Earlier this week I decided to ignore past experience and forayed into the big town of Greensboro for a little holiday shopping, or more accurately, a lot of looking. Although there are fewer than two weeks left until Christmas I didn’t expect the crowds and traffic to be as thick or active as I found them. I didn’t have a specific gift in mind when I left home; I was hoping for inspiration, divine or otherwise to strike me somewhere along my journey. Unfortunately, my muse was silent, evidently enjoying my lack of imagination and my discomfort as I endured the crush of swarming holiday shoppers. After a variety of miscues and dead ends I opted to retreat to a place, which has always managed to bring me a measure of solace and escape: a book store.
The aroma of coffee that greets one upon entering Barnes & Noble suggests the comfort of home, an easy chair surrounded by shelves of books cataloging parcels of accumulated knowledge–art, history, science, mathematics, religion, poetry, and of course, philosophy; however, this pleasant reverie was short-lived for in this particular Barnes & Noble there was no section reserved for philosophy. Shelf markers abounded in the store, each one announcing its separate bailiwick of authority: History, Fiction and Literature, Self Help, Books On CD, Religion, Computers, Science Fiction, Mathematics, Science, Nature, New Age and more. At first I thought I must have overlooked the tiny little space at the end of one of the sections of religion, which I knew had been alloted to philosophy from prior visits. So I looped through the store a second time taking care to move more slowly and deliberately. I abandoned my search for a gift and focused instead on discovering what had become of that tiny treasury that documented our pursuit of wisdom. While there are many who believe that psychology has supplanted religion in areas that once was its exclusive domain, that evanescent chameleon, New Age, is not philosophy’s surrogate; any indication of interchangeability between the two is merely coincidence.
This age shares many of the same conditions as its antecedents. What our curiosity exposes eventually becomes knowledge we acquire; it is an acquisition we frequently misuse or misunderstand; a fallible process we laud as progress. The current debate on the definition of torture and the Bush administration’s willingness to cavil where it should be forthright is a case in point. Defining justice as a legal codicil which does not extend to whomever we choose to exclude cannot forestall the ethical dilemma an informed citizenry must confront. Throughout public school we recited the Pledge of Allegiance daily and there were no caveats implicit in the the phrase “with liberty and justice for all”. Questions involving ethics extend to stem cell research, genomes and genetic mapping, specifically as it relates to medical information, and, certainly include the spate of scandals which have led to the indictment, conviction, and incarceration of several high level elected and appointed government officials.
Despite pronouncements to the contrary metaphysics has not become obsolete, moreover, it facilitates the work of logic and epistemology in this highly technologically oriented world in which the queen of science, mathematics, is the linchpin to the progress that has been realized in this area. Plato immortalized Socrates’ eponymous method in his dialogs and thereby facilitated its adoption as an effective teaching tool in many other disciplines. The pre-eminence of philosophy was guaranteed as a result of the remarkable body of work produced by Plato and his most notable pupil, Aristotle. One is tempted to argue that the advances in philosophy following the golden age of Greece may be regarded as footnotes to the thought of Plato and Aristotle. The spell of that temptation was broken temporarily if not permanently by the work of Wittgenstein, particularly the perspective of his opus the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which in turn was pushed from its moorings by a member of the the famed Vienna Circle, Kurt Godel when his incompleteness theorems were published. Suddenly, the world was not all that was the case and that which we cannot speak about may deserve more than our silence. Wittgenstein was remarkable, notwithstanding the implications of Godel’s brilliant use of logic to examine mathematical systems; and, his later work, Philosophical Investigations, pressed beyond its initial more dogmatic assault on metaphysics to a revaluation of language as both context and vehicle for meaning. For Wittgenstein philosophy matured to a method for trans-discipline linguistic analysis which, concomitantly had therapeutic value as well; however, I cannot emphasize enough that Wittgenstein is much too complex at any stage of his thought to be distilled into a few brief statements.
Moreover, the advances in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology have proceeded at such an accelerated rate in the last century that many once widely held notions have been under almost constant assault. Alan Turing’s foundational work on computer’s has evolved to the extent that it has raised some thorny epistemological issues particularly in the area of artificial intelligence. The maturation of quantum mechanics in physics has seen a rebirth in metaphorical language, which appears to an attempt to describe more adequately emerging hypotheses and to clarify existing theories to the masses. Physicists, however, might disagree with my characterization and stop short of admitting to being in the thrall of metaphysics.
While Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems upset the smug equilibrium that positivists had established when they dispatched metaphysics, the stunning conclusions tempted many to apply his technique in areas for which it was not intended. Godel’s triumph was bittersweet and his life was one of contravening moments of lucidity and turgidity; however, his achievement enticed some non- mathematicians to interpret it as a general critique of all systems, including those absent any mathematical foundation. Analogs of Godel’s method are intriguing and offer novel approaches in critical thought but do not command the same authority in examining the tenets of religion as a rigorous analysis of natural numbers in arithmetic.
Perhaps philosophy’s banishment from categorical distinction in Barnes & Noble’s store layout was nothing more than a utilitarian business decision, not the traumatic after shock that rattled me or a paranoid conspiracy theory incubated and brought to term under one of the most stifling retrogrades in the history of Western thought, the presidency of George W Bush. The dialogs of Plato, Aristotle’s Poetics, Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Kant’s Groundwork Of The Metaphysic Of Morals, or James’ Essays On Pragmatism are probably reproduced in some amorphous section of classics, on which copyright restrictions have expired, although I can not personally vouch that any such section actually exists in Barnes & Noble. Oh well, there is always Borders!
