The Poverty of Philosophy

Abstract

This article explores the essence of philosophy as a situation of authentic asking (poverty) which transcends the bounds of pragmatic knowledge. The poverty of philosophy is investigated in three meanings: liminality, abandonment, freedom. Liminality means that basic philosophical concepts are not ontologically given, they point to the openness of being, so docta ignorantia, learned ignorance is posited as the archetypal form of philosophy. Learned ignorance here means the knowledge of the whole (freedom, truth, God, soul, death, etc.). Knowledge of these is not gained experientially, not amassed, nor passed on, but rather exists in the special mode of already-knowledge. This knowledge leads to the dichotomy of captivation for fundamental philosophical concepts that precedes reflection and “grasp” of the instrumental mind, which turns the world as a whole into the object of power-seeking (V. Bibikhin). Abandonment: philosophy unfolds as thinking after the catastrophe of great beginnings. Historically, philosophy emerges with the collapse of mythological thinking. Philosophy is defined as post-catastrophic thinking, thinking in the state of abandonment. Freedom: philosophy as a self-collected readiness to place oneself at the edge. The author points out the marginality of philosophy, which doesn’t represent any metasubject (nation, state, class). This article shows philosophy’s destructive influence on myth, using the juxtaposition of community and society. Myth is shown to be a meta-narrative that integrates the community through a grand story of identity, marginalizing the Other and taking away her voice. At the same time, community is not an alternative project to be implemented as “utopia”; it is called to resist the final immanentization of society by generating splits and disruptions. The author outlines the main characteristics of community: the interruption of myth through giving voice to outcasts, and the destruction of the mimetic stance of “sacred beginnings”; the dispersion of subjective collectedness in existence- at-the-edge of a simulacrum; the introduction of the principle of ontological inadequacy (M. Blanchot); the gainsaying of the alternative between the singular and the general through articulating a “singular plural” (J.-L. Nancy), “any” being (G. Agamben); com-patibility as division (of joint space of coexistence and resisting homogenization); death as extreme openness to the other; communication as an ontological phenomenon beyond the function of representation and passing “information”; and memory as preservation of the traumatic Forgotten (J.-F. Lyotard). This article analyzes contemporary culture’s simulation of poverty, where exoticism of amassed impressions replaces liminality, the place of abandonment is taken by the apocalyptic rhetoric of postmodernity, and freedom is simulated through the biopolitical themes of security.