Month: May 2025

Witnessing reactions to ideas. A response to Michael Hampe’s autobiographical philosophy

Her eyes are wide open, her left hand covering her mouth to suppress a scream. – Imagining this kind of scene, ideally in black and white, you know you’re probably watching a classic horror film. This kind of scene is called a reaction shot. It’s designed to show the reaction to an event rather than the event itself. This kind of shot is certainly intriguing in many ways. The reactions to events guide our empathy, letting on what it’s like to undergo a certain event, even if we’re not seeing the event as such. We know that something scary or funny or beautiful is being seen. Seeing the event, we can then make up our minds as to whether we agree with the sentiments displayed. Once you get to know someone, you might be quite interested in how they in particular react to something. Unsurprisingly, there is by now a whole genre of “reaction videos”, designed to show initial reactions to music or films or whatever. In a manner of speaking, philosophical works can be seen as reaction shots to ideas. In this case, too, you might be quite interested in how a certain philosopher reacts to certain ideas. Knowing someone fairly well, you might be able to anticipate their reactions. Still, you might be surprised or curious as to how that person will phrase their response to a particular idea. Reading Michael Hampe’s book What for? A philosophy of purposelessness (Wozu? Eine Philosophie der Zwecklosigkeit)*, which comes with a decidedly autobiographical approach, it dawned on me that this approach is perhaps the ideal form of what a philosophical reaction shot could be.

Why bother? ­– Although I have a strong interest in philosophers’ attempts to overcome teleology, my wish to read this book was mainly driven by what I already know about the author. There are some authors whose reactions to thoughts are just interesting to witness. And Hampe is a great writer: the way he challenges and recombines patterns of ideas is just a treat, to say nothing of his style. This book is no exception. It consists of three parts: (1) an autobiographical exploration of purposes and their conditions and boundaries; (2) a reflection on the actual approach as a sceptical stance with its ethical and political repercussions; (3) the discussion of a set of inspirational sources ranging from Aristotle and Spinoza to Weil and Wittgenstein.

Picturing the invisible. – The book is beautifully composed: Starting out by probing into thoughts about how we might experience our first conscious beginnings of getting drawn into speech, attention, and purposes, Hampe skillfully navigates through the dialectics of purposes and what its boundaries might be. One of the crucial (Wittgensteinian) ideas Hampe develops is that we live our lives by adhering to a certain picture. That is, you might have a certain picture of individual events you wish to happen, like a picture of yourself reading a book in the library tomorrow; thus, you might behave in such a way that you make the pictured event happen. At the same time, you might follow a more abstract or super-picture governing your actions as pertaining to your life or a life project. Taken in this light, the question whether you can dip into purposelessness (which is still close to impossible to imagine) amounts to the question whether you can devise a different picture to govern your life. Sometimes we seem to manage this. But how can you express what this amounts to? Trying to express this resembles the practice of negative theology. That is, eventually it seems inexpressible. However, witnessing Hampe reacting to this thought goes beyond this somewhat helpless gesture. He writes: “The relief that occurs when all purposes disappear is quite different from that which occurs when a certain purpose is achieved.” (“Die Erleichterung, die eintritt, wenn alle Zwecke verschwinden, ist eine ganz andere als die, die eintritt, wenn ein Zweck erreicht wird.”). Comparing kinds of relief is one of Hampe’s many ways to explore what purposelessness might mean.

Scepticism as a way into purposelessness. – Hampe’s kaleidoscopic autobiographical approach is embedded and recflected in a nuanced sceptical approach (with a touch of Buddhism, Montaigne, Rorty and other pragmatists). Again, the crucial merit is not to develop a theory or to “defend a position” but to react to the historically grown array of philosophical and scientific stances to the world and ourselves, as they oscillate between ascribing and denying purposes. Here, it is especially the dismissal of hierarchical thinking (ingrained in most attempts at how we see and evaluate what we see) that takes the lead in dipping into purposelessness. Taking this dismissal of hierarchy as a trait of dismissing a universe with final causes, Hampe suggests, inter alia, that Spinoza’s anti-teleological thought can be redescribed as a way of dismissing hierarchical orders in nature and second nature. Along similar lines, we can see Hampe reacting to his readings of a vast array of other philosophers, not attempting to present their thoughts in a historical reconstruction, but in a way that Jay Rosenberg has called creative reading.

Situatedness. – In keeping with the picturing approach to capture desires, life goals and projects, Hampe thinks that what makes me me and you you is not an essence but the fact that we find ourselves in certain situations. It’s not our supposed character traits but arrays of situations gone through that seem to determine our responses to the world. It’s no surprise then that Hampe, like Rorty, seems commited, not to an ethics of principles, but to an ethics of sensitivity, educated through diligent attention and literature. In like manner, Hampe suggests it’s our historical situatedness, rather than philosophical originality, that makes renewed interest in old topics worthwhile. Thus, we might say of Hampe’s treating (anti-)teleology what Hampe himself says of of others treating the topic of love: “It would be strange to claim that Shakespeare’s works represented a sort of ‘progress’ over those of Homer… One can no longer write about love today like Homer or Shakespeare … People love at different times and in different situations. It is because of these changes, and not because of any genuinely new philosophical insights, that love must be written about again and again.” (“Es wäre merkwürdig zu behaupten, dass die Arbeiten von Shakespeare einen ‘Fortschritt’ gegenüber denen von Homer … darstellten. Man kann heute nicht mehr wie Homer oder Shakespeare über die Liebe schreiben … Menschen lieben zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten in unterschiedlichen Situationen. Aufgrund dieser Wandlungen und nicht wegen irgendeiner genuin neuen philosophischen Erkenntnis muss immer wieder über die Liebe geschrieben werden.”)

Accordingly, we might say that our renewed interest in people writing on old philosophical issues is not a belief in progress but an interest in contemporary reactions, i.e. reactions situated like we are situated, to these issues. Autobiographical reactions might be most revealing about their situatedness and thus most pertinent to this purpose.

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* Incidentally, there will be a seminar on Michael Hampe’s “Wozu?” as well as a talk by him in Hagen. – Here is a post with some more reflections on the autobiographical approach.

Thou shalt not read sloppily on your phone! The ethics of reading (1)

“What the philosopher establishes in their labors are not truths or theses, but rather scores, scores for thinking with.”

Alva Noë, The Entanglement, 115

If it’s true that so many people and especially ‘students these days’ fail at reading, there must be an ethics of reading. And of course, there is more than one. While many ideas in this field are revolving around the relation between reader and text (just think of the principle of charity), I’m currently more interested in the relation between readers. After all, it’s not so much between reader and text but between readers within a certain group that we try to enforce certain values.* Spinoza or his œvre will not show much offence, if you read sloppily. But your instructor, your fellow student or your colleague are already waiting for their gotcha moment. Indeed, many philosophy classes are thinly veiled occasions for blaming others of sloppy reading or, if they’re aiming higher, of missing the argument. What many philosophers or indeed other academic readers tend to overlook is that such (ethical) standards are relative to the profession or shared philosophical endeavour. If you’re reading for pleasure or reciting some passage to a friend, quite different standards might apply.** But even within philosophy, there are different sets of standards. In what follows, I want to look at these standards more closely, hoping to suggest that many common complaints about students these days etc. might be off the mark.

The ‘fake it till you make it’ reader. – I guess we all know this particular student who comes to class, is rather quiet when we ask for a summary of the text, but greatly enlivens the discussion when we turn to a particular argument. As instructors, we can sense that this student “didn’t do the reading”, but we let them get away with it – just this once – because it’s the discussion we care about most for the moment. If you haven’t been this student yourself, here is how it works: You just wait till the discussion reaches a very particular point (and it will), then you make up your mind about the point, deriving most insights from the summaries before and the heat of the moment. If you actually did bring the text, you might quickly search for the pertinent passage and even shine with terminological digressions. It’s a great skill, but it doesn’t require the kind of devoted reading that is encouraged by old dons. The skill is not based on “wrestling with the text” but on distilling crucial information and turns from what is being said. By and large, this kind of skill is greatly honoured in philosophy classes and in essay writing. We use words like “smart” to describe such behaviour, even if we might chide the student for not going all the way and reading the damn book properly. (By the way, I don’t think Jerry Fodor lied when he said that he thought he could write a book about Hume “without actually knowing anything about Hume.”)*** Hence, we might say that the ethical core value in place is not so much being a serious reader but rather being a serious discussant of pertinent ideas.

Now change just some parameters. – Instead of listening to your fellow students, you ask ChatGPT for a summary and for what’s in certain paragraphs. The same honoured skill is applied, but instead of honouring the skill we now focus on the decline of mankind as we knew it. But has anything relevant changed in what the student does? Remember, the student didn’t read the originally set text but gathers information from a likely somewhat flawed summary. Granted, the student might be better off listening to fellow students rather than feeding off tech products, but for the particular ethics applying to what happens in class or on the page, the student may still be doing what matters most, i.e. engaging in a serious discussion of a thesis or argument. In fact, many philosophers I know trust their rational reconstructions much more than poring over the ancient texts. We even have debates about whether we should really have students read an actual text by Kant, let alone the original German, rather than, say, the smart secondary texts in our ubiquitous “just the arguments” summaries. So if we don’t care all that much about teaching “the text”, let alone “the original”, why do we worry so much about students when they take this endeavour to the next level?

I’m not saying textual scholarship doesn’t matter; and you wouldn’t have much fun in my history of philosophy classes when ignoring the texts. What I’m saying is that different ethics of reading apply to different sub-disciplines in philosophy. I often tell students that, while philosophers care most about problems, historians of philosophy also care about texts. So the stakes are different. And it’s this difference that we signal to our students when we focus on, say, the structure of the argument as opposed to the frilly bits and bobs in the text.

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* I’m greatly inspired by Adam Neely’s The Ethics of Fake Guitar, who makes a similar point about adherents of different genres of music favouring different core values.

** Already in relation to an earlier post, Marija Weste convinced me that there is less of a difference between different types of texts (say, philosophical texts versus novels), but much more of a difference between professional academic reading as opposed to non-professional kinds of reading.

*** Here is the passage I have in mind from Fodor’s Hume Variations:

However, ChatGPT tells me: “Jerry Fodor’s claim that he could write a book on Hume without knowing him is not meant to be taken literally. It highlights his approach to philosophy, which is to focus on the enduring theoretical insights of philosophers like Hume, rather than necessarily adhering to historical interpretations. Fodor uses Hume’s ideas as a source of inspiration for his own work in cognitive science, particularly his theories about the mind and language.”