To think philosophically is to know how to start a fight. Of course, that sounds like the easiest thing in the world; just take a position, and you’ve got friends and allies; opponents and enemies surround you with upturned bottles and pool cues in their hands. Then again, this merely amounts to getting drafted into an ongoing battle, jumping into dug-out trenches. If there’s a battle-cry in philosophy, it does not merely lie in taking a position, but in creating one; and, in doing so, backstabbing one’s supposed allies and creating strange alliances with one’s enemies. After all, was not Aristotle the grand backstabber of Plato, yet where the thought of each would go on establishing peculiar alliances with emerging Christianity? Or, more recently, did not Heidegger backstab Husserl in the name of phenomenology, while peculiarly allying himself with Kierkegaard in the name of Dasein? Starting a fight might indeed be a more challenging task than it appears to be; it implies damning all previous and ongoing struggles to insignificance (“The whole history of philosophy is garbage!” – Heidegger), but also re-employing their vectors and initial energies to reach higher strata, to conquer the Heavens (“Only philosophy can save us!” – Heidegger). How many philosophers have opted out from choosing between materialism and idealism, to either call them essentially the same, bogged down in false problems, only to raise the flag for another materialism, another idealism?
Looking out on this situation, that to think is to either merely disappear into a well worn, battle blasted, trench, entirely, or deploy a new configurations of trenches, a new orthogonal front, one may wonder why the counter-image is not as easily established: thought as building bridges and making links and burying hatchets, surmounting difference, and generating agreement. These are the images that thought often sells itself with. But in practice, the friends of thought, the philosophers, end up being quarrelsome, tunnel sapping, saboteurs. Scurrilous partizans. It would seem philosophy is always doomed to have this zero-sum aspect, drawing it into the constant motif of the conflict, the joust, the skirmish, the debate. Entrenching positions, biting bullets. It’s as though there is not enough truth to go around, and far too many propositions fighting over it. There are certainly not enough jobs or prestige to go around, but the dynamic feels poorly explained by these sociological factors. Instead, there’s something interminably quarrelsome in thought itself. Dialectic pained itself so much to distance itself from eristic, perhaps only because the difference was so slight that it often made no difference. To cry ad hominem is to commit ad hominem, etc.
If that is the case, can there be another image for the activity of philosophy? “A marketplace of ideas”? Just the same violence and logic now dressed up in a vendor stall bedecked village square. “A community of inquiry”? This is just to admit and import all the factions and rifts and gossip that after all make up the vital dramas of any healthy community. Perhaps instead we should look at the historical traces and sediment that have formed out of these endless battlefields. One doesn’t just find a nihilistic cyclone, reducing everything to dust, but instead one finds a bricolage, a monstrous tapestry like the skin of a horrendous folded organism who is all surface. On the reverse side, endless knots and threads and tensions and links and cuts: battle lines and trenches. But on the other side we find an impossible manifold, rendered taut and buckled through the curbing of internal metrics and connections that are not the connections of a synthesis, but of tangled, almost arbitrary, knots of different coloured threads. Not a resolution of the antagonisms in some higher moment of unity, but neither a vortex of betrayals and endless shifting battle lines. Instead something endless that haunts, but has a strange beauty in its astounding improbability.