Land of Saints and Morons

Ireland has not produced a single important philosopher for the last 300 years – and the Irish have no great regard for thinking. Are we just a bit thick? An essay by Max McGuinness.

There was a young man who said “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”
“Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.”

  So goes the one lasting Irish contribution to the history of philosophy. This ditty by Ronald Knox is a paraphrase of the bizarre thoughts of Bishop Berkeley, who held court in Trinity during the early 18th Century. Berkeley was an idealist, more specifically an immaterialist, who denied the existence of the material world. All that truly existed for the Bishop were the contents of our own tiny minds – our perceptions. This view is summarised in the maxim esse est percipi – to be is to be perceived. Thence the bewilderment of the young man in Knox’s doggerel, anxious no doubt that were he to take his eye off his wallet, it would indeed disappear. Fear not. As long as God is around to keep an eye on things, they’ll stay right where they are. So you’d better believe in God, right? Or else He might just stop watching over that pad of yours in Ranelagh...and puff! It vanishes when you trot out to buy a pint of milk.

So next time some moon-faced spelt-chewer murmurs, “If a tree falls in the forest and no-one’s around, does it make a sound?” (‘Deepshit’ Chopra pseudo-spirituality), you can retort, “‘Twas a Mick who thought o’ that one, so ‘twas.” And there, alas, is the end; no Irishman has been so clever since. Idealism may be crackers but it is still frightfully hard to refute. Berkeley also paved the way for David Hume and others to refine Empiricism (evidence-based reasoning) which is the basis for all science. Granted that Berkeley, though daft, was brilliant, I must point out, at the risk of violating the Good Friday Agreement, that he was quite clearly “Anglo-Irish” – a slave-trading member of the Protestant ascendancy. Even if wont to scribble “We Irish think otherwise” in the margin of his copy of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, Berkeley later appeared to consider himself a transplanted Englishman. His philosophy is part of an identifiably British tradition. Putting him on the old ten punt note was presumptuous; Berkeley may not be Irish in any meaningful sense.

Where does that leave Irish philosophy? It’s not as if small countries are statistically barred from producing many great philosophers – Australia, for instance, has been home to numerous distinctive thinkers. We could track back to Duns Scotus in the 13th Century but it’s not entirely clear (as his name suggests) whether he was Irish at all. Besides, you may have had your fill of the Immaculate Conception by now – it was Scotus’s big idea.

Let us proceed then to more recent times.

Evaluating the contribution of contemporary philosophers is no easier than reading them. Since popular understanding of philosophy is minimal, reputations for brilliance rarely transfer from academe to wider culture. Unlike a scientist or writer of poetry and fiction, the achievements of a philosopher will never feature in the mind of the man on the 46A. Philosophy is read by a handful so book sales are nothing to go by.

A crude and straightforward way of figuring out who wins the Philosophical Premiership is to count citations. Philosophers tend to be keen on footnotes. Each time a philosopher features in the footnotes of another philosopher, he or she (though philosophers are overwhelmingly male) scores a goal; the man with the most goals wins. Alas, no one has been so helpful as to compile a league table of citations by nationality. In his idle moments, Professor Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California has drawn up a table of the philosophers most cited in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Berkeley crops up often but the only living Irishman to get a look in is Professor Philip Pettit of the University of Princeton, who has been prominent in developing a civic-minded reappraisal of classical Republicanism – which briefly drew the interest of Bill Clinton.

But a more engaging snapshot is provided by Steve Pyke’s book Philosophers, which collects his photographs of 80 great philosophers from the early 1990s. Among this sartorially challenged bunch is but one Irishman, Richard Kearney, now Professor of philosophy at Boston College, Massachusetts. Kearney disputes the idea that Ireland has always been a philosophical wasteland. “There have been Irish philosophers – they just weren’t acknowledged.” He attributes this to the persistence of a British colonial cliché that “the Celts can stay quaint and stay put,” subsequently embraced by Irish nationalists who, in creating an Irish identity based on Anglophobia, paradoxically endorsed the racist categories imposed by the colonisers. Kearney is skeptical of the claim that there is such a thing “as an ethnic mode of thought” and considers the view that certain languages are better suited to writing philosophy “pretty dangerous.”

Yet there are no works of philosophy composed in Irish, and Gaelic expression is customarily evasive and indirect. In Irish, the seanfhocal – proverb – dominates and the gift of the gab is thence the ability to speak in allegory. Even saying “He is a man” requires a convoluted phrase which translates literally as “He is in his manhood.” John Banville accounts for the lack of Irish philosophers thus: “We don’t think rigorously as a people whereas we glory in ambiguity... The notion for us of language as an instrument of rigour is laughable.” The inherent ambiguity of the Irish language is, says the novelist, still “hardwired” into us. English, German, and French, he maintains – in opposition to Kearney – are languages “made for direct statement.” While insisting that he is “utterly amateur” in the philosophical field, Banville’s fiction attests to an impressive grasp of the subject; the overlooked Shroud, published in 2002, adopts the perspective of a misanthropic philosopher-cum-literary critic based on the Belgian Paul de Man. Following his death in 1983, De Man, a leading proponent of post-structuralist trickery, was exposed as the author of pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic newspaper articles during the War. His friend Jacques Derrida briefly attempted to defend De Man by appealing to the vagaries of objective truth and textual ambiguity which form the basis of their philosophies. Shroud extrapolates the elusiveness of personal identity – what exactly lies behind the “I” of the narrator? But though Banville acknowledges the debt to philosophy in his own work, he denies that fiction can be philosophy, and says that a novel can advance the argument in ways unavailable within traditional philosophical writing: “philosophical thinking is entirely different to artistic, visionary usage of language... we (the Irish) produce artists but we don’t produce philosophers.”

Joyce, Beckett and Banville all make extensive use of philosophical material in their novels, perhaps as part of an Irish penchant for showing off – which Banville at least has admitted in the past. In his introduction to Ulysses, Anthony Burgess informs us that the ‘National Library’ episode is intended to present a dichotomy between the literalism of Aristotle and the swirling mysticism of Plato. But you would be none the wiser. Even by Joyce’s standards, the sequence in the National Library is all over the place. Both Plato and Aristotle wrote in clear prose which Joyce here subverts; the episode largely consists of dialogue, a form adopted by Plato because of its instructive, didactic potential whereas Joyce’s characters just pile on the nonsense. This is anti-philosophy. In the hands of an Irishman, clarity is wilfully transformed into obscurity.

Theoretical dogfights in philosophy often occur because no one can agree exactly what philosophy is. To draw a broad distinction, Anglo-American or “analytic” philosophers seek to confine philosophy to a quasi-scientific or mathematical study of argument, language and certain observable phenomena; their European or “continental” counterparts tend to take a broader view of philosophy as a part of culture which has something to say on most topics. They behave accordingly. Great Anglo-American philosophers often live cloistered lives; the French and Germans are ready at, the drop of a fountain pen, to wade into whatever public controversy rattles their ashtrays. There has never been a British or American equivalent of the omnivorous man of letters, Jean-Paul Sartre, who even lectured his many acolytes on the correct position to read a book (sitting at a desk, never lying down).

While Richard Kearney assents to the description of “Irish philosopher,” he admits that he is “better associated with broader European trends.” He says he “would have a very broad definition of philosophy” and resents the tendency to view the subject in specialist terms. On this basis, he considers Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Joyce philosophers and believes our failure to engage with our own concealed cosmopolitan intellectual history doomed us throughout the 20th Century to being Britain’s “Siamese twin.”

Kearney bemoans the “hegemony of scholastic thinking” which prevailed at UCD during his time there as an undergraduate, where most of the philosophers were clerics passing off second-hand versions of Thomas Aquinas as revealed truth. Trinity, he says, was equally moribund, casting itself as an island of imperial enlightenment in an ocean of Papist demagoguery.

The Irish education system still ignores philosophy; uniquely in Europe, the subject is not taught in any form at second level. In France, by contrast, philosophy forms the cornerstone of any baccalauréat. The image of France as a nation of philosophising café dwellers is rather overdone – contrary to popular belief, you cannot pick up copies of Derrida in the supermarket – but the country does possess a distinct intellectual tradition derived from Descartes. French philosophers, however diverse, are inspired by a common mindset that rhetoric and reason are the source of enlightenment. They believe that the power of the unaided intellect is limitless, capable of arriving at knowledge and insights about the nature of the universe, like Descartes, from the vantage point of a comfortable chair. They are likely to insist, like Garret Fitzgerald, that: “I can see it works in practice but does it work in theory?” This extreme cerebrality is illustrated by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker when he writes of the reaction of his French interviewees when he said they would be receiving a call from one of that magazine’s famous fact checkers before going to press:

“What do you mean, une fact checker?”
“Oh, it’s someone to make sure that I’ve got all the facts right, reported them correctly.”
Annoyed: “No, no, I’ve told you everything I know.”            
                                           “Oh, I know you have.”
Suspicious: “You mean your editor double-checks?”
“No, no, it’s just a way of making sure that we haven’t made a mistake in facts.”
More wary and curious: “This is a way of maintaining an ideological line?”

Gopnik concludes: “[French] People don’t speak in straight facts; the facts they employ to enforce their truths change, flexibly and with varying emphasis, as the conversation changes, and the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of pure factual consistency is an absurd denial of what conversation ought to be.”

The Irish too are loath to let the truth get in the way of a good story. Until the 1970s, Irish history avoided inconvenient facts which might jeopardise the official “700 years of struggle” account of our great little nation’s divine destiny. The Troubles turned this celebration of communal violence into a bad story and scholarship, thankfully, filled the void. But we still go in for tales of epic, poor mouth bullshit (Frank McCourt, Bill Cullen).

The French have lent their national narrative a philosophical edge, casting Robespierre’s Terror as an experiment in Rationalist thought. Ireland’s revolutionaries were a reactionary bunch who rejected the Enlightenment. Pearse was a shoddy thinker incapable of constructing a coherent argument, who became obsessed by destructive Romantic notions of “élan vital.” De Valera went on spouting clichéd bilge about frugal, sturdy, romping bogmen who “devoted their leisure to things of the spirit” until sensible heads finally prevailed in the late 1950s. The French had a useful national myth which, even if its premises were wrong, at least made sense. The Irish were stuck with a surreal trinity of blood, farming and a language no-one understood. In truth it wasn’t even a very good story once Parnell died. How could anyone ever hope to make philosophy out of this nonsense and give it a distinctly Irish stamp?

And there is no point in blaming Catholicism. It’s only due to religion that philosophy exists at all. Descartes inadvertently fathered modern, secular philosophy in the Meditations while attempting to prove the existence of God. Kant only developed as a philosopher because he had the Church to argue against. Banville contends that “Irish Catholicism is a version of paganism.” Worship in Ireland has revolved around the Virgin Mary and the saints rather than God Himself. The countryside is still festooned with heretical relics and grottos which attest to a failure to embrace the legitimacy of a genuinely abstract, immaterial Creator figure. So we failed to understand the intellectual power of God and instead thought of Him as some sort of chap who might be persuaded to help out in a tight spot, though it was His mother who really wore the trousers.

Journalist Vincent Browne, who holds an MA in philosophy, points out that there are not many African philosophers either. He thus suggests our lack of a philosophical tradition derives from our experience of colonialism, rejecting the view that we are “genetically incapable” of thinking rigorously. Kearney similarly emphasises the absence of an Irish Renaissance, due to English rule, as pivotal. Perhaps philosophy is just an extension of Imperialism. All the nations which can lay claim to a detailed, original and extensive philosophical tradition, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, America and even Italy, have been imperial powers. Ascribing philosophical superiority to these nations could be a classic instance of “false consciousness,” assuming that ideas shape the world when the reverse is the case. In this way, British Empiricism arguably developed because British industrialisation created an environment where philosophers would be educated to think like scientists and engineers. Plato was in favour of slavery because the absence of machines in Ancient Greece made it inevitable that the comforts of civilisation were only possible on the basis of outright exploitation.

But our writers owe everything to Ireland’s immersion in the English language for centuries. Joyce, Behan and others show how “the Empire writes back” – re-inventing the coloniser’s own tongue. Salman Rushdie made the controversial point some years ago that the brief history of post-independence Indian literature written in English was vastly superior to centuries of native Indian output beforehand. I challenge any Gaelgeoir to insist that a few love poems, Peig Sayers and Padraic O’Conaire trump the Irish contribution to English literature. So if we must credit the Brits for our literary heritage, we can hardly blame them for our lack of philosophy. And time is running out. The obituary pages of the past few years have been full of the 20th Century’s greatest philosophers from both traditions – Williams, Berlin, Strawson, Rawls, Derrida, Ricoeur. There is little indication that the next generation will throw up figures of comparable stature because, in truth, there may not be much thinking left to do. Analytic philosophers now tend to pore over the same theoretical ground repeatedly, devoting their entire careers to one part of one problem. Eureka moments – like Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ – have just dried up. I hold out little hope that many further lightning strikes of lucidity are even possible. We delude ourselves that associated New Age and vaguely Eastern wisdom constitutes philosophy – the desperate fumble of a civilisation bereft of new ideas. The philosophical world is worn out. But who knows? Perhaps if the Irish taught their children how to think, they might come up with something after all.

Published in the February 2007 edition of The Dubliner magazine

Comments

[Dr A. W. Harrison-Barbet]

Alas, alas! Duns Scotus was not from Ireland at all. You are confusing him with John Scotus Eriugena.

[Haymoon]

What ? You can't see the wood for the trees. Philosophers ? Everyone in Ireland is a philosopher. Sit and talk, talk and sit. We are short on doers though

[Timothy Roberts]

Isn't Rawls' "veil of ignorance" just a rehash of the categorical imperative? Calling it a "Eureka moment" is a bit much.