Philosophy as insight, not doctrine

Some people are quite hostile, and others smugly dismissive, when I talk unguardedly about philosophy, and the ideas I come across when re-reading thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, and others.

Hostile and dismissive attitudes seem to be based mostly on grossly reductionist understandings of those ideas.

My purpose in re-reading parts of the Western canon is precisely to transcend my own reductionism.  To form my own opinions based on original works rather than accepting uncritically second hand interpretations (though I read those too).

My intention is not to reduce all those ideas into ideologized doctrines that function as fixed rules, the way some shallow academics and their even shallower students have (the ones engaged in culture wars, for instance).

What I look for is the perspective of the authors.  Their lived experiences and environments.  How those may have influenced not just the ideas, but the language in which they are couched.  And then how the ideas might relate to my own circumstances, including the insights I gain into how other people have responded to and used the same ideas.

I don’t need to embrace an entire oeuvre to find one or two useful ideas, or to appreciate how my analyses differ from those of other people.

So, for example, I don’t much care for Nietzsche’s denunciation of the bourgeois establishment of his times, except as an insight into other ideas he has on morality and freedom of choice.

Likewise, I don’t have much time for Heidegger’s disquisition of Aristotelian ideas, except as explanations for the profound departures he takes from conventional ontology and epistemology, especially in phenomenology and hermeneutics.

I have come to appreciate the insight of Richard Rorty in proposing that the European thinkers need to be understood in a sequence of ideas rather than in isolation.  And in my own preference for picking and choosing ideas as seems appropriate rather than getting stuck in a kind of ideological/theological literalism.

A note on the illustration: Vassily Kandinsky’s 1923 'Black and Violet' can be appreciated on any number of levels.  The colours.  The arrangement of shapes.  The aesthetics of how both come together.  Or, for example, as a depiction of conflict and murder.  The point is, the meaning is not fixed and reducible to some ideologized simplification.