And what happened instead?
Our emotionalising – we couldn’t help ourselves! Pathos instead of logic! Appeals to the heart! Prose-poetry philosophising!
Our overinflation. Big picture sweeps – panoramas of the West; far too vast. Epic tales of Absolute Spirit’s unfolding. Of the History of Being. Of Holy History. Of epochal changes. Of epistemic shifts. Of regimes of truth.
Our mad ranging across the philosophical landscape. Stomping! Smashing! Issuing forth vast claims. Categorical statements. Without moderation. Without restraint. Bellowing philosophically, like delusional King Kongs.
Our spurious etymologising. Shifting between languages we barely knew. Parody-Heideggers. Would-be Jacob Taubeses, falling flat. And without knowing it, not really! Blind to it! Caught up in our flights. In our absolute ardency.
Our biographism. Our lives-of-the-philosophers narration. Retelling all the most gaudy tales. All the most sensational! Hölderlin’s madness. Nietzsche’s madness. Bataille, wanking besides his mother’s corpse. Steigler studying philosophy in prison, for bank-robbery. Negri in prison, for urban guerilla terrorism.
Our piling on the pathos – and especially the Nazi pathos. Levinas, jotting down notes for From Existence to Existents in a Nazi labour camp. Husserl, banned from the university library as a Jew (by Heidegger – his own pupil!) Benjamin, suiciding on the day before the chance of escape from Nazi Europe to the USA opened to him.
We moved ourselves! All but made ourselves weep! There were tears all but rolling down our cheeks, with European pathos. With the thought of all the European agonies! Of the immense European suffering! And helping ourselves to it as though it were ours. Scooping it onto our thought-plates. Serving it up, as if it was ours to serve up …
As if presenting and assessing philosophical arguments wasn’t enough! As though calmly weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of philosophical positions didn’t suffice! As though we had no natural thought predators. No analytic philosophers to curb us. To cut us down when we needed it. No one asking for clarity. No one asking to tone down the hyperbole. No one to bring us to heel.
And our resentment. Born of years of part-time teaching. Of our envying hatred of the full-timers where we’d taught. Born from years of working in a system of analytic philosophy hegemony. Of logicism! Of technical philosophy, dull and soulless.
Taking swipes at other philosophy departments in the UK, that no student could understand. Against prominent UK philosophers, that none of our students would know. And against analytic philosophy, of which our students had no conception. In which they had no interest!
And our resentment of the academic system in general! Of universities as such! Of institutions in general! Of our social institutions, our political ones! Invocation of outsider thinkers! Of outsider artists!
And resentment of our own students! Of their private school backgrounds. Of their privileged insouciance. Of their chat about skiing holidays. Of their height. The way they were bounding with health.
And all but declaring class war on them all, our students. Talking wildly of revolution. Declaring the impending end of the present form of the world. Making great claims for the revenge of the proletariat and the subproletariat.
Wanting to fill them with doom, our students. With a sense that finitude was all! That death could strike at any moment! That apocalypse was nigh! That civilizational collapse was around the corner! Wouldn’t that shut them up about skiing holidays? About university balls. About riding to hounds!
A sense of danger – that’s what we’d impart. That the whole Truman Show was about to collapse. That it was like seeing the asteroid coming for the dinosaurs. That a horrifying future was about to arrive all at once.
Apocalyptic hope – that’s the only thing available now: that’s what we told them, our students. Hope for the apocalypse – and what passes through the apocalypse! Hope for total change, which can only be preceded by total destruction! Where you can’t even hope for your own survival!
Apocalyptic energies – that’s what you have to harness: that’s what we told our students. It’s all about marshalling wild energies, unpredictable energies, impossible to contain, we said. Where all you can do is to let them be unleashed. Horror and joy, mixed up! The fury of destruction – that is also the fury of creation! The end and the beginning – all mixed up!
Confirming all the worst cliches about European philosophy. All the terrible things analytic philosophers have said about European philosophy. Irrationalism! Appeals to authority! Ancestor worship! Lurid talk of Nazism and fascism and madness and suicide. As if philosophy wasn’t about reason! About logic! About argument!
And Livia, only encouraging our excesses! Only plying us with espressos beforehand. Only telling us how great we were over cocktails at Trillians, after. Only telling us we should go further …
When we should have just stuck to amusing our audience. As though we were children’s entertainers. Anything to keep their attention. Modulating tone. Saying unexpected things. Moving things. Funny things. Using pop-cultural examples to bring to life the more obscure points. Amusing anecdotes from our lives! Slightly risqué stories. And with an air of confidentiality … of letting our charges in on a secret.
When we should have simply ensured that the students graded us well. Gave us good marks on the student surveys. That we could keep our customers amused during their years out of the world. That we could maintain the university’s alibi that there was actually learning going on. That the humanities were more than crowd-pleasing and grade inflation – more than a rich kids’ playground.
But Livia didn’t care about those things. She wasn’t worried about the National Student Survey. About league tables. She didn’t mind about departmental reputation. It wasn’t about securing the future of Philosophy at Mercia.
And sure, although we might idly dream of making Mercia Philosophy’s reputation. Of letting it become the place to study European philosophy – the capital of the north for all things Continental. Of hosting the annual European Philosophy conference in the city. Attracting international attendees. Keynote speakers from the European mainland. All those things!
Wouldn’t we be just as happy to go down with Livia’s ship? To throw ourselves on her funeral pyre? To set the department on fire! To let it burn up to nothing in some mad potlatch. To climb into Livia’s wicker man …
Livia only goaded us, her outsider philosophers. Livia only encouraged us, her idiot-antinomians. It was only about drunken escalation. About crudeness and gaucherie. About our rogues’ and rascals’ revolt. About the revenge of the miserable provincials! About the peasants’ revolt of our lecturing.
Work in Progress 