Is Philosophy an Art?
Ludwig Wittgenstein; portrait by Renée Jorgensen Bolinger, 2013
Jonathan Rée introduces his unconventional history of philosophy in the English-speaking world from 1601 to 1950 with a declaration:
Today’s philosophers may like to think of themselves as the culmination of a purposeful tradition going back two and a half millennia, but the record suggests something different: their predecessors were, for the most part, making their way along unmapped forest paths, with various combinations of ingenuity, frustration, anxiety, improvisation, frivolity and braggadocio. Instead of seeing their works as candidates for inclusion in some ultimate compendium of knowledge, we might do better to treat them as individual works of art forming a tradition as intricate and unpredictable as, say, Yoruba sculpture, Chinese poetry or the classical string quartet. In that case the old histories of philosophy with their well-worn plots and set-piece battles will turn out to be systematically misleading—of all forms of history, perhaps the most tiresome, wrong-headed and sad.
It is a remarkable beginning. A book that aims to examine the ideas of philosophers over three and a half centuries needs to consider what they thought they were doing, and one fact that seems clear is that very few of them believed they were chiefly engaged in creating works of art. With only a handful of exceptions, the philosophers of this period believed they were engaged in the pursuit of truth—as, in their view, the philosophers before them had been. Unless works of art claim to capture some matter of fact, they cannot be true or false. Certainly there are traditions in which what we in the West consider to be art objects purport to represent truths about the world. Tibetan iconography was an exercise in cosmology as well as a religious art form and an aid to meditation.
Similarly, works of fiction can be evaluated by how far they match or depart from human experience.But recognizing the beauty of Yoruba sculpture does not mean denying that of Tibetan mandalas or Renaissance Italian statuary. By contrast, one cannot accept the philosophy of Epicurus, according to which the soul is material and vanishes when we die, and at the same time accept Plato’s, according to which death means the separation of an immaterial soul from the mortal body. For Epicurus and Plato, these were not simply different representations of the world. They were conflicting answers to questions they had in common, and only one of them could be true.
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