Socrates’s legacy is one of philosophy as intervention and enlightenment of public life. Could contemporary academic philosophers play a similar role? The Enlightenment’s legacy, still alive in the academy today, sees philosophers as the holders of reason and the guides of progress. But those are philosophical myths best left behind. What is called for is a new Enlightenment, one that interrogates grand buzzwords like “reason” and “progress”, is more historically grounded and pragmatic, writes Michale Hampe.
Should academics in philosophy promote an enlightened way of life? As academics they can see themselves as experts who advance a particular academic field and represent it in public, but who have not more and no less to contribute to the improvement of human conditions than physicists or papyrologists, sociologists or psychologists, insofar as the latter act publicly as citizens or "public intellectuals".
But philosophy itself can be understood as an enterprise originally and primarily conceived as an intervention in the human condition, not a religious or political one, certainly not a military one, but an intervention sui generis. Socrates' questioning of the beliefs of his fellow men was an intervention in the Athenian conditions of living of his time. And his activities were not occasional "reach outs" of an academic, which Socrates was not, but his "real activity." The fact that human life does not have to be determined entirely by conventions, religious dogmas or political regulations, but - this is how one can summarize the intention of Socratic activity - above all by a communal reflection, can itself be interpreted as an initial spark of enlightened philosophy, a philosophy that was striving for a "form of life": that of a community of people who freely communicate with each other about what one should do in life, once self-preservation has more or less succeeded, a community of reflective friends who do not want to be told what to do by a caste of priests or political "leaders". Following Dewey, for whom democracy was not merely a form of government, this can be called an enlightened democratic way of life or a secular philosophical life. The question is, what can philosophy’s intervention for a more enlightened way of life look like today?
Behind the concept of reason used in this abstract way lurks an illusion of the Enlightenment that is continuing to mislead philosophy to this day.
Can philosophers intervene in the public sphere in a regulating way and develop criteria of reasonable, friendly discourse that may contain the universal struggle for power and attention in the end and replace it with collaborative thinking and enlightened education for which philosophy establishes the principles, as modern Kantians, such as Habermas, seem to think it possible? I don't think that this is an option.
6th September 2021
Join the conversation