In the first hour the question was presented that is at issue in this course: what is a thing?

            To ask this question is presumptuous. It is even more presumptuous to hold that this question is philosophical, and that so to question is to do philosophy. The fact that the one who asks the question and introduces it is a professor of philosophy does not in the slightest prove the questioning to be philosophical. Quite the contrary: the danger that — based solely on that faculty-chair in philosophy — it merely appears to be philosophy is just here the greatest. And the existence of a philosopher in the form of a philosophy professor, insofar as that one is steadily busied with philosophy, pulls one most strongly toward the thought that what such a one is doing is philosophy. Presumption after presumption, which can only be lessened if one fully exercises one’s freedom not to yield to such pressure.

                                                                                                —  Martin Heidegger[i]

Those lines are from a summary Heidegger gave of the first session of a winter-semester seminar course he offered in 1935-36 at Freiburg, Germany, a course entitled “Fundamental Questions of Metaphysics.” As was always his wont, he delivered the summary of that session of the course at the beginning of the next session. The lines above appear as one of the “thought-splinters” (Denksplitter) that are printed in volume 91 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgbe (“Collected Works”), which was published just this year (2022).  When I read that passage recently, it reimpressed upon me what I have myself experienced ever since I first clearly heard my own calling to philosophy back when I was still in my mid-teens, during my freshman year in high school. Ever since that time, I have all too often experience firsthand the vast difference between doing philosophy and engaging in the academic study of philosophy or, to put that another way, between genuine philosophy as such, on the one hand, and philosophy as no more than one of all the many, ever further proliferating academic disciplines, on the other.

I did not encounter Heidegger’s works until six years later, at the end of my senior year as an undergraduate at a university. Ever since I first read him, Heidegger has claimed my attention precisely because he always followed the same calling I was following, and had been ever since I first heard that calling in my teens. Precisely because he was himself always actually doing philosophy, and never just expounding on some academic discipline, whenever I read him Heidegger always kept my full attention. That is why I continue to this day attentively to read new volumes of his collected works as they are still being published today, more than forty-six years after the series began to be published and to which I have been a continuing subscriber throughout that long period (with a small fortune tied up in the series by now, a series finally nearing completion).

 *     *     *

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

                                                                                                —  Oscar Wilde[ii]

Back when I was the chairperson of a philosophy department in a university, a fellow chair of a different department — one belonging to an academic discipline that did not come to be created and named until well into the 20th century — remarked to me once that there still were and most probably always would be universities that did not have such departments as his. However, he went on, one could not imagine a university without a department of philosophy.

As I saw myself even back when my fellow department chair first said that to me, he was wrong. Now, not that many years later, there are various universities that do not have any departments of philosophy, proving my intuition then to have been all too true.

On the other hand, departments of various names dealing with various matters of information-processing, as it is typically called in our so digitized age, have proliferated, and continue to do so. That offers depressing proof of the wisdom of Oscar Wilde’s adage above.

 *     *     * 

We need to learn how to deactivate the misprizing, the renouncement that the existing order daily seeks to inculcate in us, of that of which humanity is capable.

                                                                                                 —  Allain Badiou[iii]

Humanity is capable of so much more than mere information-processing. Intelligence, no matter how high and no matter whether natural or artificial, has no essential connection with wisdom. As I have observed more than once, both in this blog and elsewhere, even the most intelligent individuals are often complete “birdbrains” in the colloquial sense. Wisdom is not some body of information that is waiting to be mastered; and those who love wisdom, as do all genuine philosophers, have no desire to see what they love degraded to no more than some such thing as a “worldview” or “conceptual system,” no matter how complex and all-inclusive it may be.

Heidegger always insisted that there was no such thing as “Heidegger’s philosophy,” in that degenerate sense of the word. In that sense, he never had a philosophy, he always maintained. Nor did he want ever to have one.

Like Heidegger, I neither have nor want any such thing as what is ordinarily, in our academically processed information age, referred to as “a philosophy.”

My own philosophy? No thank you!

*     *     *

Reading Heidegger continually reimpresses upon me the joyful recognition that I am, after all — and despite what anyone however well-informed may say about me — a philosopher.

Therefore, I aspire to have no “philosophy of my own.”

NOTE TO READERS: Those interested in the underlying theme of today’s post might also want to read my post from September 7, 2020: “A Humble Encomnium — To Myself (?)” at https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/blog-1/2020/9/7/a-humble-encomium-to-myself-

[i] Heidegger, Ergänzungen und Denksplitter: Gesamtausgabe, vol. 91 (Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann: 2022), p. 579, in my own free translation. 

[ii] Quoted in Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 87.

[iii] Allain Badiou, Le Séminaire: S’orienter dans la pensé, s’orienter dans l’existence (2004-2007) (Paris : Fayard, 2020), p.103, in my own free translation.