A Modest Proposal for Revitalizing Philosophy

(a) context          

     In every generation, someone makes the claim that philosophy is dead, and yet, like the ever-imminent Christian Apocalypse, this death never seems to come.  History is done, philosophy is dead, the stars are not wanted now, put out every one, pack up the moon and dismantle the sun etc etc… This mentality of self-pity or whatever you want to call it usually is the result of taking some theological, philosophical or scientific hyperbolist a bit too seriously.  Wittgenstein did not murder philosophy with the Tractatus, nor Hegel with his Phenomenology,  nor Fukuyama with his End of History, nor Dewey with his frightful pragmatist nonsense, what they did was to provide a certain type of enabling optical illusion, an excuse for the tired, for the weary for those whose fantasy was such a death to seize upon. 

        Philosophy will never die as a result of its problems being “solved” or “dissolved.”  It will only be clinically dead for as long as a people lack imagination enough to practice it.  The definition of philosophy in these terms falsifies it.  Philosophy is about the creation of the problem, about posing a problem, about problematization, not about reconciliations or solutions. As soon as one “problem” is “(dis)solved,” life has already thrown another mountain in the way of the sensitive mind.  As Emerson put it in his essay Circles:

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