Peter RuddFiled under: brave new world, the sweet life | Tags: control, friendship, love, philosophy, simon critchley, sophistry, truth
Here is a definition of philosophy by Critchley which is quite democratic. It wrestles the discipline out of the iron grip of the intelligentsia of the day – sophistry – and presents it transparently for anyone and everyone who will have it. It says it can’t be owned or quantified, and rather it is a quest, a procession toward friendship and knowledge and truth.
Last month I was sitting in the office of a dean of a school, pitching a new course. I was making a case for a connection between high energy consumption and outdated property development ideas, and I happened to mention blogs among other media as a source for my observations. And got a wrinkled nose from the university administrator.
He’s in his 50s and has a PhD in history and a blog simply isn’t a good source of information. His retiscence protects quality; and it also commodifies and controls sources of knowledge. The new media tends toward democracy, shattering that block between the academy and people. Maybe like the church replacing it’s Latin liturgy for the peasant lingua franca. The sudden new knowledge is a flush of love.
From the book:
So philosophy begins with a critique of the Sophists; the Sophists are those people who claim to know and offer to exchange knowledge for a fee. Philosophy begins with a critique of Sophistry and its claims to knowledge. In place of the sophistical pretensions to wisdom, philosophy offers a love of wisdom, a philia, an orientation of the soul towards the true, which is not the possession of the true. So philosophy begins with love in a non-erotic sense: a kind of friendship, usually between men, usually between an older man and a younger man.
How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, Simon Critchley
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