[Bups-dis] Transformation of the individual

[David Mitchell]

  In response to comments made by Luis and Sophie on what I wrote:
   
  Sophie: I’m glad this struck a chord with your opinions, and glad that someone else shares my sense of dissatisfaction with analytic philosophy. Despite the many problems with a ‘transformative philosophy’ I feel that it does at least oblige people to question the values and nature of a tradition, analytic philosophy, which is too often taken for granted as the only way of ‘doing’ philosophy.
   
  That said, I think it is important to recognise that the transformative effect of philosophy need not be restricted to ‘changing the world’ in the grand sense of the term e.g. changing political/socio-economic institutions, eliminating injustice. Of course philosophy should be connected to, and an essential part of, any movements trying to make the world a more rational/ just place, but I think there is also another, more ‘localised’ sense of transformation, concerning the individual, which should not be overlooked. What I mean by this is that philosophy can transform the individual’s relation to the world in a way which allows them to live a richer, more meaningful, life. In this sense transformative philosophy resembles art, like art it ‘opens up the world’ to the individual, it changes and deepens the way in which we see ourselves and everything around us. Further, this change is not just on the level of theoretical understanding but involves all the related aspects of
 our being, that is, the integrated whole of our relation to the world, of which the emotions and the imagination are integral parts. 
   
  Perhaps the highest and most sophisticated expression of this notion of individual transformation, or ‘overcoming’, is to be found in Nietzsche. The relationship between philosophy and the life of the individual is, of course, a central concern in his thought. Nietzsche is, moreover, an interesting case with regards this discussion, because not only does he attempt to elaborate the meaning/nature of the individual’s ‘overcoming’, but, connectedly, he sees his own works as fulfilling this ‘transformative’ role themselves. Witness his own comments on ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra':
   
  ‘As regards my Zarathustra, for example, I count no one as being familiar with it who has not at some time been profoundly wounded and at some time profoundly enraptured by every word in it
’ [On the Genealogy of Morals: Preface]
  In other words, to appreciate Zarathustra one must become passionately involved with it; one must allow oneself to be troubled, elated, and, ultimately, transformed by the experience.
   
  Naturally all this is not to say that the transformation of the individual in this sense is more important than, or should come at the expense of, what you might call a more explicitly ‘social’ or ‘historical’ transformation. Rather the two aspects are essentially related, it is in recognition of the value of individual overcoming, and recognition that this is inherently stunted by more general social reality, that one sort of transformation necessitates the other.
   
  Criticism
  I think Luis raises two central criticisms of my contribution, unfortunately I’ve only had time to properly address the first, and the second, which relates to the ‘is/ought’ understanding/practice distinctions, I’ll hopefully get round to soon.
   
  The first criticism Luis makes: it does not necessarily follow from the fact that understanding is non-atomistic that our relation to the world is non-atomistic. If though the fundamental idea behind holism, that everything is essentially related, is generally true, why shouldn’t this apply to the individual and their relation to the world? Indeed it is precisely because the human relation to the world is of a holistic nature that it makes sense, and is productive, to look at understanding in a relational way.
   
  To take the example of religion: say I have a holistic understanding of this area, I view religion as one relational aspect of the development of human culture/life. As an individual within human culture though, I myself am not isolated from that process, I cannot avoid being essentially related to those developments. On this view my whole relation to the world [as given in consciousness] is irreducibly bound up with the psychological, social and cultural relations that went into shaping religion over the past two thousand years. As such our relation to religion [not as an abstraction, but in its full, real, existence and relations] is necessarily holistic, a purely theoretical relation, or say purely ‘religious’ [in the sense a Christian might think they have] relation to religion is not, in reality, possible. Further, this holistic relation to religion exists whether or not the individual concerned is at all ‘aware’ of this; their consciousness remains related to the
 development of religion regardless of whether they know this to be the case.
   
  David

       
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