What sets the philosophy that began with Socrates apart from the thought that came before it, and why has today's teaching of philosophy lost this principle?
This introductory text places the workshops under one constant principle: reconnecting with the philosophical inquiry that Socrates began. That inquiry differs from earlier thought, from the Indian and Chinese traditions to the Presocratics, whom the Greeks called "physicists." Philosophy begins when we stop questioning things and start questioning the words through which people exchange them. Postwar French philosophy lost sight of this question. It has wavered between the shadow of Heidegger, from Sartre to Derrida, and the "human sciences," in order to set aside Hegel and Hegelian-Marxist dialectics. Citing the Phaedo, the text concludes that this value-centered return to questions of knowledge is what today's teaching lacks.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
The visitor to this site cannot fail to notice the extent to which, throughout the pages that unfold its contents, one invariant remains, immanent to each of them: the concern to reconnect, all along the history of philosophy, with its oldest principle, that of philosophical inquiry, initiated by Socrates. Not that the history of ideas had to wait for the philosopher of maieutics to see great thinkers arise, fertile in the most diverse vertiginous meditations, from the materialism of Democritus to the theological references teeming in the countless currents of thought proper to the Indian or Chinese East, which must not be confused with the currents of philosophy that came after Socrates.
Whether taught orally or set down in canonical writings, the rich diversity of these traditions well predates the “Greek moment”: the moral prescriptions of Buddhism and/or Brahmanical theology long precede the meditations and the logic of the Stoics as well as the relativism of the Sophists, true forerunners of ideological liberalism.
But the philosophical framework stricto sensu, laid down by Socratic questioning, is established as soon as interrogation no longer bears on things, whether natural, human or divine, but on the words through which these objects come to be exchanged between subjects. The Greeks were not mistaken in designating the great pre-Socratic thinkers not as philosophers, but as “Physicists.”
Contemporary philosophy seems to have entirely forgotten this questioning of the “words of the tribe”: In France, from the immediate postwar period to our own day, that is, throughout the Cold War, it has never ceased, between literature and philosophy, but also in general culture, to hesitate between the shadow of Heidegger, from Sartre to Derrida, and its inverted specular double, deployed under the pathetic label, with its positivist connotation, of the “human sciences” (or “social sciences”).
It is not a matter here of lumping together, within this binary philosophical framework, tendencies as differentiated as existentialism, phenomenology, the analyses of the unconscious, or other structuralisms; but of bringing out a remarkable polarity, which most often imposes itself on the philosophy teacher, whether this polarity be sub-Nietzschean here, or more neo-Kantian than faithful to Kant, elsewhere. The aim of the game being to get rid of the shadow of Hegel by liquidating the mortgage of the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, which the greatest carnage of all time had briefly put back on the agenda, at the time of the Liberation.
A specular opposition, we say, if only one recalls our pre-Socratics mentioned above, Heidegger’s privileged references, and gives them back their hat of “physicists.” Curiously, one finds the positivist connotation there again: the term unfolds a field of inquiry, the cosmos of “meteors,” in order to track down the divine in it, or, conversely, “the actions of air, of ether, of water…”... in short! the bones and muscles of Socrates (1), who, according to ancient tradition, “brought philosophy down from heaven to earth.”
This taking-up of cognitive problematics in a resolutely axiological perspective is what is most lacking, to come back to our historical present, in the teaching of philosophy, in philosophy class or, at the university, in general philosophy.
(1) (see Plato/Phaedo 97/98 b,c,d)