I was reluctant to write this book, for various reasons. I was also spurred to write it for various reasons, one of which was a stumbled-upon phrase from Cicero. ‘How inconsistent it would be for us to expect the immortal gods to love and cherish us, when we ourselves despise and neglect one another!’
I have come to see much of contemporary philosophy as little more than indulgent game-playing, superficial and shallow, marked by triviality, having lost any but the most tenuous connection to a justification by worthy purpose; in a dirty word (that philosophers should recognise to connote all that is meant by it): sophistry. This despising has caused me to neglect it. Not all philosophy is like this, but it seems to me that an increasing proportion of it is, and that the subject is, in the ever more business-oriented character of the modern university, coming to be dominated by this impoverished form. There is a chance that it will come to be be defined by that form.
I know philosophy to be more than this. The truer form of the subject is rarely if ever trivial and can claim to be the most important thing a person can do. The truer form of the subject does not invite accusations of shallowness but has unfathomable depth; not in mere complexity, but in profundity, and can often be most profound when it is most simple. Only that form of the subject is what enables us to say, with unflinching sincerity, that ‘the unexamined life is not worthy of a human being’. It is more than a learning of facts and theories or the construction of arguments; it is a love of wisdom. It is a commitment to the pursuit of wisdom, of having true beliefs about what really matters and making an attempt at living in alignment with those beliefs. It is more than something that increases your earnings potential. Its value is intrinsic. Its worth is self-evident to anyone who understands it; sadly, it appears to be invisible to those who don’t. I don’t know if that truer form of the subject can survive in the modern university. I am pessimistic; I think it’s too late. But I can hope that the subject will survive in some sense and not come to be totally dominated by the counterfeit form. I am grateful to be able to discern the difference.
‘Why perpetuate that game by playing it? Why feed the beast?’ This is a question that makes me reluctant to write this book. But if I think, as I do, that philosophy has a better and truer form, and I think there is a chance that I have the power to remind people of that or provoke them into it, what would I be if I held back? I believe good philosophy to be good; I believe I might have the power to provoke good philosophy; if I did not at least try to do so then I would be no more consistent than the ‘inconsistent triad’ that is the topic of discussion in this book. It would be a moral failing for me to do otherwise.
What more indulgent a reason could one need to play the game?
When I returned to write this book in the customary manner, I found I couldn’t. Exile (however self-imposed) has sent me a bit too Diogenes. In exile, I find I am more free to write in a style of my choosing. This is probably not a good thing. I am inclined to be more rebellious than I might otherwise be. It’s childish, unsophisticated, simple. I find I do not want to replicate the self-important and serious tone of academic writing. This pushes me into a slightly mocking and ironic tone, at times sloppy, at times rhetorical. It is indisciplined; it is melodramatic. I am still in the grip of my pessimistic disdain and so my tone is harsher than I would like. I have eliminated what I can of this, but I would also choose to leave much of it in because it’s part of my point. It’s good to trim the fat, but sometimes it’s the fat that gives the flavour.
Style is not the only virtuous convention against which I’ve chosen to rebel. Other than the ‘brief history’ segments, and occasional other segments where it is strictly necessary to go over old work, I have deliberately chosen not to engage with the literature whenever it’s possible to avoid doing so. I want to make a fresh start wherever I can, even if it’s obvious to anyone in the know that I am doing no such thing. (If it’s good enough for Descartes, it’s good enough for me.) It’s not that I don’t want to show any respect or appreciation of those who have contributed to the literature. Quite the opposite, in fact: I want to avoid them being seen as guilty by association with me, or otherwise imply that they might be on my side. I don’t insist that they support what I say. But another compelling reason is that time and time again we show ourselves to be incapable of avoiding misinterpreting or misrepresenting one another. One way to avoid this problem is simply to stop representing anyone at all and leave them to speak for themselves. I speak for me, and make no claim to speak on behalf of any other. You can hear it as you will; that is not in my power to control. Obviously I have my influences. I can only hope you have an ear for tone.
And also: it makes a point. A friend once joked to me in our first year of university: ‘Look how smart I am; I’ve got two massive books!’ To recognise this as a joke requires that we understand ‘having big books’ as not equating to ‘having knowledge’. Whilst books might hold knowledge, they are not themselves knowledge. Anyone who seriously claimed to demonstrate their knowledge by showing their books would show themselves to miss the point. But what is it we see in academic writing that offers citation after citation, quotation after quotation, that all say the same thing and add nothing except a nod or a wink or a hat tip? It seems to me that many of our attempts to offer citations and support are only attempts to give the illusion of weighty knowledge… I will not do this.
And so I have not included a bibliography or any detailed bibliographic references. I don’t cite page numbers for my literary quotations, because I think it would be better if you were to go and read the book and not just jump to the quotations as if you were an undergraduate student looking for essay content. I should not enable you to cherry pick. In the words of Ron Swanson: ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish and you feed yourself. He’s a grown man. And fishing’s not that hard.’
But I’m torn, because whilst I don’t want to imply that certain philosophers are aligned with what I’m saying, or an accessory to it, I also don’t want to imply that I am the sole source of all of the ideas, arguments, and phrases deployed in this book, as if they were all original. (That might have been good enough for Descartes but it’s not good enough for me.) Most direct quotations and references will be obvious or else easily sourced by a quick copy-and-paste into your preferred search engine (they are; I’ve checked); I’m not too worried about them. What remains are the paraphrases and clear allusions, included but not necessarily named, which will be obvious to anyone familiar with their origin but not to those who aren’t. I don’t want to pass these off as my own. And so, to make it clear, in addition to those named in the text, in this work you will find clear allusions to or paraphrases of the work of: Raimond Gaita, D. Z. Phillips, Nick Trakakis, Kenneth Surin, Stephen Wykstra, Andrew Gleeson, Gavin Hyman, and Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy. And Plato and Kant and Wittgenstein, obviously, but I think that goes without saying (like the Bible or Shakespeare). There is one major exception that necessitates a proper acknowledgement because I depend on it but have no reason to mention it by name in the text: Dostoyevsky’s correspondence is all sourced from Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). And the translation of The Brothers Karamazov is David McDuff’s (London: Penguin, 2003).
Perhaps it’s obvious, but I am trying to do something different here. This book is not a straightforward academic argument: it is a provocation, in content and form. It is meant to pose a question. It an attempt to shout above the choir. It irks that I have to point this out – it’s self-defeating, like explaining a joke – but like Plato’s dialogues, this book is written with layered intentions: on the surface, there are some philosophical arguments with which you may or may not agree; beneath that, there is a show of doing philosophy in a certain way (a way that many of you will not like and I’m not sure I do either); and beneath that there is a provocation to philosophise. What’s on the surface is not really what the book is about. Like Socrates, I ask you unsophisticated questions. It’s your job to answer. Isn’t that what philosophy ought to be?
It’s all rather clumsy, of course, because I am no Plato. My attempts at narrative structure, foreshadowing, reflecting characters in themes and themes in characters, etc., are half-hearted and lack confidence. Is it obvious that I am the doctor, we are the baker, and philosophy is our saw? I am frustrated that I find myself feeling the need to put some parts in parentheses to make it obvious, labouring ‘the connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear’ at the end of some sections that are meant to show but not say. But we are so used to everything being offered to us with absolute explicit clarity that we have forgotten to look beneath the surface and between the lines. We have lived so long with everything on the surface that we have forgotten that philosophy can have hidden depths. But what would it be to read Plato’s Socrates literally? Other than shallow and superficial, of course. How much would be lost in that.
This book displays a distinct lack of humility, which makes me very uncomfortable. It is a part and product of an experiment in provocation. Like Ivan, I am meant to be a villain. As I say, it is an attempt to shout above the choir. The irony is I am doing this in an attempt to avoid being self-important. It should be clear that I am playing at being Ivan Karamazov or Socrates or Diogenes. There is an arrogance in this, of course, and this work is dripping with it, but I won’t hide this arrogance behind faux intellectual humility and fancy words.
It’s relatively easy to say stupid things in a way that seems clever. Like the Drake equation. Or the simulation argument. I choose to say clever things in a way that seems stupid, or at least I choose to try to. I have chosen to present my work barefoot, visible poor, ugly. Self-published and given away. It is a renouncing of the markers of respectability.
The lack of a bibliography is a good example of what I’m doing. Obviously I think people should cite their sources – the virtues of that go without saying. But I also think we’ve become corrupted by the idea of ‘presenting’ a certain thing: an image of academic respectability. The image takes over, we compete and communicate in these terms, and this hides what really matters. So to work against that, I adopt the contrary habit. Of course it is not correct – I am a villain – but it is a corrective provocation. And likewise with the language and style, so childish and petulant: this is not the most admirable form of philosophical writing. But, again, because I think we have become corrupted by the attempt to appear a certain way, I choose to do the opposite.
Why not stick to the proper form? Why not try to say clever things in a way that seems clever? Because in doing so we get so caught up in the cleverness of our arguments that we spin ourselves into a vacuum. Because in doing so we exclude anyone who is not able or educated or willing or sympathetic enough to the topic to bother making the effort to learn and decipher our complicated and idiomatic terms of art. Because in doing so we pursue cleverness so much that we forget why what we are talking about matters, as if the only thing that matters is saying something more clever than our opponent. To break a habit, you need to adopt the contrary habit, so I will try to not appear clever; I will try to appear stupid. If I have anything worth saying, it will survive my stupid telling of it.
I’m not saying this is the best way to carry on, but I think we need to do more. We can no longer assume that people will acknowledge philosophy’s value. If we do not make them realise why it matters then we will fade into obscurity, withering under the weight of the economic pressures of a world that does not suit us.
People do not understand why the problem of evil matters. They think it is one amongst many obscure technical problems in philosophy, or else of interest only to religious believers and zealous atheists. One Socratic conversation can bring them into the fold. How better to do this than by throwing an accusation?
It is a question. I do not tell you my conclusion. I ask you my questions and I tell you my reasoning, I give you an insight into my way and my way of thinking. It is meant to be irritating. This points to my conclusion, but I do not say it, because you must make your own conclusion. Because it is an ethical conclusion and ethical conclusions must be your own if they are to mean anything at all.
In the end I use the word ‘reflections’, and reflections is exactly the correct word. I reflect, philosophically, and give serious thought to my own thoughts. But these thoughts ought also to be a reflection of what is in you; they ought to show only what you already know but have forgotten.
But I had to include this ‘introduction’ at the end, rather than the beginning, otherwise it would have defeated the whole point.
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