March 25, 2021 35
Is Philosophy an Art?
John Gray
Witcraft: The Invention
of Philosophy in English
by Jonathan Rée.
Yale University Press, 746 pp., $37.50
Jonathan Rée introduces his uncon-
ventional history of philosophy in the
English- speaking world from 1601 to
1950 with a declaration:
Today’s philosophers may like to
think of themselves as the culmi-
nation of a purposeful tradition
going back two and a half millen-
nia, but the record suggests some-
thing different: their predecessors
were, for the most part, making
their way along unmapped forest
paths, with various combinations
of ingenuity, f r ustration, an x iety,
improvisation, frivolity and brag-
gadocio. Instead of seeing their
works as candidates for inclusion
in some ultimate compendium of
knowledge, we might do better to
treat them as individual works of
art forming a tradition as intricate
and unpredictable as, say, Yoruba
sculpture, Chinese poetry or the
classical string quartet. In that
case the old histories of philoso-
phy with their well- worn plots and
set- piece battles will turn out to be
systematically misleading—of all
forms of history, perhaps the most
tiresome, wrong- headed and sad.It is a remarkable beginning. A
book that aims to examine the ideas
of philosophers over three and a half
centuries needs to consider what they
thought they were doing, and one fact
that seems clear is that very few of
them believed they were chiefly en-
gaged in creating works of art. With
only a handful of exceptions, the phi-
losophers of this period believed
they were engaged in the pursuit of
truth—as, in their view, the philoso-
phers before them had been. Unless
works of art claim to capture some
matter of fact, they cannot be true or
false. Certainly there are traditions in
which what we in the West consider
to be art objects purport to represent
truths about the world. Tibetan ico-
nography was an exercise in cosmol-
ogy as well as a religious art form and
an aid to meditation.^1 Similarly, works
of fiction can be evaluated by how
far they match or depart from human
experience.
But recognizing the beauty of Yoruba
sculpture does not mean denying that
of Tibetan mandalas or Renaissance
Italian statuary. By contrast, one can-
not accept the philosophy of Epicurus,
according to which the soul is material
and vanishes when we die, and at the
same time accept Plato’s, according to
which death means the separation of an
immaterial soul from the mortal body.
For Epicurus and Plato, these were not
simply different representations of the
world. They were conflicting answers
to questions they had in common, and
only one of them could be true.
The problems that come with think-
ing of philosophy as a discontinuous
series of artworks appear when Rée
discusses A Treatise of Morall Phylos-
ophie, Contaynyng the Sayinges of
the Wyse (1547), a history of the sub-
ject—“the first in the English lan-
guage,” according to Rée—by William
Baldwyn, an Oxford graduate. The
treatise was largely an abridgment of
Lives and Opinions of the Philoso-
phers, written in Greek around 250 CE
by Diogenes Laërtius. Rée comments
that Lives is “sometimes scurrilous,”
as when it describes another Diogenes,
one of the founders of Cynicism, mas-
turbating in public in order to demon-
strate his indifference to conventional
standards of good behavior. More to
the point, considering the difficulties
of Rée’s view of philosophy, is the fact
that the concluding chapter of Laër-
tius’s text containsa serious and sympathetic account
of the doctrines of Epicurus, cov-
ering not only empiricism (the no-
tion that sensations are a criterion
of truth) and atomism (the theory
that the physical world consists of
tiny particles moving in an infinite
void), but also mortalism, or the
doctrine that there is no escape
from the oblivion of death.Here Rée acknowledges that, for Bald-
wyn as for Laërtius, philosophy con-
sisted of attempts to answer enduringquestions about the world and the place
of human beings in it. Mortalism and
Plato’s theory that the soul is eternal
are rival doctrines for addressing what
happens to the human mind when the
body dies, not different traditions in
art.Thinking of philosophy as an exercise
in artistic creation means that philos-
ophers who believed they were pur-
suing the truth during the 1,300 years
between Laërtius and Baldwyn were
deceiving themselves. Imagining they
were struggling to establish how things
are in the world, they were only shaking
up their own intellectual and linguistic
practices and those of their contem-
poraries. Instead of being a search for
“truth, goodness and beauty,” Rée
avers, philosophy has to do with “offer-
ing difficulty, doubt and disorientation
to those who are willing to have their
intellectual habits rearranged.”
It is a view with some distinguished
twentieth- century exponents, includ-
ing Richard Rorty, who developed an
American tradition of pragmatism
in philosophy, and one to which I am
sympathetic. But it involves a radical
rejection of the traditional goals of
philosophical inquiry. Rorty’s work
has had little impact on how philoso-
phy is taught in universities, and it may
not have been wholly accidental that,
after twenty- one years as a professor
of philosophy at Princeton, the aca-demic positions he subsequently held
were not in philosophy but in literature
departments.
The belief that philosophy is closer
to literature and the arts than to logic
or science has long had its supporters.
Rée cites the poet John Donne, who
studied in the 1580s at Oxford and
Cambridge, where he soon wearied
of Aristotle. For Donne, philosophy
was like music, and should be con-
ducted spontaneously rather than in
well- rehearsed performances. A not
dissimilar stance was taken by Ludwig
Wittgenstein, quoted by Rée as believ-
ing that “instead of mimicking the nat-
ural sciences philosophy ought to be
‘written like poetry.’” Rée devotes the
concluding hundred pages or so of this
750- page book (including about 150
pages of notes and index) to explor-
ing Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy,
summarizing it as follows: “A single
thread ran through everything he had
written: that logic and philosophy are
nonsense, but nonsense of a significant
kind.”
Wittgenstein knew his view of the
subject was revolutionary. Friends of
his at Cambridge, where he studied
from 1911 to 1913 and lectured from
1929 to 1948, described the transition
from traditional philosophy to his own
work as being akin to that “from al-
chemy to chemistry.” Famously, Witt-
genstein produced not one but two
philosophies: the “logical atomism”
of his Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus
(1922) and Philosophical Investiga-
tions (the first part of which was pub-
lished posthumously in 1953), in which
philosophy was no longer a discipline
producing any kind of doctrine, but an
activity.
Without explicitly endorsing it, Rée
appears to share Wittgenstein’s view of
the nature of philosophy. But he does
not seem to realize how fundamentally
this view differs from how philosophers
themselves understood what they were
doing when they practiced their disci-
pline. At the same time, he confuses
this shift in the understanding of the
nature of philosophy with a changed
view of how the history of the subject
should be written:What we look back on as the inert
reality of the past was once a myr-
iad of possible futures, to be deter-
mined by choices that had not yet
been made; and they have since
been taken up by historians in
fields like structural history, his-
tory of mentalities, women’s his-
tory, working- class history, history
of sexualities, post- colonial his-
tory, resistance history and history
from below.No doubt it is right that there can and
should be many histories of philos-
ophy, not only the rather stale story
that has been taught for so long, in
which philosophy begins with the an-
cient Greeks, becomes subservient
to theology after the rise of Chris-
tianity, and then gradually evolves
into the analytic discipline that ex-
ists today. This story leaves out much
that should be recognized as philos-
ophy, including Indian, Chinese, andLudwig Wittgenstein; portrait by Renée Jorgensen Bolinger, 2013(^1) On Tibetan cosmography, see David
Shulman, “Buddhist Baedekers,” The
New York Review, March 24, 2020.