Where does philosophy begin?
El Lissitzky - New Man 1923
Towards the end of a controversial life and career, the communist philosopher Louis Althusser repeatedly defended the position that a straight line could be drawn between the invention of mathematics and the birth of philosophy. Before the advent of mathematics, the order of the world could be explained with religious or mythical rhetorical discourses. Mathematics, as an abstract logical system, functioned according to radically different parameters. Mathematics does away with references to Gods or other mythical stories. It exists as a purely rational discourse, the first one of its kind and is still the exemplary model of the natural sciences.
But what does mathematics have to do with philosophy? The answer, according to Althusser, is ultimately political. Before mathematics, religious mythology provided the world-view that made sense of the social world: the world was ‘such and so’ because these particular Gods had ordained them like that. Mythology served the political purpose of legitimating social divisions and hierarchies. With mathematics a form of reasoning came into being with the ability to challenge this type of justification that the ruling class had used up to then. More importantly, scientific reasoning presented a danger for the established order. The reason, Althusser explained, was that it offered proof that people could attain knowledge of things through their own scientific practice rather than through divine revelation.
Enter Philosophy
This is where philosophy came in; the discourse par excellence that can never content itself with rhetorical answers, evasions into mysticism, or blind religious authority. Philosophy seeks out root causes (even if these root causes turn out to be God after all). Philosophy was birthed in Greek antiquity to provide a rational explanation of the world after mathematics made it impossible to solely rely on religious justifications. Thus it came to Plato to supposedly deduce that the rational ordering of the polis was based on the ‘natural’ division of society in three classes, manual producers, guards, and rulers.
Thus Aristotle opened his volume of the Politeia with a naturalist defense of the institution of slavery (“Hence, where the relation of master and slave between them is natural they are friends, and have a common interest, but where it rests merely on convention and force the reverse is true.”). Philosophy took over the role of religion in explaining ‘the way things are’ when mathematics had shown people that they could reason for themselves.
We do not have to be convinced by Althusser’s historical argument to see its value. Throughout history, but, more importantly, on a daily basis, philosophical arguments are used to justify the existing states of affairs. Opinions or seemingly scientific propositions turn out to be founded on philosophical propositions, concerning for instance use, merit, belonging, essence, or ultimate purposes. For example, whole armies of opinion makers and ‘philosophers’ tell us that social inequalities are just when they are based on hard work, or if they lead to more welfare for all. This type of apologetic philosophy is obsessed with questions of origins and end-goals which construct a certain ordering of the world. Conveniently they forget to mention that in class-ridden societies, hard work explains next to nothing, especially when it comes to producing wealth for ourselves and others. Though philosophical, these arguments become indistinguishable from an ideology that justifies obscene disparities in wealth and opportunities.
The aim of ideological philosophy is to furnish people with a coherent worldview in which everything finds its place. Inescapable by nature (we are all ideological animals to a certain extent), we are at the mercy of ideology when we act as if the world exists without contradictions. And although political struggles against oppression or exploitation (socialism, feminism, third world nationalisms, etc.) also always rely on ideology, most often it serves as a line of defense to keep the world working the way it already does.
Louis Althusser
Can philosophy ever be anything more than ideology?
Althusser’s example of the invention of mathematics also furnishes us with an opening towards a different practice of philosophy. Philosophy steps in when there’s a breach in our understanding of the world. Scientific understandings destabilized modes of explanation that dominated for centuries. In Greek antiquity, philosophy succeeded in integrating the principle of rational explanations into an ideological worldview that defended the existing state of affairs. But what if we stayed within the breach opened up within our perceptual field, without searching for questions of origin, foundation or end-goal? Here, philosophy could emerge as a new type of practice irreducible to its ideological function.
According to Althusser, ground-breaking scientific discoveries are not the only threats to dominant ideological world views. Above all, it is social and political events that radically put into question how we are used to seeing the world. The fall of the Soviet Union radically challenged socialist world views, and for many the financial crisis of 2007 or the election of Donald Trump did the same for the ideology of the steady progress of liberal democracy. But nothing prevents us from locating ruptures within our ordinary understanding at the most minute or individual level. A single word or sentence delivered off the cuff by a stranger can make us question everything that we hold as beyond doubt.
Philosophy can start, I suggest, at that moment when an event lays bare internal contradictions in the way we perceive the world. When our words, ideas or actions become inadequate to make sense of what is happening around us. Philosophy is a practice that does not begin with the ‘big questions’ seemingly out of nowhere. It begins when we become incompatible with the world, when the world becomes incompatible with itself, when we become incompatible with ourselves.
Philosophy, despite everything, is a practice of understanding. Can we hold onto a manner of understanding that does not want to reduce everything to a stable foundation, that is, to a fixed identity? In a text written a few years ago, the French philosopher Patrice Maniglier argues that we might, if we view philosophy as a practice that works at the level of concepts. The language we use to describe ourselves and our relations to others is fundamentally ambiguous. It harbors multiple meanings that are not necessarily compatible. They may overlap, conflict, shift with regards to one another. One meaning of a word might even attempt to repress the other. ‘Value’, for instance, has both a moral connotation and an economic one, as does ‘debt’. ‘Man’ or ‘woman’ refers simultaneously to biological markers, cultural markers, a social division of labor, a psychological identification, social norms and norm-creating practices, and most often, an uneasy bundling together of these aspects. Our practice of philosophy begins when we try to logically work through these ambiguous words or concepts, without reducing them to a fixed identity.
Philosophy as a Radical Practice
It is in this way that philosophy can turn into a radical practice. We know that the way we make sense of the world, the language we use to describe it, the concepts that dominate our environment, structure how we act towards one another. Concepts are material entities because they produce effects in the real world ‘out there’. For instance, by questioning what constitutes healthy, normality, the normal, and its inverse, the pathological, deviance, delinquency or abnormality, we can open up new pathways for acting, caring, understanding and organizing. By reconfiguring how we understand phenomena we can make possible new ways of life that are anxiously kept down by dominant ideologies that strive for coherence above all. Philosophy, in this sense, becomes a speculative (but not arbitrary) shifting of meanings, concepts, and relations that produces experimental effects, not least in its challenge to established understandings of the world.
Louis Althusser was fond of quoting Blaise Pascal, who wrote that to truly philosophize, one must mock traditional philosophy. As we dig into the privileged concepts of philosophy (subjectivity, morality, politics, epistemology etc.), invent new concepts or shine a philosophical light on everyday language, we renounce any quest for stable foundations or metaphysical essences. Rather, we let ourselves be guided by the inherent instabilities that these concepts offer us, in order to illuminate something about them which too often remains silent. Since we always inhabit a world that is made up of heterogeneous practices and tensions, traditional philosophy must always shield its own intellectual construction by repressing unwanted presences. A genuinely philosophical exploration seeks to unsettle the picture presented by traditional philosophy. Perhaps, out of the unsteady coordination of concepts might arise resources to stake a claim for living differently.
Further resources:
Althusser, Louis, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987 (London: Verso, 2006).
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Maniglier, Patrice, “Manifeste pour un comparatisme supérieur en philosophie.” Les Temps Modernes, vol. 682, no. 1, 2015, pp. 86–145.
Pascal, Blaise, OEuvres complètes. éd. Louis Lafuma, (Paris: Seuil, 1963).
Plato, The Republic (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).