On Writing Philosophy: A Manifesto

By Michael Eskin

Polemical and aiming at both the academic and general reader, this short and punchy book – a manifesto, manual of instruction, and inspirational romp through the history of philosophy – argues that what we typically take to be ‘philosophy’ these days is actually not philosophy in the strong or ‘true’ sense at all, but a mix of intellectual history, the history of philosophy, philosophical scholarship, and ‘academic’ philosophy.

In a nutshell, this manifesto's argument runs as follows: True, original philosophy comes with certain indelible, defining features that make for a particular discursive-conceptual, dynamic ‘phenotype’. These features are what the author calls: The Idea, The Gesture, The Break, The Cull, The Style, and The Rock.

Drawing on a plethora of examples culled from across the history of philosophy, the author demonstrates how “authentically philosophical” writing (in contrast to its academic-scholarly-historical-philosophical counterpart) works, making a pedagogical-institutional recommendation for the creation of what he envisions as MFT (Master of Fine Thought) programs in the process: programs, that is, which will be geared toward teaching how to create true, original philosophy (along the lines of creative writing programs), as opposed to, for the most part, how academically to discuss and write about the original philosophies of others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781935830740

Michael Eskin

MICHAEL ESKIN was educated at Concordia College, the University of Munich and Rutgers University. A former fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he has taught at the University of Cambridge and at Columbia University. He has given workshops, lectured and published widely on literary, philosophical, ethical and cultural subjects, including: "Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Lev⁠inas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan"; "Poetic Affairs – Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky"; "17 Prejudices That We Germans Hold Against America and Americans and That Can’t Quite Be True" (published in German under the pseudonym ‘Misha Waiman’); "Philosophical Fragments of a Contemporary Life" (under the pseudonym ‘Julien David’); and "The DNA of Prejudice – On the One and the Many" (winner of the 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Social Change); and "Yoga for the Mind: A New Ethic for Thinking and Being & Meridians of Thought" (with Kathrin Stengel). A frequent guest on radio programs throughout the US, Michael Eskin is a member of the Academy of American Poets and the PEN Center for German-Speaking Authors Abroad. He lives in New York City and is the cofounder of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

Book preview

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Copyright © 2023 by Michael Eskin.

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This book is also available in print

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover Image: Anonymous Japanese woodcut, A Fairy Moon and a Lonely Shore (1890 – LCCN2008680225 / LoC ID: jpd.01557)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eskin, Michael, author.

Title: On writing philosophy : a manifesto / Michael Eskin.

Description: New York, NY, USA : Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2023. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022026754 (print) | LCCN 2022026755 (ebook) | ISBN 9781935830733 (paperback) | ISBN 9781935830757 (hardback) | ISBN 9781935830740 (ebook other)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy--History. | Philosophers.

Classification: LCC B72 .E85 2023 (print) | LCC B72 (ebook) | DDC 190--dc23/eng/20220630

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026754

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026755

Cover Design: Raanan Gabriel

Epigraphs

Toute philosophie recherche la vérité.

– Emmanuel Lévinas

"The scholar faces the great problems through the intermediacy of books …

The great thinker faces the problems directly."

– Leo Strauss

Original philosophy is essentially about becoming a philosophical subject; academic philosophy is essentially about becoming an expert on a philosophical subject.

– Michael Eskin

Contents

Epigraphs

Preface

I. What Is not Philosophy

II. What Is Philosophy

1. The Idea

Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lévinas, Arendt, Onfray

2. The Gesture

Socrates, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Heidegger, Lévinas, Derrida

3. The Break

Aristotle, Spinoza, Husserl, Russell, Arendt, Lévinas, Derrida, Badiou

4. The Cull

Descartes, Lévinas, Badiou, Jollien, Onfray

5. The Style

Apodicticity (Russell, Scheler, Lévinas, Derrida),

Mood (Frege, Quine, Marcel),

Call (Plato, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Badiou)

6. The Rock

Coda

Teaching Philosophy

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Available from UWSP

Preface

What you are about to read is intentionally polemical. It is designed to provoke, challenge, overshoot its target, call the bluff of certain ingrained ways of thinking, and suggest a different approach to conceiving of and engaging in and with philosophy. Which is to say that once you’ve climbed the ladder of polemic and thrown it away in good Wittgensteinian fashion, you will see that my overall goal is most benevolent, conciliatory, constructive, and embracing, namely: to remind us of the creative powers of true, original philosophy; to explain how, I believe, it works; and, finally, to point out ways of allowing it to take up residence among us in a more inclusive, accessible, and universally pertinent fashion.

The idea for this essay initially formed as a side thought to, and on the heels of, a much longer philosophical project on the human condition, which I recently completed. Working on the latter, I realized what I take to be certain key truths about the very nature and process of primary, original or authentically philosophical writing, to quote Michel Onfray, as opposed to secondary, academic or scholarly philosophical argument. Concomitantly, I also realized that I had never been properly taught how to write original philosophy, how to become an original philosopher, having been led to believe that philosophy is what is taught and practiced by professors of philosophy or, more broadly, humanities-based academics offering courses and publishing books and papers on philosophical subjects.

In the following pages – which have shaped into a manifesto, compendium, and manual all in one – I wish to share my insights with you in the hope that we, as a community of lovers of wisdom, may find our way back to philosophy as a genuinely original and inspired endeavor, as an equal among all the other creative genres of human expression.

Finally, in order to allow for as smooth a reading experience as possible, I have opted for the route of simplicity, verbal economy, and grammatical elegance when it comes to using the third person singular pronoun in reference to general, grammatically singular nouns in non-gender-specific contexts. Thus, I employ throughout – with no gender determination, preference, or value judgment whatsoever in mind – ‘he’, ‘his’ or ‘him’ where the somewhat cumbersome and, at times, ambiguous ‘they’, ‘their, or ‘them’, as well as the reductive and, to my ear, inelegant ‘he or she’, ‘his or her’, or ‘him or her’ might also be used.

All translations of texts cited that were written in languages other than English are my own unless otherwise indicated. For most of the Greek texts, I have relied on the translations provided in the Loeb Classical Library editions.

I. What Is not Philosophy?

For as long as I can remember, I have been reading philosophy – at least that’s what it feels like to me now. But it must have been in middle school, in the late 1970s, that I first began engaging with philosophical works consciously and purposefully. Up until then, the only ‘intentional’ forays into philosophy I can recall consisted in my occasional mesmerized leafing through my parents’ dauntingly beckoning multi-volume Soviet hardcover edition of Plato’s complete works.

The entry point for me was a course on ethics I had to take in lieu of the mandatory religious education class – a core requirement at Bavarian schools at the time, which you were allowed to swap for ethics if you belonged to a denomination other than Roman Catholic or Protestant, or considered yourself not religious at all. If the old Latin saw nomen est omen is true, then I couldn’t have wished for a more apposite ethics teacher – Dr. Nutz – whose very name (meaning ‘use’ or ‘utility’ in German) embodied the practical, life-oriented thrust of the philosophical subfield of ethics. I still have the grey paperback anthology we used as our textbook for several years in a row, which contained excerpts from antiquity to the present. And judging by the markings in my copy, we must have spent quite a bit of time on the categorical imperative, utilitarianism, and the question of the Good.

I am sifting through these memories because I believe that already then it became vaguely clear to me that there was a fundamental difference between doing ethics, and philosophy more generally, for real and merely talking about it. For what we were pursuing in class was neither ethics nor philosophy as such, it seems to me, but a mix between what one might call intellectual history and the history of philosophy. And there is certainly nothing wrong with that at all: Both have their time and place in life and the educational curriculum. But it wasn’t ethics or philosophy proper. That was precisely something contained and unfolding in the reading assignments themselves – snippets from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Epicurus, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Mill, Moore, Russell, and others. What the philosophers we read did, I realized, was tell us how ‘it’ is or how ‘it’ ought to be. What we, in turn, did in class was discuss and argue about how the philosophers we read thought ‘it’ was or ought to be. Unlike the philosophers we studied, neither Dr. Nutz nor any of my fellow students (including myself) ever seemed to posit anything about existence, human behavior, the meaning of life, or the cosmos in their own name. All we did was try to understand what others had thought and posited in their own name. If you asked me today what Dr. Nutz had to say about life, love, mortality, duty, truth, happiness or any of the big and small questions philosophy typically tackles, I couldn’t tell you – and not because I’ve forgotten, but because he apparently never let on, if indeed he had something to say (which, I am sure, he – like most experiencing, thinking, living, and dying humans – must have). And even though it is impossible that seeds of real philosophy didn’t germinate in our ethical deliberations – how could they not, given that in thinking through this or that thinker’s philosophical positings we couldn’t help, if indirectly, touching on life itself – whatever inchoate, genuinely philosophical intimations may have lit up and briefly glowed in the heat of class discussion most likely dissipated into thin air like the charred fragments of kindling paper carried upward by the chimney’s draft.

This is not to say that anyone who posits anything whatsoever about life, existence, the cosmos, or the nature of truth is thereby automatically a philosopher. Contrary to the widespread belief that ‘we are all philosophers’ (of sorts) simply because as humans we are presumably all capable of self-reflection, rumination, and speculative thinking about any and all subjects human and non-human, what makes for philosophy in the true sense is, as I wish to elaborate in this essay, something else. Philosophy is an endeavor sui generis, and that’s why we recognize it when we see it, why we don’t mistake it for other intellectual pursuits such as physics, literary scholarship, creative writing, cultural criticism, or the history of philosophy – or simply shooting the breeze about life, love, and what have you on a Sunday afternoon.

Which brings me to this essay’s conceptual point of departure: It has recently occurred to me that there are no places where you can actually learn how to become a true, original philosopher the way you can learn how to become a writer, poet, or playwright (not to mention other creative fields such as painting, directing, composition, and so on). While the world abounds with creative writing workshops, programs and departments, as opposed to so-called language departments (English, comparative literature, French, Italian, and so on), where you can study all kinds of things except creative writing – for instance, literary history, critical thinking, deconstruction, poetics, the ins and outs of academic literary scholarship – I have never heard of a single philosophical writing workshop, program, or department; a program or department, that is, devoted specifically to teaching original, authentically philosophical writing, where you can learn how to create original philosophy and become a true, original philosopher. While you can get a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at any number of educational institutions, you cannot, to the best of my knowledge, get an MFA in philosophical writing or, better yet, an ‘MFT’ – a ‘Master of Fine Thought’ degree – anywhere.

This is not to suggest that you need formally to study philosophy in order to become a philosopher, in the same way that – judging by the witness of history – you don’t need formally to study creative writing in order to become a poet, playwright, or novelist. Nor is it to imply that there isn’t the occasional true, original philosopher working in this or that philosophy department (or, conversely, that the original philosopher cannot, on occasion, also write academic texts) – think, for example, of bona fide original philosopher and inventor of deconstruction Jacques Derrida, who taught at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, among other universities, and described himself as a professorial and professional philosopher. It is merely to point out that to the extent that we have, for one reason or another, created specific institutional and educational frameworks for becoming a poet, novelist, or playwright, the absence of such frameworks in the field of philosophy cannot but give pause. Certainly, you can get a BA, MA, or PhD in philosophy, that is, you can concentrate or major in the academic discipline of philosophy as part of your tertiary education, whose end point is the all-humanities-and-social-sciences-encompassing ‘Doctor of Philosophy’. But within this educational framework, you do not specifically learn how to become a true, original philosopher in your own right – as opposed to an historian of philosophy or a specialist in one of the many historical and conceptual subfields of the multifarious academic discipline of philosophy – the way you can learn how to become an original writer or poet. At most, you are taught to read, understand, and write about the original philosophy of others, or any given subject, topic, or problem, as it gets refracted and filtered through the original philosophies of others. You will hardly be awarded a degree in philosophy (or land a job teaching philosophy, initially anyway) if you present a thesis laying out your own, personal take on life, love, truth, the universe, and so on (should you have one). Whatever genuinely original and idiosyncratic views you may hold on any given real-life subject or philosophical problem will either have to be smuggled into your writing as stowaways amid the ‘legitimate’ philosophical cargo collected from recognized, established, authoritative others (the Platos, Kants, Hegels, Wittgensteins, Freges, Russells, Tarskis, Quines, Arendts, Rawlses, and Kripkes of philosophical tradition), whose original philosophies will constitute the rigid parameters for your ‘own’ designated scholarly-philosophical shipping lane; or, if openly articulated, your original views will typically be (expected to be) anchored and contextualized, justified and legitimized within the given authoritative framework of the academic community to which you happen to belong.

*

We clearly separate the skills taught and acquired in language departments or programs from those taught and acquired in creative writing departments or programs. The lines of demarcation are fairly rigid: When writing a term paper, master’s thesis or dissertation in English or comparative literature, you are literally forbidden to be original and innovative in the creative writing sense, where originality, novelty, and the singular voice are key and the explicit terminus ad quem. Whatever originality is mandated in scholarly, academic writing is of a different kind entirely: It may add a balcony, cornice, window, or portico to the edifice of ever-accumulating scholarship, but it will be thrown out without much ado if it presumes to posit something that has the temerity of bucking the panoptical imprimatur of established, recognized disciplinary authority. Just like the medieval scholastics, who required, as Bishop Berkeley complains (Principles of Human Knowledge [1710], Introd., §20), the Philosophus ait or Aristotle hath said it seal of approval to guarantee an argument’s validity, today’s scholars, too, resign their Judgment and rely on recognized