“Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed.”
Philosophy must always justify itself. But only the situation in which it emerges can give it the criteria for justification.
Since Plato philosophy has struggled to distinguish itself from sophism. One would rather be philosophically wrong than a sophist; better to have made a mistake, to be in error, than to be concerned only with appearances and not essences, with perspectives rather than truth.
But this, par excellence, is what Deleuze called the dogmatic image of thought: the presupposition bears on the relationship between the thinker and that which is thought, a primordial or originary affinity in which the thinker seeks after the truth, as is only natural. Such a dogmatic image doesn’t exhaust the possibilities for thought; as long as this fascistic desire to avoid sophistry there has been a parallel history of anti-Platonists, who have sought to invert Platonism. In this regard of course Nietzsche was exemplary.
There was never a nihilist who stood up and announced hirself as such. Nihilism names a misrecognition or misidentification: zhe is a nihilist who thinks zhe believes in something real, but that something turns out to be nothing. A similar misidentification is common in contemporary modes of philosophical inquiry or address, which Deleuze called stupidity [bêtise]. In the recently translated Deleuze: a Philosophy of the Event, Zourabichvili highlights precisely this: stupidity names taking something commonplace as singular, something dull as something interesting. This is not the same as error, which is simple miscalculation; bêtise has to do with a profound failure at the level of evaluation.
This balancing act is difficult. For we are determined from without, and we do not get to decide: on the terms of what can be called true; on the world we experience which calls us to thinking; on the structures of our subjectivity and the intersubjective field within which we find ourselves; on the problems which interest us. Yet some of those problems are ultimately idiosyncratic. If there is a question of philosophical justification, it must be articulated along these lines: is there a difference between idiosyncratic thinking or pet projects on the one hand, and necessary projects on the other? Such a necessity could only be immanent, it could only come from within the situation that calls for thinking. If this difference is real, could it still be undecidable? What is at stake here is the articulation of a distinction between philosophy and sophism which is not Platonic.
It seems clear that what passes for philosophy is often just an idiosyncratic interest, pursued with all the scholarly rigor that would be called for by a project that demands its completion, not as an idiosyncratic curiosity, but with the force of necessity. We have come to expect that most people will not see the necessity of philosophical inquiry. We are used to the provocations of ressentiment, the demeaning questions: what are you going to do with a degree in philosophy? so, you’re an expert in bullshit, right? just arguing forever, never getting anywhere – what’s the point? We are obviously convinced that there is a point, and that there is more to it than bullshit, and we have allowed these questions to become meaningless to us, as though they never had a sense, as though they never had any meaning: of course we know there is a point, we know it’s important, no matter what they say…
But perhaps we have moved too far in the opposite direction, and we have developed a taste for the cleverness of idiosyncratic projects which refuse to justify themselves. Zhuangzi knows this problem: “Virtuosity is undermined by getting a name for it. Cleverness comes forth from conflict. For a good name is most essentially a way for people to one-up each other, and cleverness is most essentially a weapon for winning a fight. Both are inauspicious elements, not the kind of thing that can be used to perfect your own behavior.” The danger then is that this might turn into a taste for the banal, a passion for a certain kind of performance, a thirst for anticipating that there might be some kind of twist at the end which transforms the banal into something significant. We can investigate banalities, and they might turn out to be important. But we must distinguish between these tastes, and we must not be afraid of the question: so what? why is this important?
To be sure, the demand that thinking justify itself can easily tend toward a fascism of thought. It is important to open a space within which something other than instrumental thinking is possible; and isn’t this demand for legitimacy the whole problem of the enlightenment (capitalism) all over again? Your philosophy, it needs to justify itself… you haven’t turned a profit yet this quarter… There is a clear danger, a real risk here. But there is also a danger in allowing idiosyncrasy to present itself as necessity, for the unimportant to continue to occupy our precious time, energy, and resources, when there are truly important problems to be solved.
Our movements are always structured along lines of habituation. Our practice of philosophy thus requires that we habituate ourselves in accordance with this: that philosophy, even under the aegis of ‘postmodernity’, is never simply arbitrary, that idiosyncratic fascination not be confused with the questions which are appropriate and necessary to ask given the exigencies of our historical conjuncture. All we are suggesting is that the absolute ban on the question of why does this matter? is what is truly fascistic here, and we should work towards undoing this prohibition. The inverse form of this rejection is the demand that philosophy be justified. Even without becoming Platonists, we can rightly oppose sophistry.
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