Unmourned Funeral

1,704 words

This is the preface to a book I started writing five years ago when it occurred to me that philosophy in the West is, if not dead, then certainly dying. The book is titled Unmourned Funeral: The Welcome Death of White Western Philosophy. Philosophy is my subject. In a way, it’s what I do. My doctorate is in philosophy, and as I advance in years I find myself spending more and more time reading it to the exclusion of other distractions. Increasingly, I see little point in wasting my time observing the carnival of dysfunction the modern world has become and, like some trusty motor-car or old pair of shoes, philosophy always does a job I am not certain that anything else the tawdry collection of gewgaws that comprise modern culture can provide me with. Or, by the same token, that I could supply myself with. We all have what Kafka termed “the incredible world I hold inside my head”. Sure. It’s how you use it.

If you are familiar with Western – and therefore white – philosophy, I would value your comments. If you are new to the subject, welcome. Welcome philosophy into your home, if you will. But never forget that philosophy is much like the Transylvanian proverb concerning the vampire. He will not enter your house unless you invite him in. If you do, he will never leave.

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Counter-Currents and to Greg Johnson, without whom I could not have worked through and developed the ideas presented here.

As the young people say, enjoy.

Preface

Soon, very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton, and either a name or not even a name…

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

Whatever happened to philosophy? You remember philosophy. Nice kid, always asking questions. She did well, made quite a name for herself, before it all went wrong. Now? She hangs around the places she used to own, hoping for scraps or even a little work, like a jetty stevedore grasping at the gang-boss’s ticket for a day’s graft at the dockside. I heard she was theology’s handmaiden, back in the day. But those days are gone. Whatever happened to philosophy?

This is an invitation to a funeral, but there is no need to mourn. The grave has been dug for some time, eulogies prepared, obituaries written, flowers cut, and all the arrangements made. The deceased passed away peacefully, in her sleep (although there are other theories), and she has gone to a better place. Although some suspect foul play, others that she took her own life, in the end she just lay down, like a weary Napoleonic soldier in the snows of Moscow, and let the mist swim around her. What did she have to live for?

Philosophy is finished, for now. A combination of that discipline’s lack of relevance in an age dominated by science and its offspring, technology, boosted by an intellectual malaise which has settled like fallen feathers across the West, the broad replacement of a culture of reading — what Jacques Derrida calls in Of Grammatology, “the end of the civilization of the book” — with one led by the televisual and Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” together with so-called “woke” culture and, negating the Renaissance, a resultant and socially engineered Denaissance, have finally smothered the old beldam in her bed. Philosophy was withering on the vine as an academic subject long before the spores of today’s toxic and dysfunctional culture settled to finish the job, certainly. Apparently, all that is left for genuine philosophers is to obituarise.

The exact historical point at which philosophy began her demise is debatable, although it seems clear that the emergence of advanced technology, firstly as mechanics and subsequently as solid-state electronics, was the start of a long goodbye. Then, science’s own little handmaiden, technology, appearing if not originally then certainly most forcefully in the form of the British Industrial Revolution, applied the ether-soaked handkerchief to philosophy’s airways.

As we shall see, talking together at the wake, philosophy is the love of wisdom and, casting a jaded eye over the modern world, it is not hard to see that her services are no longer required. For philosophy is a part of the old world, to be swept away just as Mao’s Cultural Revolution was designed to destroy much of China’s heritage in order to rid the empire of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. Wise has been replaced by woke.

Our brave new world has no need of philosophy. She has no role to play. She has nothing to offer the new boss (science), the new chief of staff (technology), and their upstart apprentice (technocracy). Philosophy ceased to be useful when science became self-sufficient. She is the love of wisdom, naturally intellectual, the province of those who try to protect the flame with their cupped hands, like an old frontiersman carrying fire in a ram-horn, shielding it from the gathering storm. Unlike technology, philosophy does not seek to clutter up an already chaotic world with ever more trinkets so that it increasingly resembles a global version of a psychotic 10-year-old’s bedroom. There is a quietude about philosophy which science mistakes for inactivity, and so she outlived her usefulness to the modern state. Philosophy builds no suspension bridges, discovers no vaccines, invents no driverless cars.  Nietzsche writes in Schopenhauer as Educator: “I believe in all seriousness that it is to the state’s advantage to have nothing further to do with philosophy…”

The only use-value philosophy has now is to the individual, and even then only a certain caste of individual, one who requires respite from the storm and time away from the junkyard of the modern. For these, philosophy is a friend and travelling companion, solace, consolation, and salvation. As Cicero writes to M. Portius Cato: “I have only one last resource – philosophy: and to make her plead for me, as though I doubted the efficacy of a mere request: philosophy, the best ever friend I had in all my life, the greatest gift which has been bestowed by the gods upon mankind”.

Respect for philosophers has of course all but vanished, to be replaced by suspicion, hatred, scorn, and the post-modern charge-sheet of racism, whiteness, and other modish offences. There is tokenism in the media when ethics are being discussed, and a philosopher might be asked to appear on the radio or even the television for a few minutes, but this is ideologically orthodox and adds a patina of intellectual respectability to a producer’s schedule, provided that the philosopher says the right things. There is still no respect for philosophy in and of itself.

But “we philosophers”– Nietzsche’s fraternal call — neither want nor do we need respect, excepting our own for the dead philosophers with whom we converse. Just as Socrates looked forward to his death sentence as it would bring forward the time when he could converse with Homer in the afterlife, so too we cherish our time in this life with those men — and Plato reminds us that to read is to converse with the writer — who offer an alternative to the chaotic chatter of what passes for modern culture.

Which separates us from what Plato might have termed the hoi-polloi. And perhaps that separation should emerge from its larval form as segregation, and finally take flight. Seneca, in a letter to Lucilius, forewarns of the coming attitude of the efficient modern ideologue to philosophy, but looks forward to a secession that may be inevitable: “The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn: and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the customs of our fellow-men?”

What indeed? This book is not a plea for the return of philosophy to the people, most of whom had no use for her in the first place. It is not a prophecy of reappearance or resurrection, of one raised from the dead, a messiah, revenant or zombie. The classroom was a habitat philosophy only really enjoyed, in the modern Western world, in France, and look what is happening to her. There is no curricular salvation nor salve nor universal panacea coming, no philosophy for the masses. Rather a secession. Rather philosophy for the esoteric few, Nietzsche’s philosophical aristocracy, Bowden’s cultured thugs, those of us Kant was talking about when he noted, in a rare moment off-piste during his transcendentalist magnum opus, The Critique of Pure Reason:  “…those who really have philosophy at heart – and their number is but small…”

It is indeed. Philosophy is liberatory discourse, and the more it is cancelled, annulled, erased, stigmatised, ostracised, and exiled beyond the walls of the polis, like the pharmakōs of the Ancient Greeks, the city’s chosen scapegoat, the more it will attract a certain type of person, a certain breed of thinker, Nietzsche’s philosophers of the future.

This is not a book for the philosophical specialist, nor is it a critique of philosophical specialism. It is a broad-brush daub, not a precise pointillist canvas. Nor am I a systematiser. This book is no eagle’s flight, seeing all below as it soars, but rather the collection of trinkets with which the bower-bird decorates the entrance to its nest to entice a mate, the toys of Dionysus, given to the child by the Titans to distract him. The pugnacious Julius Caesar was of the opinion that he would rather be a notebook for the sayings of great men than be a great man himself. So, with regard to the fragments from other writers which are strewn about herein, my working maxim is that if it was good enough for Montaigne, it’s good enough for me.

So, then. It appears that those of you who know nothing of philosophy have arrived too late, in time only for the uneasy threnodies which must be sung, just there to see the dirt flung on the sunken coffin. Not at all. Do not feel quite so bereaved. Death is not eternal, something H. P. Lovecraft knew.

I come both to bury philosophy and to praise her, and also, perhaps, after all, to tell of the possibility of a resurrection. Every phoenix needs its ashes.