John Mullarkey
There is a moment in the novel Small World, David Lodge’s comic depiction of academic intrigue on the international conference circuit, that has long haunted me. English literature don Philip Swallow is at Ankara University on a British Council visiting lectureship, and now sits anxiously in front of a large audience who seemingly wait, with high expectations, for his lecture to commence. As he listens to the chair of his talk go through a prolonged introduction, a sudden, staggering thought enters his head: why is he there?
“Why am I here? Hundreds, probably thousands of pounds of public money had been expended on bringing him to Turkey. Secretaries had typed letters, telex machines had chattered, telephone wires hummed. Files thickened in offices in Ankara, Istanbul, London. Precious fossil fuel had been burned away in the stratosphere to propel him like an arrow from Heathrow to Esenboga. The domestic economies and digestions of the academic community of Ankara had been taxed to their limits in the cause of entertaining him. And for what purpose? So that he could bring the good news about Hazlitt, or Literature and History and Society and Psychology and Philosophy, to the young Turkish bourgeoisie…?”
What strikes Swallow as a literature don – the question of why he is here – might well, one would think, strike a philosophy don even more as he or she waits to perform. After all, don’t we pose the question, “why are we here?” all the time (at least in some abstract form?). Yet it is the concrete realisation of this question – when I’m sitting and waiting to speak to myriad strangers about philosophy – that puts real fear in me. And that is why Lodge’s portrait of this common, yet rarely discussed academic situation strikes me as its best formulation to date. “Why am I here?” – not, “why are we here”, nor even “why am I here”, but “why am I here”, doing this, saying this, in this place, before this audience?
This hesitancy on my part does not concern any putative waste of time or resources, however, but something concerning the very nature of philosophy itself – philosophy’s habitual appearance as a failed, failing subject. After all, what hubris could possibly have lead me to think that, after two and a half millennia of unsuccessful attempts to answer questions concerning the One and the Many, Reality and Appearance, or Good and Evil, I should have definitive answers to offer; that I should be able to give the final word to problems that have thwarted others for eons? And it is not just the age of our problems that seemingly militates against any one answering them now, today, and here. The all-encompassing scope of philosophical problems too, not to mention their quality (as “fundamental”), or the sheer number of previous failures to answer them, should act as a caution against any further attempts to offer any final words.
Such incongruity between form and content, between high expectation and actual delivery, is not dependent on the exotic context portrayed in Lodge’s scenario, however. Any time, in any place, when I must wait to stand up and talk “philosophically”, has always occasioned in me a realisation of impropriety, of the gap between my finite powers and my audiences’ infinite expectations, in principle if not in fact (for who knows what motives have led them here to this place – indeed, they may have given up all hope of enlightenment long ago – yet appearances still belie this). Incongruity often leads to comedy, of course, and so some humorous self-effacement is frequently the first stratagem used by the speaker when he or she stands up to enlighten the audience with the latest solution to age-old problems. Yet such a deflation of the audiences’ expectations (usually in the vein of these being merely “provisional” findings, “work in progress”, or just “one’s own opinion”) often indicates a certain disingenuousness. Kierkegaard once wrote that if Hegel had only said that his System was not a serious attempt to explain absolutely everything, but simply a thought experiment concerning such an enterprise, then he would have proven himself the greatest thinker of all time. However, given that Hegel did not do this, he rendered his entire work comical, a huge joke at his own expense. Yet, conversely, one suspects that Kierkegaard’s own avowedly humorous writing also masked a seriousness that was no less ambitious. Likewise (though does anyone really need to say this again?), answers proffered in relativistic vein – that truth is illusory; that there is only power, personal preferences, or pragmatics in philosophy; or that there is an inherent insolubility to all philosophy’s problems – are self-refuting (they still presume an absolute view) and so no less disingenuous.
All the same, some might still claim that my aversion to philosophical conceitedness is unwarranted. Though philosophy has proven itself historically to be a subject that perpetually falls short of success, there remain those whose attitude flies in the face of any evidence for despondency. These are they (and there are many) who do believe that finally, now, this time, we have made real advances in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, or epistemology. And in fact there be may something to be said for a belief in philosophical progress, given that my fear of failure, this sense of inadequacy before the performance begins (before I stand up), may not, in fact, be wholly predicated on failure in any case.
At the end of Small World, the naïve hero of the novel, Persse McGarrigle, speaks up from the audience at another academic talk with a question that flips this fear of failure on its back, transforming it into what might now be termed a fear of success. Faced by a panel of illustrious academics who have each just explained to the audience why their answer, their paradigm alone (Marxist or deconstructionist, classicist or hermeneutical) should be adopted by all as the way to pursue the subject, McGarrigle asks them this: what would happen if everyone were to agree with them?
“I would like to ask each of the speakers,” said Persse, “What follows if everybody agrees with you? […]What I mean is,” he said, “What do you do if everybody agrees with you?”
The chair of this panel then glosses McGarrigle’s question in even more frightful terms: “You imply, of course, that what matters in the field of critical practice is not truth but difference. If everybody were convinced by your arguments, they would have to do the same as you and then there would be no satisfaction in doing it. To win is to lose the game.”
If I win, I lose. If I stand up and succeed, then I’ll never be able to stand up and speak again. But one has to stand up, nonetheless, and to start speaking. Alain Badiou often recites the end of Beckett’s Unnameable with respect to the paradox of “eventful” action (pursuing an action whose justification must be a self-fulfilling prophecy): “You must go on, I can’t go on, I will go on.” Surely, with respect to philosophers, one certainty is that we will always go on (and on, and on) whether or not our interventions are eventful. In the end, I, like every other philosopher, do stand up and speak, in fear of both failure and success, and also in spite of them. Beyond these emotions there is the act that breaks their hold, not because it is suddenly a justified one, but because movement is the only cure for immobility. To paraphrase John Wayne, a philosopher has gotta do what a philosopher has gotta do.
John Mullarkey teaches philosophy at the University of Dundee and is the author of Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (Palgrave-Macmillan).
