 – 500BC). As told by Cicero, the story is that, in conversation with Leon, the ruler of Phlius, in the Peloponnesus, he described himself as a philosopher, and said that his business was an investigation into the nature of things.”

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates has praise for speech-writers and rhetoricians whose “compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them”. Socrates gives them a measured accolade:

“Wise, I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God alone. Lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest and befitting title.”

If we can hold fast to a definition of philosophy as a love of wisdom (and despite the unsettling effect of Socrates’ revelation that definition is ultimately never possible) then we ought at least to offer a provisional definition of the word’s roots. What of Philēin, love? It is better to be discrete; philosophy is the preserve of the lover, and wisdom the obscure object of desire. We shall discretely pass love by, and leave lovers be. What, though, of wisdom, Sophōs?

If we accept a simple and successive triad of information, knowledge, and wisdom, then the first should be refined into the second which is then available to be transmuted into the third. Wisdom, surely, is a good, and philosophy should be both midwife to and steward of wisdom today as she was during the classical era, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Instead, as noted, philosophy now scrubs the floors she used to walk in all her finery.

Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now…
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West.

Philosophy in the Western world is withering on the vine for several reasons. Technological (STEM) studies have long replaced it in terms of pragmatic relevance to the modern, post-Industrial Revolution world. More, now that philosophy is part of a canon which is in the process of being “decolonised” by the intellectually ham-fisted “woke” generation, and also being downplayed in its home territory of Europe to accommodate a contemporary Islam which will not tolerate intellectual enquiry, perhaps she is finished. But death may not be the end, provided, like Orpheus, you have a reason to descend into the realm of the shades. And something to bring back.

Nietzsche notes that the philosophical wanderer:

“…desires a long period of darkness, an unintelligible, hidden, enigmatic something, knowing as he does that he will in time have his own morning, his own redemption, his own rosy dawn… Yes, verily he will return; ask him not what he seeks in the depths…”

Philosophy has gone underground before. Paradoxically, given their hatred of philosophical enquiry, both Islam and the Medieval Western Church were stewards of a hidden treasure trove of philosophy during what Petrarch termed the “Dark Ages”, including the Platonic corpus Marcilio Ficino was tasked with translating by Lorenzo de Medici. Before 1462, Plato’s Timaeus was effectively the only Platonic text to have passed across 18 centuries from Athens to Italy. The Renaissance was classical philosophy’s awakening on the arrival of the rest of the Dialogues and letters and the ability, finally, for philosophy – and theology – to question Aristotle and for Humanism to blossom. Unfortunately, this was something of a high point for philosophy (the Enlightenment notwithstanding) and it is not quite so encouraging a tale since. Thirty years ago, Copenhaver and Schmitt wrote in Renaissance Philosophy:

“Philosophy no longer plays a large part in the pedagogic formation of an educated public in the English-speaking world, but things were very different in the Renaissance.”

We will see later how the culture liberated by a Renaissance is being co-erced into the corresponding Denaissance we see around us today. What does the term “educated public” mean now? Education has almost been destroyed and the earth salted. Any pattern or mode of thinking even approaching the rigorous techniques and epistemological protocols laid down by centuries of white philosophical enquiry is a poisoned well. Just how capable of thought is today’s “educated public” compared with that of the Renaissance? Nietzsche writes the following concerning general education in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks:

“A time which suffers from so-called ‘general education’ but has no culture and no unity of style in her life hardly knows what to do with philosophy.”

And so, what should we do for philosophy? What can she do for herself? What has she done to deserve saving?

So it seems that there is no field of investigation left over for philosophy, although from antiquity it has been considered the fundamental science.
Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

In his 1809 book Philosophy and Pedagogy, Paul Natorp writes a premonitory obituary for his discipline:

“At first philosophy hid in her womb the germs of all sciences; but once she had given birth to them and given them motherly care during their infancy, and once they had, under her tutelage, become mature and great, she is not averse to watching them go out into the big world in order to conquer it. For a while she watches them with loving care, perhaps now and then with a soft warning word that neither can nor wishes to restrict their newly won independence; eventually, however, she quietly withdraws to her retirement corner, from where one day, scarcely noticed and scarcely missed, she will have vanished from the world.”

And so philosophy is in the position of an employee who, having trained her own replacement, now sees herself replaced. Science may utilise basic philosophical principles, or at least principles originally clarified by philosophy, but it has no need of the discipline in itself, any more than a civil architect beginning a new project needs to read Vitruvius’ de Architectura for anything other than personal pleasure. Kant, for example, is often seen as vital to the development of science, but if he had choked to death in his crib, the world would still be exactly the same.

David Hume gives another clue as to why philosophy brought about her own redundancy and disciplinary demotion:

“But may we not hope that philosophy, if cultivated with care, and encouraged by the attention of the public, may carry its researches still further, and discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations?”

Hume got his wish, eventually, but it was called psychology. When science declared its independence from philosophy over the course of the Enlightenment, what was left to the former handmaiden of theology, the deposed queen of the sciences? If this separation were viewed as a modern divorce, then science got the kids, the car, the house and the pension while philosophy was sent packing with an old cardboard box full of odds and ends, a three-stringed guitar, some CDs with cracked cases, and Dad’s old radio. In philosophy’s box were the things science no longer had much use for, including morality and metaphysics. As technology raged, philosophy suddenly became rather clumsy and maladroit, unable to compete in a world no longer of ideas but of consumer items. Philosophy became an old farm-horse, unable to work and put out to grass.

Since the schism in the 17th and 18th centuries that saw theology’s erstwhile handmaiden dispossessed by science and its handmaiden, technology, philosophy was been seen by an industrialising world as increasingly meaningless, an antiquarian pursuit for louche gentlemen. It did resist to an extent as a discipline in the 20th century, but only due to a small collection of genuine thinkers, lovers of wisdom, plus a workshop built at the cost of philosophy’s taking its lead from industrialization and becoming what we might call “Taylorised”.

We shall proceed to a standardization of the intellectuals; we shall manufacture them as in a factory.
Nikolai Bukharin, The ABC of Communism.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was the man who told Henry Ford to change his production process so that one man didn’t build a car, but rather many men made many cars by reducing their work to one stage only of the construction process. So it was with 20th-century philosophy, whose leading exponents used to be like decathletes, able to perform in many different areas, but have since been forced to specialise as academia took on a structure which aped the production line of the factory.

Schopenhauer notes that:

“[M]en who concentrate their whole power and their whole knowledge upon one limited field… may be compared with those Geneva workmen of whom one makes only wheels, another only springs, and a third only chains. The philosopher, on the other hand, is like the watchmaker, who alone produces a whole out of all these…”

Spengler finds “the modern tendency of over-specialisation which has unreasonably subdivided Western research into a number of separate branches”. The resultant standardisation, for Spengler, “prevented the big problems from ever being seen”.

Whereas philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Arthur Schopenhauer, and even quasi-philosophers such as Montaigne and Freud, were able and competent to write in any number of areas and fields, 20th-century philosophy became something of a production line of specialists: Moral philosophers and philosophers of mind, deconstructionists and philosophers of language, analytic philosophers and logicians. As brilliant as Wittgenstein undoubtedly was, his philosophy was more or less autistic. He had no interest in the history of his trade. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is ex cathedra. The more specialised the philosopher, the further he is from humanity.

Philosophy lost her ability to dally in the square with Socrates, to involve herself in the affairs of men (existentialism notwithstanding) and became just another obsessive affair pursued by a vanishing type of man – like collecting old jazz albums or vintage cars – and not an important one at that. The word “Philosophy” kept a kind of brand-based cachet as books sprang up on the philosophy of science, the philosophy of business, the philosophy of history, but this was still a demotion. Philosophy had gone from being theology’s handmaiden to fulfilling the role of a type of management consultant.

This was ever philosophy’s fate, to be dismembered and sold off piecemeal. When the Lady Philosophia visits Boethius’ cell in the great 6th-century translator’s prison diaries, The Consolation of Philosophy, Philosophy’s robe, woven by herself from “imperishable fabric… has been torn by the hands of violent persons, who had each snatched away what he could clutch”. Philosophy goes on to explain the mistake made by those who have rent her garment and stolen the pieces of cloth:

“They tore in pieces the garment which I had woven with my own hands, and, clutching the torn pieces, went off, believing that the whole of me had passed into their possession.”

Philosophy should never specialise, as Saint Augustine recognised in the Confessions:

“I should not chase after this or that philosophical sect, but should love Wisdom, of whatever kind it should be; that I should search for it, follow hard upon it, hold on to it and embrace it with all my strength. That was what stirred me in that discourse, set me alight and left me blazing.”

So, from theology’s excommunicated divine attendant to science’s redundant lab assistant, from exile in the universities to decolonisation on today’s campus, philosophy is finally breathing her last. But who killed her? We have motive, we have the rough place and time, we have a victim, but do we have a putative murderer?

The foolish pair, thus hoping to become rich all at once, deprived themselves of the gain of which they were day by day assured.
Aesop, The Hen and the Golden Eggs.

Nietzsche, in The Dawn, naturally finds Christianity responsible if not for the final death of philosophy, then for the oppression that first brought on the fever:

“In Christianity we may see a great popular protest against philosophy: the reasoning of the sages of antiquity had withdrawn men from the influence of the emotions, but Christianity would fain give men their emotions back again.”

From the point of view of science, as sad as she was to see her old helpmeet fall on troubled times, Philosophy just couldn’t pull her weight any longer, like a faithful but lame family retainer. Stephen Hawking, in his 2010 book The Grand Design, declared philosophy dead, principally because she failed to take science sufficiently seriously, leading her main practitioners in directions which failed to take the importance of science into account. This is both absurdly Whiggish and monomaniacally technocratic, as though intellectual progress were some kind of sporting contest.

This is what Heidegger warns of in The Question Concerning Technology, that science frames everything as a scientific question. To a hammer – a tool Heidegger refers to – everything looks like a nail. Hawking’s assumption is that philosophy, as it existed as a sub-set in the proto-scientific project, was only ever there to serve science, as though the end of philosophy’s tenure as handmaiden to theology was just a career move. Science’s provisional arm, technology, also has its own apprentice in technocracy. As we shall see, the mechanical metaphor takes over to such an extent with the technocrat, that technocracy itself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. To the technocrat, every scheme is valid as long as it is technocratic. This is the same thinking employed by Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons. Because the latest goofy device he has purchased to catch his prey is from ACME, it will definitely work this time.

To the growing list of philosophy’s enemies, Christianity and science must be joined by Islam. As we shall see, Islam essentially had one philosophical debate, and that was a thousand years ago. The result killed philosophy in the Islamic world and, after a Reich of ignorance, is joining forces with those for whom philosophy’s use is not just at an end, but whose continued existence may pose a threat as we enter a Denaissance, an Age of Unreason.

In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy because it could not stop it. It could not stop it because it was as yet disorganised, and poorly armed for terror… But as soon as Islam had an ardent mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path.
Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

We may be concerned with the death of philosophy in the West, but for the Islamic world that particular bereavement occurred over a millennium ago. We will look in depth at Islam and philosophy, particularly Robert R. Reilly’s book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, in Chapter 5. This lays out the history of the radical epistemological divide between Islam and the West, the implications for philosophy of the Muslim rejection of reason, and how this ingrained Weltanschauung is a spectre coming back to haunt Europe.

The implications of Islam’s rejection of reason in favour of the raw exercise of power aside contains a salient element, one which echoes the final conversations in Socrates’ death-cell in the Phaedo. A feature commonly found in Muslim rhetoric, and since we are concerned with death, shows an essential difference between Islam and the West. Essentially, Muslims do not fear death as non-Muslims do. As Nietzsche writes in The Antichrist, Islam “at least assumes it is dealing with men”.

We know that there is a morbid strand within Islam which leads some commentators to label it a “death cult” and this is entirely understandable. This strand demonstrably exists, and a longing for death clearly haunts Islamic ideology where it really only inhabits the extreme fringes of pessimistic, “Schopenhauerian” philosophy in the West, or is a valid part of such a philosophical system as Heidegger’s.

There is a glint of the scimitar in modern Islam’s attitude towards philosophy. Death is ever-present in the Muslim mindset in a way alien to those in the West outside esoteric and existential works. For most Westerners, death is natural or accidental but – the vanishingly small instances of the death penalty in the West notwithstanding – rarely punitive. For the Muslim, extremist or not, death is a ruling principle of life because it can be taken away by the operations of jurisprudence, both the ultimate arbiter in Islam and divinely sanctioned, which means divinely mandated. Reilly quotes Libyan reformist Dr. Muhammad al-Houni, who believes Islam must choose between severing ties with the West or with:

“…the religious legacy of the Middle Ages, in order for their philosophy to be a philosophy of life and freedom, and not one of death and hatred.”

Philosophy was killed off in the Muslim world, and a millennium later many Muslims would be quite happy for philosophers to be killed for blasphemy. At the time of writing, French philosopher Robert Redeker is still in hiding and under police protection, effectively from Islam, for his 2006 article in Le Figaro critical of Islam and disrespectful of Mohammed. Inquiry into reality – philosophy’s stock-in-trade – is a gross impertinence to Allah, and such things do not stand under Islam. Muslims are not trying to out-think the West, paradoxically, by denying the validity of inquisitive thought, as a 2005 recording of an Al-Qaeda terrorist makes clear concerning the conflict between the dar al Islam and the dar al harb:

“The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates, Platonic ideals, nor Aristotelean diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.”

A fatwa was issued by a leading 13th-century scholar of Mohammed’s sayings, the Hadith, when he was asked whether it was permissible to study philosophy. In part, the document reads:

“All those who give evidence of pursuing the teachings of philosophy must be confronted with the following alternatives: either execution by the sword, or conversion to Islam.”

The effects of a philosophical struggle which ended in 11th-century Spain are still with us. In fact, as Francis Fukuyama said of the French Revolution, it may still be too early to tell what they are. The one certainty is that Islam has no interest in defeating the West philosophically in Western terms. Instead, it gradually Islamises Europe and is so far proving adept not only at steadfastly refusing to integrate, but in forcing the host nations (“host” here to be understood in parasitic terms) to adapt to their demands. What will happen to philosophy – and indeed to philosophers – as the crescent rises remains to be seen.

What the Ash’arite Muslim sect did to philosophy in the 11th century, students and faculty of what used to be a proud university tradition are repeating as the new assassins scale the walls, killing philosophy not with the scimitar but with the seminar.

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
Lord Byron.

Christianity stifled philosophy but failed to smother her. Arabia cut off her head early in the dar al Islam but failed to kill her in the West (indeed, inadvertently helped her, via the court of the Medici). The Industrial Revolution and the resultant surge in technological advance de-fanged theology’s one-time handmaiden and left her redundant, exiled in the universities, where she languished until a new hit squad formed and looked for a way to scale the walls of the ivory towers with daggers between their teeth. It is bitterly sad that, after having fought Titans for so long and remaining bloodied but unbowed, philosophy should receive the killing thrust from liberal Western children, intellectually negligible, emotionally unstable, cultural self-harmers who despise themselves because they are too genuinely and natively stupid to understand the philosophy they wish to see removed from the syllabus.

The mutations of a genetic strand of politico-cultural DNA which stretches back to Romanticism paired off this century and became cultural Marxism on one Petri-dish, and “woke” culture on another. This combination was always engineered to destroy philosophy, not as a primary target but as a coalmine canary, a leading sub-set of the Humanities in general, these being constituted almost entirely of works written by white men.

For Western philosophy is – excepting and accepting the Berber St. Augustine – a white man’s affair. This is the essential accusation levelled at the Humanities in the West, as though the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution would have been hurried along if only the ratiocinative preparatory work had been done by Angolan epistemologists and the cream of Turkmenistan’s essayists. But it is the whiteness of philosophy which is its engine-room. It is also whiteness which set the terms of engagement, terms very different from those employed to kill off white philosophy. Before the lethal injection is given, what could the new breed learn from their victim?

The history of Liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.

The post-modernes, the children’s crusade of “woke”, would do well to heed the two great Platonic lessons: Socratic humility and the art of debate. Even though some of the Platonic dialogues settle into monologue (not least the most famous, Republic and Timaeus), they almost all begin as gentle debate between citizens. This often leads to a type of epistemological stalemate, and it is this that nourishes the legend of Socrates as he who is wise because he knows that he knows nothing. We will revisit this at the Delphic Oracle.

The post-modernes, as is well known, shun debate as vampires do the light. Their ex cathedra pronouncements of ex nihilo propositions carry with them the full and unearned gravitas of papal infallibility. They know they are not equal to debate and so, by an extraordinary anti-rationalist sleight of hand, they deem debate to be a tool of white oppression, one of the stratagems of a system designed to maintain the illusion of the white supremacist patriarchs the modern Left see everywhere.

The current intellectual punk rock masquerading as a moral crusade is a base of Maoism in a Marxist sauce with a little Taliban thrown in as seasoning. Destroy the past, re-write history and create the future now. It sounds tiresomely like the soixante-retards of Paris in 1968. But adolescents with high time preference and no capacity for deferred gratification also have no time for a Long March, preferring a Great Leap Forward. All things considered, perhaps it is time for philosophy to slip away in the night…

Someone will head south until this whole thing has cooled off…
Tom Waits, Small Change.

Over four decades before Hawking’s seigneurial dismissal of philosophy, in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord defined philosophy as “the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power”. Certainly, we have seen a separation, the parting of the ways that Hawking sees, as being to the disadvantage of philosophy. But, in fact, philosophy has no need of science, whereas science merely thinks it has no need of philosophy.

Philosophy, in fact, has no real need of the modern world at all, no use for it. The modern world may have dismissed her from its employment, but she has been allowed to keep her lodgings. No stacks of philosophy books have been put to the torch, there have been no conflagrations, no burning of libraries as in Alexandria or Córdoba. Many classic works can be bought online for a pittance, or are free. Philosophy is allowed to remain of the company, like eunuchs in a harem, permitted to stay in the chamber because harmless. So philosophy is here, but she is not here.

So, let us not labour under a misapprehension. For now, the discipline of philosophy is dead, or she may as well be. We are entering, we are in, an era in which any display of intelligence not deemed ‘the science’ is suspiciously white, and therefore loaded with the baggage of geographical and ideological colonialism. We recall intellectuals in conical hats being dragged through China’s streets and mocked as part of Mao’s great leap forward. Even if philosophy is not dead, it is for the best that the authorities remain none the wiser. Certainly, she has been missing for some time, and the search has been discontinued.

But what if philosophy didn’t die but went underground, got out of town until the whole thing blew over? Where would she go? Where is there a safe-house for philosophy, the virtual equivalent, perhaps, of the great Renaissance libraries of Medici and Urbino, the Academies? Who would protect her, as the philosophy of Plato was guarded during the Dark Ages? Will we see re-enacted the marvellous scene that ends Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and is wonderfully shot in Truffaut’s film of the book, in which people are walking around in the woods reciting books they have memorized before the great burning?

Philosophy may be vastly improved by disappearing beneath the chariot wheels of modern culture for a while, a time in exile, a breather to regroup and rethink. A period of ostracisation, a time of maquis resistance fighting in the woods, nights of dark beer-kellers and plotting around the light of a candle might invigorate the old dowager.

Philosophy and philosophers, those who love wisdom, may need some time absent from the fray, which is starting to go from a cultural cold war to rather a hot exchange. So, again, it may be good idea for philosophy to make herself scarce, to crouch behind the bar while the saloon fight rages, to recoup and regain strength which may well be much needed.

In the midst of peace, the Roman troops familiarised themselves with the practice of war.
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Or perhaps – if like Nietzsche we suppose truth to be a woman – philosophy has stepped into the shadows from choice, from feminine pique. Possibly she has retired from public life for the simple reason that public life no longer cares for her, much as a child ceases to care for a game or toy when it fails to provide the initial excitement it brought with it, and what economists call “diminishing marginal utility” has long since set in. Also, and this is the ground-note over which the melody accompanying philosophy’s midnight flit is played, philosophy simply does not fit the intellectual requirements for membership of the contemporary epoch. And so there is a perfectly good reason for her need to get out of town. In today’s kiddy metaverse, her face doesn’t fit.

Philosophy can’t be dumbed down. You can’t publish a pop-up edition, or an app, or turn it into a game show with a panel of witless judges, or explain it via the medium of rap, or persuade a handful of celebrities to endorse it on social media. You have to do the work, you have to do the reading. Philosophy, as Nietzsche recognised, is a natural state of intellectual aristocracy.

And so, in the carnival of souls the West has become, philosophy is not in keeping with the fashion, she’s dancing last season’s dance in the season before’s hemline. Don’t interpret the world, growled the misanthropic Karl Marx to philosophers, change it! The post-modernes have done just that by exhibiting an ability to interpret the world in a post-Enlightenment manner. It is as though they process reality using the categories of the deep religious mind, mired in magical thinking and superstition. And so philosophy can’t breathe the air of the post-modern, and must take a break in the mountains.

A supplemental reason philosophy made the kill list of the new activist Left is not just to do with philosophy’s perceived instantiation of white supremacy, but also because the Left unconsciously envy philosophy’s style, Shelley’s “sneer of cold command”, its aristocratic nature, wearing as it once did the imperial purple these same upstarts expect one day to drape around themselves.

And so philosophy has been almost completely abstracted from the cultural and ideological discourse of the West on the grounds of obsolescence, ethnicity and irrelevance. Its classic works are on a new Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Catholic Church’s inventory of heretical texts, their teaching either verboten, haram, or at the very least genetically modified to include the vacuities of Critical Race Theory.

Philosophers who think they have adapted philosophically to the modern world by having a YouTube channel and a documentary made about them either play by the rules or, if they transgress even fractionally, they are burnt for witches. That most enlightened of philosophers, Socrates, self-aware to the point that his humility in the face of knowledge became his signature, was of course executed by the Athenian state, a most literal death of philosophy. The charges were the importation of novel divinities and corruption of youth. (Essentially the same charges levelled at another man tried and executed around 430 years later). What he was actually doing, of course, was enlightening those who entered into conversation with him, and perhaps this is what the Athenian state feared most. Plus ça change. The modern, deep state also has no wish for an enlightened populace. And so philosophy had better leave her clothes on the beach and – apparently – go for a fatal dip in the ocean. Who would notice?

In the film Casablanca, Police Captain Renaud tells the wartime resistance hero Victor Laslo that he had heard many times that he was dead. “Each time”, says the cool Hungarian, “it was true”. So it is with philosophy. Let’s pretend she has gone to meet her maker. She is dead. In a later film, The Usual Suspects, Victor Laslo’s sardonic comment to Renaud echoes. Gabriel Byrne’s character Keaton is met, in jail, with a conundrum when Stephen Baldwin’s character McManus tells him,

“I heard you were dead.”

Byrne replies,

“You heard right.”

A reprise of Casablanca, certainly, but then The Usual Suspects was named for a line in the film.

Is philosophy dead? Everybody tells you so. You heard right.

So, if the word on the street is that philosophy is gone, any good detective would visit her last known address. In the case of philosophy, this means we must go to university and get ourselves an education.