「哲學源自（宗教上和政治上的）失望」

[clement]

An Interview with Simon Critchley
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200308/?read=interview_critchley

What is the meaning of life? Isn’t that the question that philosophy is supposed to answer? Maybe, maybe not. But philosophy can help us talk about how we get ourselves into situations of “meaning” and “meaninglessness.” Against the threat of meaningless existence offered by a nihilistic worldview—an attitude that declares finding meaning in this world to be impossible—philosopher Simon Critchley propounds a theory of what is common: “the acceptance of meaninglessness as the achievement of the everyday or the ordinary.” Accepting that meaning can’t be offered to us from on high, but rather that we have to make it for ourselves, points the way out of nihilism’s trap. As Critchley will demonstrate, this is very much related to questions of ethics, and “the good,” in a secular society.

This interview was conducted at various times and places and via various media between March and June 2003. Media included email, cassette tape, barely decipherable handwriting, and good old face-to-face conversation. Questions were answered in and from places including New York, San Francisco, and diverse locales all over Europe where Critchley seems to be relentlessly traveling. Oh, and Iceland. Times included 1:19 a.m., 3:54 p.m., 2:33 a.m., and my favorite, 11:11 PST. Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the University of Essex in England, and directeur de programme at the College International de Philosophie in Paris. In January 2004 he will join the graduate faculty of the New School University in New York. When it comes to punctuation he is very fond of ellipses. He is the author of five books, most recently On Humour (Routledge, 2002).

—Jill Stauffer

Full Text :
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200308/?read=interview_critchley

[clement]

Quotations (emphasis mine):

"[Philosophy] begins in disappointment. And there are two forms of disappointment that interest me: religious and political disappointment. Religious disappointment flows from the realization that religious belief is not an option for us. Political disappointment flows from the fact that there is injustice—that we live in a world that is radically unjust and violent, where might seems to equal right, where the poor are exploited by the rich, etc."

"Nietzsche writes that nihilism is the experience where the highest values have devalued themselves. Where the question “why?” finds no answer. This can also be linked in Nietzsche to the problematic of the death of God. The thought in Nietzsche is not that the highest values have been devalued through some sort of general skepticism. No, Nietzsche’s thought is much deeper. It is that the highest values have devalued themselves—it is a reflexive verb he uses. This is what he means by the death of God. It is not the fact that God has somehow been killed or has popped his clogs or slipped off behind the scenery, but rather that we have killed him. That’s Nietzsche’s full remark: “God is dead. We have killed him.” The way history has worked out, Nietzsche tells us, is that the highest values in which we believed—namely, God, immortality of the soul, and whatever—have become incredible to us. We cannot believe in them. Why? Because Christianity, for Nietzsche, is driven by a will to truth. What I mean is that Christianity is not a fable for a Christian. It is not just a nice story about the creation of the world and some rabbi who got murdered by the occupying Roman authorities a couple thousand years ago. No, for the Christian, the Christian story is true. There is a will to truth at the heart of Christianity. What the Christian realizes, in Nietzsche’s account, is that the “true” world, the world of heaven, immortality, God, is untrue. It has been disproved by reason itself, by science, the will to truth. What is nihilistic for Nietzsche is the following situation: The Christian realizes that what he or she has taken to be true is in fact untrue. God is dead. And we have killed him. That drives people to declarations of meaninglessness, radical meaninglessness. It is the position that is expressed philosophically, for Nietzsche, in the work of his onetime favorite philosopher, Schopenhauer. The point of Nietzsche’s work is to refuse the nihilism of the present—his late-nineteenth-century present." (Nihilism reigns if human beings think that there is no answer to the question of meaninglessness)

"The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility. My personal belief that I’ve tried to argue for in my book Very Little… Almost Nothing—a winning title if ever there was one—is that we have to, in a sense, give up the question of the meaning of life, or at least hear it in a particular way. The formulation that I use in that book is “the acceptance of meaninglessness as the achievement of the everyday or the ordinary.” What I mean by that is that once we’ve accepted that the meaning of life is ours to make, we make meaning. Then we accept that we live in a situation, or, rather, that we inherit a situation of meaninglessness, and out of that meaninglessness we create meaning in relationship to the ordinariness of our common existence. I try to argue for a cultivation of the low, the common and the near—the everyday—as that in relationship to which we can make a meaning out of the meaninglessness of our existence."

"In relation to the question of hope, I think the only hope we have is hope against hope. We hope for a better world. But of course we can do better than just hope. We can act in the world. We can act ethically, we can act well. We can try and construct laws, constitutions, that are just. We can engage in political activity, and in the activity of teaching and instruction. These are tremendous activities of hope. But that’s hope against hope, insofar as there is no metaphysical basis for my hope. I can’t root it in religious belief. There’s a lovely phrase of Gillian Rose’s, which she borrowed from somebody else, which goes, “keep your mind in hell and despair not.” I think of that a lot. Philosophy is keeping one’s mind in hell, in the violence and cruelty of the present, and not despairing, but going on, making, creating, affirming."

"For me, there is a radical separation between philosophy—the activity of being a philosopher, someone who reflects—and a religious point of view. The philosopher is someone who doesn’t know, but who wants to find out. This is why Socrates was declared the wisest man in Greece. The inscription over the oracle at Delphi reads: Know Thyself. The truth is, we do not know ourselves. The wisest of us accept that we do not know ourselves. Philosophy is the inquiry into that situation. But the religious person knows what the meaning of life is."

"... all I can do is philosophize. In the absence of anything like God. If I had a religious experience, what I know for sure is that I would stop doing philosophy and would start doing religion, teaching classes in religion, preaching in a local church. That is fine and noble activity. But I do not feel entitled to engage in it. So for me philosophy is my fate. "

"[P]hilosophy, for me, is a way of relearning to look at the world."

"One of the tendencies intellectually at present is a massive return to religion, usually in the guise of postmodernism. I think this is lamentable."

"[W]e haven’t achieved modernity. Modernity would be the achievement of a secular form of life, and we haven’t got there yet. "

"In my view, ethical action is taken in the face of infinite responsibility, a responsibility that I can never fully discharge, a responsibility that pushes me on to try and do more, not just for this particular other in front of me, but for all others in the world."

"The point about reason in Nietzsche is that faith in the categories of reason is, as he says, the cause of nihilism. This could be linked to a thought inherited from Nietzsche through the work of Max Weber into the thought of the Frankfurt School, in particular Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. The thought here is that reason, which was that in which we had faith in the period of the Enlightenment—the eighteenth century—has undergone a reversal, an inversion, a dialectical transformation. The reason that was meant to be our salvation—to be, in Kant’s words, man’s freedom from his self-incurred tutelage—has become the means of our imprisonment. It has become the instrumental rationality, the bureaucratic rationality, that governs contemporary society. This is the version of rationality that was also discussed by Foucault in his idea that we live in societies of surveillance, discipline, and control."

"Merleau-Ponty says that true philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world. Philosophy teaches us to look at the world again. It brings out at a theoretical level what all plain, common, ordinary people, in a sense, know already. That’s also a definition of phenomenology. Another formulation of the term would be to say that phenomenology is the unveiling of the pre-theoretical layer of human experience. We exist in a world, we exist practically in an everyday manner. Phenomenology is a philosophical method that tries to uncover that pre-theoretical layer of human experience and re-describe it. That, in a sense, sounds a little obscure and uninteresting. I’d sharpen it up by thinking about the relation between phenomenology and the scientific worldview. We live in a world that is dominated by science. And that’s not a bad thing—not at all. But one of the problems with the scientific worldview is that it leads human beings to have an overwhelmingly theoretical relationship to the world. For example, I no longer accept my being in the world practically and then try to describe that or elucidate that; rather, I see the world theoretically as colors and objects and representations which are fed through my retina into the brain. "

"[P]hilosophy could end for me if I underwent a religious experience or became an anti-intellectual philistine."