Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno

By Raymond Geuss

“A history of philosophy in twelve thinkers…The whole performance combines polyglot philological rigor with supple intellectual sympathy, and it is all presented…in a spirit of fun…This bracing and approachable book [shows] that there is life in philosophy yet.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Exceptionally engaging…Geuss has a remarkable knack for putting even familiar thinkers in a new light.”
—Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“Geuss is something like the consummate teacher, his analyses navigable and crystal, his guidance on point.”
—Doug Phillips, Key Reporter

Raymond Geuss explores the ideas of twelve philosophers who broke dramatically with prevailing wisdom, from Socrates and Plato in the ancient world to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno. The result is a striking account of some of the most innovative thinkers in Western history and an indirect manifesto for how to pursue philosophy today. Geuss cautions that philosophers’ attempts to break from convention do not necessarily make the world a better place. Montaigne’s ideas may have been benign, but the fate of those of Hobbes, Hegel, and Nietzsche has been more varied. Yet in the act of provoking people to think differently, philosophers remind us that we are not fated to live within the systems of thought we inherit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9780674981997

Book preview

2006.

INTRODUCTION

A Game of Chess in Times of Plague

What is philosophy? In what kinds of human situations does it arise? What is it intended to do? It is my basic contention that one of the characteristics of philosophy, perhaps exactly what distinguishes it from science, is that it generally avoids giving a direct answer to a direct question. Rather it changes the question, and what is most interesting to observe and most enlightening is to look carefully at why and how the question changes, for what reason and with what result.

In this spirit, then, rather than answering the question of what philosophy is directly, let me invite the reader to think about Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal. In the late fourteenth century a knight returns from the Crusades to a Sweden in the grip of the Black Death. He sits on a beach, sets up a game of chess, and waits for Death, who duly arrives to take him. The Crusader, however, says he knows that Death likes to play chess, so why don’t they have a game? The Crusader is not going to be able finally to escape Death in any case, so what does Death have to lose by a short stay of execution while they play? If the Crusader wins, he gets a reprieve (for the moment, at any rate); if Death wins, he takes the Crusader with him immediately. While the game is played, the Crusader can continue to live. The game is played, following the usual rules of the game of chess, in a series of short rounds, a few moves at a time, over the course of several days. The Crusader thinks he has a strategy that will allow him to win, but his religious conscience trips him up. He feels that, after the mayhem of the Crusade, he needs confession and absolution. Death pretends to be a priest and, while hearing the Crusader’s confession, he gets him to reveal his intended strategy. A strategy revealed, however, is not of much use, and Death rubs this in by commenting that he will remember what the Crusader has said. Eventually a situation arises in which the Crusader sees clearly that Death will soon be able to force checkmate on him. While making his next move, the Crusader ‘accidently’ allows his robe to sweep across the board, throwing the pieces to the ground, then claims he cannot remember where they were on the board. This does not work, of course, because Death has a good memory; he replaces the figures on the board in their previous positions, makes the move which brings about checkmate, and wins the match.

The Crusader has been on an utterly pointless journey, trying, while in the grip of religious mania, to wrest military control of a fly-blown speck of useless desert from the members of another human group who are demonised because they happen to have a set of religious beliefs that are actually only microscopically different from his own. He returns home to find the plague raging. So he is faced with a complex situation which one would call intolerable (except that he has no choice but to bear it) in two respects. First, he suffers from a lack of orientation and a sense of emptiness in his life; he feels he has accomplished nothing and does not know how even to begin to act so as to remedy that. This is a very general feature of his situation and one for which there is unlikely to be any quick and easy solution—or indeed perhaps any real ‘solution’ whatever. Second, he is immediately threatened by the plague; there is reason to believe that at the start of the film he knows he is already infected and thus about to die.

As the film opens, the Crusader is focused on the more immediate and pressing of these two concerns and is looking for a way out of a situation of imminent death from the plague. He tries three approaches to finding a way out, each of these approaches instantiated in one moment of the story. First of all, he suggests to Death that they play a game of chess. Doing this requires, for obvious reasons, a great deal of intellectual and moral initiative and imagination, but the approach works at least to the extent that it does stave off the inevitable and gains the Crusader time. His second approach consists in elaborating a strategy for winning the game of Chess by following the rules to bring about a configuration on the board which is recognised as a checkmate of his opponent. He tries this, but it does not work. Death thwarts him in a way that actually has nothing to do with chess strategy per se. External observers might, to be sure, judge that Death’s action has not been not totally above board, but so what?

We do not know, of course, whether the Crusader’s strategy would have worked if he had been able to spring it on Death in the unexpected way he intended. It might not have been an especially clever strategy, and the Crusader might have lost anyway. This, however, is all speculation. Again, it seems pointless to ‘object’ to what Death does here. What would it even mean to say that Death was not being sporting or honourable or acting in a way that was proper? Death does not violate the rules of chess, which nowhere, as far as I know, contain a provision to the effect that one of the players may not induce the other to reveal his or her intended strategy. That is enough, and more than the Crusader has reason to expect. Even if Death did cheat, and admitted it, what recourse would the Crusader have?

This brings us to the third approach. Just as Death secured an advantage to himself not by playing an especially brilliant move on the chessboard but by doing something else completely (sitting with his cowl over his face in a church until the Crusader came in to confess), so the Crusader tried to secure an advantage to himself by knocking over the pieces. This was a way of trying to escape from a situation that seemed hopeless. He was not acquiring an advantage in the game of chess. The rules of chess specify how pieces are initially positioned, what counts as a permissible move, when a game is over and who has won, etc., but just as the rules of chess contain no provision against dressing up like a priest, so they also do not forbid knocking the pieces over. The Crusader was trying to find a way out of his difficult situation not by making a recognized move in the situation but by changing the definition of the situation itself. They are no longer making moves in chess; the Crusader is struggling for his life. This is, at the very least, a different kind of game altogether, and what he does is probably not best construed as part of a ‘game’ at all.

I have distinguished three moments: first, deciding to play a game, and this specific game; second, making various recognised moves in that game; third, redefining the situation by reference to a wider situation in which it is embedded. The suggestion that motivates this book is that the moment of ‘philosophy’ is definitely not the second of these three moments. It is not, that is, the moment when either the Crusader or Death analyses the board and thinks up and executes an especially brilliant move. Rather I wish to suggest that to understand what philosophy is, it makes more sense to consider the third moment, the moment when the Crusader tries to find a different way out by changing the situation—in this case by knocking over the pieces and thus putting an end, he hopes, to the chess game. He does not actually succeed, but that is a separate matter. Knocking the pieces over is not making a move in chess; it is thinking of the world as not exclusively defined by the rules of chess but as set in a wider context. Philosophy takes place when someone, an individual or a group, begins to try to look for a way out which might include transforming the framework of some situation, changing the rules, asking different questions. The moment of philosophy occurs when the Crusader shifts from asking ‘Which of the possible moves on the board should I now make?’ to ‘How can I avoid having Death take me?’ He may originally have thought that answering the first was a way of answering the second, but he now recognises that that is not the case. Philosophy arises when one first realises that these are two different questions. The fact that one is never finally going to ‘win’ against Death is also a possible object of reflection, but it is neither here nor there in this discussion.

The most characteristic feature of philosophy is its connection with a moment when the gears shift, the code breaks down and changes or is changed, the definition of the situation is thrown into question, and we need to reflect on the wider context within which a course of action (including possibly a discussion) has been proceeding, when expectations change and terms need to be redefined. Let me give a few more examples of the kind of phenomenon I have in mind. If I am a barrister and I hide my opponent’s wig so that he cannot speak in court, I am not by doing that making any argument that has any legal standing. I am doing something quite different, which may or may not work (and which may or may not have certain other consequences for me). Or imagine the case of an operatic tenor who is ‘killed’ but must remain on stage as a visible corpse for the rest of the act and who uses the time to have a nap. Or suppose I am a member of Parliament. The Government and Opposition benches are on opposite sides of the House, ‘two sword-lengths’ apart, in order to discourage duelling. Now suppose that, when I am recognised by the speaker, I stand up and, instead of asking a question, pull out a gun and shoot a government minister; I have certainly done something which will most likely be reported in the newspapers, but it is in a clear sense not really a contribution to the parliamentary debate in the narrow sense of the term. Here I have rather clearly taken a step outside a given framework of rules and expectations, redefined the situation, and acted in such a way as to impose that new definition of the system on others. No member of the opposing front bench will be likely to respond to my firing a pistol at someone in the chamber with a rebuttal, an argument, an answer, or a long rambling speech; other kinds of things will happen. When Haydn transmitted the message to his employer Count Esterházy that the musicians of the Court orchestra were tired of the summer residence and wanted to return to Vienna, he did so by writing a symphony in whose final movement the players one by one stop playing, put away their instruments, extinguish their candles, and leave the room, until only two are left.¹ He had, in the late eighteenth century, musical means for annotating any note a flute was called upon to play, and even for annotating silence, but there is no notation for ‘flautist extinguishes his candle’. Nevertheless Count Esterházy apparently got the message. Finally, suppose some of the passengers on an airplane decide to make a gesture of political protest at US policy in the Middle East by reconstruing the airplane in which they are travelling as a flying bomb and, deviating from the regular flight path, crashing it into a