Philosophy: Alive, Over the Rainbow

In the preface to his new book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking caused my jaw to drop: "Philosophy is dead," he declared.  He boldly, baldly  asserted that it was now "science" that was leading the way to discovery and philosophy was dead.

Well ensconced in his Anglo-American academic culture, I can certainly see how Hawking feels this way.  However, I would think that an astrophysicist would exhibit more caution, or at least modesty in making such comments.  After all, his sciences bloomed just as Lord Kelvin was pronouncing that all the problems of physics had been solved.  Except, that is, for a couple little nuisances, like Browning Motion and black box radiation.  These are the two problems that subsequently opened up to Einstein's theory of Special Relativity and then the quantum physics.  And these sciences have made Hawking's career possible.

But, that note aside, to a devotee of philosophy, the ignorance such a statement reveals is stunning.  Let me be clear:  philosophy is so far from dead, it is actively, competently, and most important, imaginatively, creatively and generatively taking up a role as momentous as that of its inaugural moments in ancient Greece -- from Thales through at least Plotinus.  At that time, philosophy inaugurated the formation of a new human mode of engagement with the world:  Reason.  Over the course of eons, Reason went from being a mythic demand for a new human way to a functioning faculty that could be comprehended, deployed and taught as a generalized, expected and standard-bearing capability.

Now, philosophy is mapping out the rudiments for a meta-capability:  the way of facultative development itself. The work that began with Hegel's noting of the procession of facultatively deployed life ways (shapes of consciousness), was developed in most explicit terms by Husserl, and then was taken up as a truly cosmic-level engagement of the human spirit by Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Blanchot, Nancy and their French brethren, this procession is now being studied as the very core of the human way.  Aided by notions of self-organization and ideas of "massively collective effects" in scientific discourses, philosophy finds itself indispensible, once again.

This new status may not be visible from the cloistered empircal/analytic caverns of some (especially Anglo-American) academic circles.  The work being done requires a suspension in acceptance of given formulations as being end states of reality;  it develops new languauge, words and grammar that pertain to states of generative cosmic life that may or may not even become "things" or "objects," and that hover on the fringes of becoming singular -- analogous to Hawking's own "event horizons" on the edges of black holes. The work of philosophy is not to make or render new objects, or prove their "existence."  Instead it is now at work in addressing the forming of the human psyche itself and framing new capabilities for encountering, enduring with and bringing forth what may or may not take a place in discourse.  It is now in a deep alliance with art (and the highest levels of theoretic mathematics as well), in plumbing that dynamics of that mode of "ownness," as Heidegger calls it, that rushes to singularization, in whatever form, and that may or may not make it through the vortex of becoming existent and standing among existents, as having its "being" come to be

This is a task worthy of philosophy.  Not justifying, analyzing or parsing the real, but probing what is wont to become real;  not demanding submission to logical gridlock, but teasing logic itself out to the most generative moments existents can endure.  Far from being dead, philosophy is instead taking its place in opposition to the dead, is taking up the task of being awake.  Its place, true enough, is at the edge of the horizon, where it may indeed fall off to obliteration;  but if this place is over the rainbow, it is what beckons.  If there is a "multiverse" it will take its place in our knowing capabilities, in our reasoning anticipations, because of where philosophy has dared to do its work.