THE ESSENCE OF PHILOSOPHY: A RESPONSE TO KARL MARX

It is even hair-splitting that the field of human consciousness can even die, but a field can be in dominion of another field just as it is evident in the contemporary world of science that is failing us now.  What we have, in partial fulfilment of Marx’s vision, is the hibernation of philosophy, not its demise. Acting from the sound clandestine cum empirical foresight of a prophetic philosopher, Marx had with prescient eye presaged the dissipation of philosophy in the brimming world of science and technology whose dynasty is in fast rate encroaching and encompassing the dream of the universe, but the world is sick now by the malaise of technology and science in need of a pathologist which is philosophy.

First, the platform of Marxist ‘philosophy’ is scientific and material and the quintessence of Marx’s ideology is sending philosophy to the Coventry, but the weapon with which philosophy received its demise are fashioned for science approaching its own demise.

Premise 1: ‘philosophers have interpreted the world in several ways the point, however, is to change it’.( Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach)

The job was well done by Marx at the eleventh thesis of the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach where he argues for the irrelevance of philosophy in the world of scientific vagaries.  Hegel and Feuerbach had received the sledge of such premise and the succeeding Marxists were or are held spellbound by such enthralling wit of their raconteur but the premise is not far from being false.

The two substantial words in the premise are ‘interpret’ and ‘change’ which Marx has significantly used for philosophy and science.  While Marx attributes ‘interpret’ to philosophy or philosophers who are busy raging in the unending interpretation of the world’s mysteries, he carefully chooses ‘change’ in the position of science and the scientists who, according to him, have altered the surface of the world by edifices, automobiles, and machines. But Marx did not realise that both philosophers and the technologists have been interpreting the world and none has changed it.  The contrast surfaces where the philosophers are interpreting the world in the abstract sense and the scientists and the technologists are interpreting the world in the concrete sense.

The world had been equipped with what it entails, all we do is the interpretation of the components of its mysteries.  From the interpretation of the mule, a car is made and from the interpretation of the bird, a plane is imagined to fly.  From the interpretation of the waves came phone, and from the interpretation of the rock came the realisation of gold and diamond.  Water generates electricity and coals, petroleum, butane, and bitumen are mined from the ground.  No contradiction, however that these are the interpretations of the natural phenomena.   Philosophers likewise stem their interpretations from the rigorous abstractions and speculations of the world’s mysteries.  While nature feeds the duo, there is no innovation or invention in the world that had already manufactured itself.

To change the world is to tilt the world or make hyenas of human or seize the sun from shinning.  If a scientist can turn the night to morning or dawn to dusk or stop humans from loving or hating or smiling or killing, a scientist has changed the world but this can never be. While Marx glibly embarked on the communist ideology of wiping away what is capitalistic in man, he did not realise that humans are capitalists by nature and none can change the world.   Every age is modern in itself, the question of the primitive is a mirage.

Otherwise, the philosophers and the scientists are interpreting what the world is laid with ab initio.  The philosophers and the scientists have interpreted the world in several ways but none has changed it.

Premise 2: ‘ when reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence.’( the German Ideology).

Even after Marx’s death, some philosophers refuted this premise, loading its claim on the isolated fields such as psychology and sociology, not philosophy, but this is like escaping an arrow of an argument through an excuse.  In fact, Hegel and other idealists might have suffered from this ‘lethal’ blow.

Using the former linguistic approach, the two significant words in the premise are ‘reality’ and ‘philosophy’, where ‘reality’ is science and ‘philosophy’ is simply philosophy.  It could be deduced from Marx’s perspective that while science operates in the ‘reality’ that could be felt, touched, seen, ridden, talked on, toyed with, as evident in the hitherto world of technology, ‘philosophy’ operates as a mere circumlocution of words and gratuitous questioning of loafers whiling away their worries in the spasm of contemplation. 

If I may take Marx by his word ‘change’ in the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach , then ‘reality’ in The German Ideology is a misnomer because reality does not change.  The world of reality is the world of absolute stasis and immutability.  It is spurious to argue that the world that is capable of metamorphosis is a real world.  It is a mirage.  What is so real in the chameleon-like world where books are made from wood and jewellery are made from diamond and age succeeds age and seasons succeed seasons and all are manoeuvred by the bogus tricks of a magic wand?  The world so real is the world so fabricated and so distinct where there is no conversion made of another.  There is no ‘modern’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘old structure’ or ‘new structure’ or ‘obsolete’ or ‘fashionable’ in the world that is capable of reality.  The real world is the world of no invention or interpretation or discovery or advanced learning.  The world of reality is timelessly perfect and ideal.

   Ergo, if science’s vision is to this world, science is not real as the world unreal is.  While philosophy busies itself interpreting the labyrinth of the world, science and technology metamorphose with the world to die with it.  For if technology and science are set at perdition as evident in this world of apocalypse, annihilated by the incineration or washed away by the torrent of Armageddon, philosophy lives to tell the story of the flood and the conflagration that melted the world and its science into an extinction: the philosophy of judgement and the philosophy of Paradise which are ethereal.  Yet, philosophy occupies two posts, first, the corporeal, second, the spiritual, but science cannot operate beyond the corporeal. 

Premise 3: that philosophy is the symptom of the malaise of the society that is yet to realise itself until science places it on a firmer foundation.

The above premise is a paraphrase of some statements made by some Marxists.  It advocates the necessity of science and technology as the Messiah in the rescue of the sickening world besieged by the malaise of philosophy.  A significant word here is ‘malaise’ which is now the bone of contention.  However, philosophy ergo is the chiaroscuro of the hitherto beleaguered world of ‘demonology’.  How I wish Marx had been given a permit from where he is to witness his dream marred in the present world deluded by the malaise of science and technology.  It is however ironical that the erstwhile sick world sustained by science in the thought of Marx is being entrapped by more severe sickness incurred by its former Messiah.  And the Messiah of the hitherto sick world is philosophy, its former sickness.  Even the world was never sick as Marx claimed in his time but was beleaguered by the lost of philosophy thus wading in deserts of uncertainty.

The 20^TH and the 21^st centuries humans have been incarcerated by sports, entertainments, fashion: the symptoms of sickness incurred by the material science.  What seems the dryness of thought, philosophy and loftiness in the reasoning of the perilous humans of perilous time is the malaise of science and technology, the co-workers of material consciousness. Even the dwindling political might of the somnolent world is a symptom of the soporific and restive injections of sports, entertainment and fashion which can only be mitigated by philosophy.  Also, the seeming collapse of the world hangs on the gallows of the above routines on which the inert generation receives its serpentine deathblows.

That philosophy changes with the strides of time or that philosophy changes with the changes in the material consciousness of the people which could be argued that entertainment and fashion are the philosophy of the 20^th and 21^st centuries is false.  Such ‘philosophy’ changing with the course of time, casting ‘mythical’ the ideals of the past is not a philosophy but a mere belief capable of being eroded by the torrents of time.  Philosophy is eternal, so metaphysics, philosophy is philosophical, not profane.

The world that flouts philosophy tends towards barbarism, cannibalism and demonology; not barbarism in the primordial or cannibalism in the primitive or demonology in the coven, but barbarism in sophistication, cannibalism in massacre and deployment of incendiaries and demonology in politics.  Ergo, it is within the corpus of philosophy that the world spitting its source could be realised.

Olayiwola.O.Metamofosis       

LITERARY INSPIRATION: BY SPIRITUS MUNDI[1] OR BY MUSE[2]?

(In celebration of the literary imagination)

Kayode Taiwo Olla

The mystery of the power of creativity in literature (and even in art and music) will, I daresay, forever remain (at least, in part) an inscrutable marvelous aspect of the arts to the judgment of the rational mind. However, as John Keats (1795 – 1821), one of the greatest proponents of English Romanticism which privileges emotion and imagination over reason – as he wrote: ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination’; I may therefore presume with a methodological skeptical position, that despite the inexplicable nature of the question of the creative impulse in literature, the mind of man may still grasp or at least appreciate the marvelous power of inspiration. I shall take an especial mention on the Romantic poets in this essay; or in other sense, look on this question using the Romantics as a case study, for in my own opinion, Romantic imagination presents the best example of imaginative creativity possible.

            Irish novelist and songwriter Samuel Lover (1797 – 1868) said in Andy Anny: ‘When once the itch of literature comes over man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.’  Often times have creative writers been asked, ‘How did you write this?’ My sincerest answer to questions like these when I am asked as one (and, I could tell, are so many other literary writers’) is: ‘I don’t know! Dear, I don’t know!’ Someone else may say, ‘Teach me how to write?’ But how could I best teach him/her that it cannot ‘be taught’? Now if then this inspiration is in some way intrinsic, can man not comprehend how it came by? Inspiration in literature – is it a marvelous working of spiritus mundi (‘the human spirit’); or of a divine spirit, say a god or God?

            To aptly delineate the concept of inspiration in literature is too tedious a task and the topic too controversial, to have a definite result. In my own view, creative imagination naturally involves an awesome working interplay of man’s high faculties, taking in the miraculous workings of perception (the senses), reception (the spiritus), conception (the mind) and artistic ability – and the height of the literariness of the resultant work is left a function of the writer’s level of competence and mastery through experience. However, with some extremists inspiration sometimes transcends the workings of the body system into an unanalyzable psychological or mystical realm.

            The following statement was attributed to U.S. rock singer and songwriter Jim Morrison (1943 – 1971): ‘These first songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock theatre that was going on inside my head.’ To analyze the processes of the inspiration, then, we must have to, perhaps, take an empirical test of the electronic activities going on in his head at the time! True, we can; possibly through such medical-scientific processes as neuroimaging. Then perhaps, we might only catch a glimpse into the inscrutable sublime of that ‘fantastic rock theatre… inside my head’! On the other hand, Charles Brown, a friend with whom John Keats was living when he composed his poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, [only] had this to say about Keats’ own composition of the ode:

In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale.

Thus, the nightingale was an inspiration for the poem, I can safely say, and by gazing at its nest Keats’ creative impulse flowed into writing; but then, the process that went on in his head penning that impulse into poetic lines, how can you comprehend? The natural environment thus worked with the genius of the poet to produce the great ‘Ode to a Nightingale’! At this point, I can safely designate his inspiration, based on this discourse, as sheer working of the spiritus mundi, as opposed to being aided in his fantasy by hemlock, alcohol or any stimulating liquor, as did many poets in the Romantic era; for he himself says – addressing the nightingale:

Away! Away! For I will fly to thee

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards

But on the viewless wings of poesy.

However, extremists do go beyond to compose under the influence of mind-bending substances such as drugs. P.B. Shelley (1792 – 1822), one of the leading poets of Romanticism, did compose, at least, some of his poems under the influence of such mind-bending substances as hemlock. The disadvantageous effect of this on him is not a point to analyze here, you know what drug addiction does! Now, in this case, I presume that a psycho-neurotic approach will delineate or analyze the inspiration of the psychedelic literature, art or music. The spiritus mundi here does not function in its normal state and the inspiration is not natural but hallucinatory.

Moreover, ancient Greek poets believed that they were inspired by Muse, a goddess of poetry. (Muses, nine, were the daughters of the god Zeus in Greek mythology, each         muse believed to preside over a particular art.) For instance, Homer’s great epic ILLIAD, that recounts the legend of the Trojan War, began thus:

‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles’ Peleus’ son, the ruinous war that brought on the Achaians woes innumerable….’

Now, how realistic the Muse’s inspiration power by which the classical poets claim to write was, might be argued by skeptics and even be discounted by scientists. However, in my opinion, the poets actually created under the powers of those spirits, whether termed mystical or real; for they did worship and conjured such black powers. On the other hand, Neoclassical poets who patterned their works after ancient Greek and Roman Classism, did not necessarily imitate the worship of the classical Muses, but did make reference to, pay homage to, or even conjured them. William Shakespeare (1654 – 1616), for instance, makes mention on many occasion as of being inspired by Muse in his love Sonnets. For instance, in ‘Sonnet LXXXV’:

My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still,              

While comments of your praise richly compil’d,
Reserve their character with golden quill,
And precious phrase by all the Muses fil’d.

Whether he only wanted to pattern his work after the Classics or he is actually inspired by them, might be for some other critical analyst to search out and probe. But I daresay he was merely imitating the tradition of Classical literature, as did also many other Neoclassicists. William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), one of the most influential proponents of English Romanticism and whose theories and style created the literary tradition, did not only get inspiration from nature but sees Nature as god, whereas Keats, his contemporary, did not subscribe to this doctrine.

            However, John Milton (1608 – 1674), a contemporary of Shakespeare, in his poem ‘On the Incarnation Morning’, celebrating the Virgin birth of Christ, prays to the Holy Spirit of God and asks this ‘Heavenly Muse’ to give him lines for this Holy God born on this Christmas morning. He chose to call, or have, the Holy Spirit as his ‘Muse’.

            Ergo, my summation is: every good literary writer in literature must have got at least some little measure of an intrinsic capability of literary imagination; two, each literary writer chooses what inspiration flows through him/her or what spirit he/she allows to rule his/her creative mind. And as literary writer myself, this is my submission: ‘There is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty gives [me] understanding’ (The Bible, Job 32: 8) – for I can only speak for myself!

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[1] SPIRITUS MUNDI – Human spirit

[2] MUSE – Not only used in its denotative sense of a Greek goddess of poetry, but also in its connotative, of a spirit/Spirit that inspires a writer.