To the naive and the sentimental

The confrontation and the critique of one philosopher with another betrays and hides a sequence of profound confusions - especially if the philosophers in question belong to different generations. For, if consistently thought out, no philosopher is refutable. Every philosophical doctrine about the world, and against it, are true within the limitations of a certain given perspective - the feeling that one is right about oneself and about one's beliefs cannot be dispensed with, even if one's belief about oneself changes. This self-feeling then has its right too!

For instance, Kant did not "refute" Hume's skepticism; he was no more "truthful" than Hume, but at bottom one reads Kant more than Hume because Kant has come to capture the spirit and the mood of the generations that followed him (a mood of a certain serious gloominess tempered by cautious restraint, I might say!). Or as I say I find Kant more "tasteful" (in sentimental scholarly circles, more "profound") than Hume. But I also read Nietzsche more than Kant, although Nietzsche in many ways is more playful, more joyous, and hence more closer to Hume than to Kant.

To give an example of how enormous and uncharted this field of underlying confusion can be: One of the mostly-unconscious issues with respect to which most of these philosophers wrestle with is whether or not there should be a distinction between (their) "life" and (their) "philosophy" or between "reality" and "thought"; and if there is a distinction, how can the line between the two be unambiguously drawn. This question plagues many of these thinkers (Wittgenstein), and if it does not directly plague their own thinking process, it will play a sleight of hand in determining how their successors interpret them (ex: how the early-modern writers like Leibniz, Descartes, Spinoza appear archaic and irrelevant to OUR post-modern life). Wittgenstein, who was more aware of this particular issue than many, sought in his earlier work to clearly differentiate between "life" and "philosophy," and by doing so, sought to completely eliminate the latter. However the bunny popped up again, like a shadow which kept following him until he decided to be a philosopher again! (But if there is no distinction between the two, how would thought (philosophy) get its material, its "phenomena"?) Nietzsche was not so naive. He sought to entangle philosophy and life in endless crisscross ways, constantly denying any clear distinction between them. In fact, his whole polemic can be read as against those philosophies which sought (unconsciously) to rise above the sphere of life (which presupposes a clear distinction between the two), to transcend, comprehend and comment on the latter. Nietzsche found a place for philosophy within life, and for life within philosophy. Heidegger, his interpreter, unhappily does not see the struggle of Nietzsche's polemic. He brings his own set of assumptions, unawares, into his study of Nietzsche, and like most others his assumptions too (more than any others') tries to find a unique place for thought in spite of reality. Hence he reads Nietzsche's so-called "perspectivism" and "phenomenalism" as aspects of a subjectivist line of thought to which Nietzsche belongs with the likes of Descartes. What do we get? One more instance of confusion. Now, all of these three writers are "right" in their own ways, given their presuppositions. But to clarify these latter one needs another polemic. And so on.