My last few posts (1, 2, 3) have speculated wildly on the worldly role of a properly pragmatised, pluralised, 'deflated' philosophical practice. I am happy with how these thoughts are developing; however, I am risking over-honouring 'the philosopher' relative to others.
It might seem from what I've written as though only someone with the training and the title—as though only the philosopher qua doyen—could think. I've written of problems and skills but said nothing of philosophical texts or, even more importantly, their readers.
If philosophy books are, as Peter Sloterdijk puts it (citing the poet Jean Paul), 'thick letters to friends,' then surely philosophers do not just befriend other philosophers. For the pragmatic philosopher this would be absurd.
If the philosophical transformation, the event-type proper to philosophical experience, can be said to vary in intensity then the thick letters that philosophers write—if, of course, they are well written and well read—are transferences of intense philosophical creation in response to problematic situations. The differing parts of these networks must be understood as differently localised intensities, not as differences in kind. The philosopher doesn't hand down truth from upon high but rather transfers transformative experiences (or attempts to).
Without the capacity to transfer transformations, all the backflipping conceptual acrobatics in the world are for nothing. That is not to say that the best philosophers are the best communicators (the untruth of this is surely self-evident!) but it is to say that without the writing and reading of these thick (or thin) letters the whole enterprise comes crashing down. Indeed, perhaps there must be an exchange of letters, a two-way street (or many-way street). Certainly, there can be no more ivory tower.
Understanding philosophy in action, therefore, requires not just an understanding of conceptual creation but also mediation—media theory, as Sloterdijk might put it.
Nothing pre-determines where it is in these variegated chains of mediations that constitute 'philosophy' that the significant transformations will occur; that must always be a surprise. There is often lag-time—many letters will only 'come to life' once they find the right reader, rewriter, distributor, rediscoverer.
It would be absurd to say that the professional, dedicated philosopher has no privilege—were that not the case what would be the purpose of them? However, this is not a vertical privilege of oversight but rather that of residing at nodal points in networks of transferred transformations; a tangled rather than disentangled privilege; a pragmatic privilege.
After all, if the virtue of metaphysics is that it allows the nimble trace-based following of 'actors themselves' then it is the actually occurring 'actors themselves' that are the most fleet-footed metaphysicians, whatever their training.
