Justin E. H. Smith - The Philosopher: A History in Six Types

THE
PHILOSOPHER

THE
PHILOSOPHER

A HISTORY IN SIX TYPES

JUSTIN E. H. SMITH

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2016 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

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Jacket art, from the top: Fig. 1: Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, Fig. 2. Buddha Sakyamuni, courtesy of Carlton Rochell, Fig. 3. The Death of Socrates, 1787, oil on canvas, by Jacques-Louis David, Fig. 4. Baruch de Spinoza, oil painting, c. 1665; in the Herzog-August Bibliothek, Wolfenbuttel, Fig. 5. Portrait of a Chinese Mandarin, oil on canvas, c. 18251852, by George Chinnery. Bequeathed by Claude D. Rotch, Fig. 6. The Money Changer and his Wife, 1539, oil on panel, by Marinus van Reymerswaele, Museo del Prado, Madrid

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Justin E. H.

Title: The philosopher : a history in six types / Justin E. H. Smith.

Description: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2016. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015034074 |

ISBN 978-0-691-16327-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy. | Philosophers.

Classification: LCC BD21 .S57 2016 | DDC 100dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034074

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Linux Libertine O

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to the memory of
BUD KORG (19382015)

Now he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant (thus the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders).

ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, BOOK I

Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time.

JOHN KEATS, Letters (1819)

these unwholsome vapours, that distempered the Aer, to the very raising of Storms and tempests; upon which a Philosopher might amply discourse.

JOHN EVELYN,
Fumifugium; or, the Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661)

CONTENTS

Featuring the Curiosa 21

Featuring the Sage 54

Featuring the Gadfly 120

Featuring the Ascetic 159

Featuring the Mandarin 190

Featuring the Courtier 223

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Undoubtedly the greatest portion of gratitude must go to my editor at Princeton University Press, Rob Tempio, who has had the vision to first recommend this project to me. In matching me with this task, and this new way of engaging with philosophy, he saw more clearly than I an inclination that existed only in potentia, and its coming to actuality is entirely the result of his willingness to cultivate it. Throughout the process he has given expert and nuanced advice on the form the book should take, making intuitive suggestions that consistently show the mind of a real lover of books at work. I have also received invaluable intellectual guidance and input throughout the writing process from Stephen Menn, as well as from D. Graham Burnett, James Delbourgo, Jonardon Ganeri, Aaron Garrett, Patrick Lee Miller, Steve Nadler, Dalia Nassar, Anne-Lise Rey, Adina Ruiu, Lisa Shapiro, John Sutton, Anand Vaidya, Stphane Van Damme, and Charles T. Wolfe. I have been fortunate to have early drafts of the manuscript, or portions thereof, read and commented on by Jerry Dworkin, Zoli Filotas, and Susanna Forrest. I have moreover benefited greatly from the opportunity to present portions of this work in venues at which I was able to receive feedback from such sharp minds as Ray Brassier, Karine Chemla, Tsuyoshi Matsuda, and Paul Yachnin, in Beirut, Cambridge, Kyoto, Paris, Sydney, and many other places besides. I am surely forgetting many other people, who will likely find my cryptomnesia at work in the following pages; the secret signs of their influence, I hope, can count in their own way as acknowledgments.

THE
PHILOSOPHER

INTRODUCTION

This book, an essay in the proper Montaignean sense, seeks to answer that most fundamental of philosophical questions: What is philosophy? It does so, however, in an unusual way: by refraining from proclamations about what philosophy, ideally, ought to be, and by asking instead what philosophy has been, what it is that people have been doing under the banner of philosophy in different times and places. In what follows we will survey the history of the various self-conceptions of philosophers in different historical eras and contexts. We will seek to uncover the different job descriptions attached to the social role of the philosopher in different times and places. Through historical case studies, autobiographical interjections, and parafictional excursuses, it will be our aim to enrich the current understanding of what the project of philosophy is, or could be, by uncovering and critically examining lost, forgotten, or undervalued conceptions of the project from philosophys distinguished past.

This approach could easily seem not just unusual but also misguided, since philosophy is generally conceived as an a priori discipline concerned with conceptual analysis rather than with the collection of particular facts about past practice. As a result of this widespread conception, most commonly, and it would be more unfamiliar still to the natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, who studied meteorological phenomena in order to discern the regularities at work in the world around us, and had no particular interest in devising new concepts for discerning these regularities. Thus when Deleuze and Guattari argue that philosophy is the activity of concept coining, they should really be saying that this is what they would like philosophy to be.

Philosophy has in fact been many things in the 2,500 years or so since the term was first used, and here we will be interested in charting its transformations. We will be equally interested in exploring the question whether the activity of philosophy is coextensive with the term, that is, whether it is only those activities that have been explicitly carried out under the banner of philosophia that are to be considered philosophy, or whether there are also analogical practices in cultures that have evolved independently of the culture of ancient Greece that can also be called by the name philosophy. I will be arguing that they can and should be, but even if we restrict our understanding of philosophy to those cultural traditions that bear some historical and genealogical relationship to the practice in ancient Greece that was first called by this name, we still discover a great variety of divergent conceptions of what the activity in question is. Let us, in any case, in what follows, use the term Philosophia, with a capital P, when we wish to explicitly mark out the genealogical connection between authors, arguments, and texts throughout the broader Greek, Roman, Islamic, and Christian world, while using philosophy to designate cultural practices, wherever they may occur, that bear some plausible affinity to those cultural practices that fall under the heading of Philosophia, which, again, signals a particular historical tradition and thus, strictly speaking, a proper noun.