An Odd Thing

There is a reasonably well-defined set of questions which constitute the philosophical enterprise.  This list of questions is fluid: it is shortened and lengthened at various points in the discipline’s history.  Yet, at a given time in history, there is a general consensus within the field about the basic issues that are being addressed.

Now, it is a prerequisite for being a philosopher that you disagree with huge swaths of people on a great many of these issues.  A philosopher, generally, must have a view, a collection of answers to the Greater (and Lesser) Questions that constitute the discipline.

Yet, without philosophical enemies, a philosopher is nothing.  It is possible, if difficult, to imagine a scientist busily working alone, constructing and testing hypotheses in total isolation from any colleagues or interlocutors.  Yet, a philosopher is always responding to his or her interlocutors, those colleagues present and past whose disagreement is essential to their own position’s substance. 

The odd thing is that we are generally scornful of these opponents: we see them as hopelessly misguided, as labouring under false assumptions, as unable to see what we think is right in front of their faces.  I am not speaking here of tone, but rather of the way it feels to hold to a philosophical position. Yet, without our enemy’s allegedly nonsensical positions, our own positions have no sense, they have no context, they do not really say much.  A position without other positions is an extensionless point in a vacuum.

Nonetheless, it is impossible to shake the sense that it would be best if one’s opponent saw the light of reason, came over to your side, and stopped writing such silly things.  How could one say otherwise?  Of course, if every enemy did this, we would vanish as philosophers, as participants in a discussion. There would be no-one left for us to be.  And so, there is something self-deceptive and almost paradoxical in this hatred of one's philosophical enemy: it is a kind of will to the annihilation of one's own identity.