There are no Great Philosophers
There are no great philosophers. There are no philosophers who deserve to be worshipped as authorities, no philosophers who should have deep meanings infused into their every utterance and scribble. There are great works of philosophy and very skilled philosophers who wrote them, but it is all too easy for us to extend past the boundaries of appreciation into a cult of personality that produces bad norms in philosophy.
Philosophy always takes place within a conversation, a conversation that is itself rooted in the particularities of a cultural and historical moment. The way that we encounter philosophy can lead to us forgetting that fact. When you read a treatise, you commune one on one with a philosopher, you are shown the results of a conversation but not its method. In this state, it is easy to forget that endless influences, mostly uncredited, determine the content of the text. The ideas that a philosopher espouses do not originate in their own particular head, they are formed over years of influence conscious and unconscious, from conversations with friends and teachers. Despite this, there is a long genealogy within western philosophy of the idea that thinkers can be the sole cause or author of their own thoughts.
In the Theatatus, Socrates famously compares himself to a midwife as he helps his interlocutor give birth to ideas. It is no accident that this analogy implies the existence of fully formed ideas obscured within the mind of the individual waiting to be revealed. In the Meno, Plato reveals that this has always been his theory of ideas. He derives the position, that new knowledge is always gained through a process of recollection rather than synthesis, from Socrates’s conversation with a slave boy. Socrates purports to be revealing the slave boy’s inbuilt knowledge of geometry through a series of questions which lead to him stating geometrical facts that he could not have stated before. The idea that all knowledge is within us waiting to be recollected or revealed is not popular today, yet its implications can still be appealing. Within this concept of knowledge is the thought that though new ideas can be revealed to you through conversation with others, those ideas were already inside you at the beginning of the discussion. Something about those ideas makes them fundamentally yours.
The most overt indulgence of this idea is to be found in the thought of Nietzsche. Throughout his mature work, Nietzsche separates all humans into the higher man and the herd. While the herd follows along with their collective values, the higher-man originates his own virtue. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the titular character states: “Even naming one’s virtue would make her too common; if one must speak of her, it should be: “This is my good; this I love; it pleases me wholly; thus alone do I will the good. I do not will it the law of a god; I do not will it as human statute and need”” The higher-man’s own virtue is so particular to him they even sharing it in language with another would be sacrilege.
But Nietzsche does not agree with Plato’s idea-formation account. He sometimes sees the fact that ideas can never be birthed asexually. In the Will to Power, he writes that “a great man…wants no ‘sympathetic’ heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men, he is always intent on making something out of them” (WP 962). Here Nietzsche seems to agree that “intercourse” can be used to make something, but it is still implied that the product belongs to the great man. The other men involved are tools, not constitutive and necessary parts of the product.
The concept of the lone thinker can be seductive. It would be perfect to lay claim to a really great idea, to feel that through its production, you could alloy your own particularity with the universality of truth. In reality, we just aren’t able to name the innumerable influences that dictate what we say and write. This text features some explicit references, but many of its ideas are falsely expressed as if they are purely mine. Without conversations between friends, and the ideas that they carried to those discussions, this text wouldn’t exist.
So why does it matter that we so often make the mistake of treating philosophers as the originators of their ideas? When we tie ideas to the individual we get an intellectual culture in which debates are adversarial rather than constructive. In the introduction to his book Philosophical Explanations Robert Nozick touches on this problem, demonstrating that many of the words we use when discussing philosophy are needlessly violent and antagonistic to constructive thought. He writes that: “The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and better when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch”. This aggressive and unconstructive environment arises from the tendency of philosophers to tie themselves to their work. And that tendency in turn is a result of an individualistic concept of idea formation and subsequent ownership.
In the Theatatus, Socrates says to his conversation partner: “If I abstract and expose your first-born, […] do not quarrel with me on that account, as the manner of women is when their first children are taken from them.” This line shows that treating ideas as being derived solely from one individual is just one conceptual step away from framing the contradiction, negation or questioning of an idea as an act of violence. If we believe that there are Great Philosophers, who go out on their own and think on their own, then we also believe that our views must be shored up safely to prevent violence against us. This outlook makes us much less likely to create something which is of use to others and more likely to exclude others from conversations which could benefit everyone.
If you read to the end of this article and it interested you, or even if you hated it, I would love some constructive feedback on my work. Feel free to leave a comment on anything that you liked, or anything that you thought fell short.
