I came across a\u00a0confrontational moment in one of my\u00a0interview transcripts. We had been talking about philosophers’ metanarratives about “truth.” But my interlocutor found my questions a bit too oblique.<\/p>\n
\nPhilosopher: But I don\u2019t know \u2014 you aren\u2019t interested in the solutions to problems?<\/p>\n
Ethnographer: The solutions to philosophical problems for example?<\/p>\n
Philosopher: Problems! Real ones! For example do you consider that the word \u201cbeing\u201d has several senses? Or not? Fundamental ontological question. Do you accept that there are several senses or one? It changes everything. And what are your arguments one way or the other?<\/p>\n
Ethnographer: Well me personally I\u2019m not an expert\u2014<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Philosopher: But it\u2019s a really important question. Do you accept a category like for instance the possible?<\/p>\n
Ethnographer: Yes OK\u2014<\/p>\n
Philosopher: Between non-being and being? Do you grant an ontological existence to the notion of the possible? Me, no. Others, yes. And one tries to say why and why not. If you grant something like human dispositions, do you grant a distinction between for instance what one calls the faculties\u2014 understanding, imagining, dreaming, are these the same things or not? Do you grant something like freedom? Do you not know how to answer these questions? And do you say yes or no or something else? The response to these questions isn\u2019t of the order of metanarratives. It\u2019s of the order of the truth, pure and simple.<\/p>\n
Ethnographer: Sure, I can agree.<\/p>\n
Philosopher: But it\u2019s really important. This is what philosophy is!<\/p>\n
Ethnographer: Well I\u2019d say that what interests me as an ethnographer is that, being able to ask these sorts of questions, not everyone asks them in the same way, and what interests me as an ethnographer is the different ways of situating these questions, of raising them.<\/p>\n
Philosopher: You\u2019re not interested in the truth <\/i>of the answer?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This was a relatively traditional philosopher who was invested, as you can see, in\u00a0a fairly standard view of philosophy as “solving problems.” Here, he pressed me quite hard to express interest in\u00a0that\u00a0project. But I felt obliged to insist\u00a0that adjudicating local truths is\u00a0not what ethnographers are usually interested in!<\/p>\n
It’s interesting to me that he found\u00a0my refusal baffling. It’s as if at heart\u00a0it was hard to\u00a0imagine that other disciplines\u00a0worked on profoundly different questions from those of the traditional philosophical canon.<\/p>\n
But what goes unsaid in this interview is that I, the\u00a0ethnographer, was not the only person who wasn’t trying to “solve problems.”\u00a0In fact, many of the radical philosophers I studied in Saint-Denis were also quite\u00a0uninterested in this problem-solving approach to philosophy. More often than not, they sought to\u00a0produce new concepts, to re-reading classic texts, to reflect on the present, to “intervene” critically in debates \u2014 and all of this could happen\u00a0without necessarily\u00a0solving any\u00a0of the classic philosophical questions.<\/p>\n
I expect\u00a0my interlocutor here would have dismissed some of his colleagues, as well, as not being interested in\u00a0real philosophy.<\/p>\n
But if\u00a0I learned anything in\u00a0my research on philosophers, it’s that there can be interesting disputes over what philosophy is. (Every orthodoxy involves heterodoxy, after all.) To claim that philosophy is a well-defined field would seem, in that light, somewhat fraught.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I came across a\u00a0confrontational moment in one of my\u00a0interview transcripts. We had been talking about philosophers’ metanarratives about “truth.” But my interlocutor found my questions a bit too oblique. Philosopher: But I don\u2019t know \u2014 you aren\u2019t interested in the solutions to problems? Ethnographer: The solutions to philosophical problems for example? Philosopher: Problems! Real ones! […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[486,488,494,753,500],"tags":[647,671],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2093"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2096,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093\/revisions\/2096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}