Philosophy in a Different Key

On Christina Tudor-Sideri’s Under the Sign of the Labyrinth

Let us begin with a question or two. Where does philosophy occur and who is it for? If you find this question vexing – I certainly do – lets ask an easier variation (this variation shifts the meaning, but we are not here for rigor, we are here for truth): where might I find a philosopher? Common sense dictates that I will find one in a philosophy department, in the stuffy halls of august institutions around the world. Yet are these halls and corridors, these offices and meeting rooms the location proper of philosophy?

Right at the beginning of Plato’s The Republic, the text and the author upon which this very enterprise we are bringing into question begins – so right at the beginning of the beginning – Socrates tells us: “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon, son of Ariston.” There is a story about Martin Heidegger - a philosopher of existence who politically affiliated with those most committed to annihilation – that his final seminar on The Republic consisted entirely of analyzing this line and this line alone.

To go down to the Piraeus signifies what? To descend. The Piraeus is the port area of Athens (both ancient and modern). It is the site of commerce and of trade. If we wish to see the project of Plato and in particular of Plato in The Republic as one of establishing the rule of philosophers as the precondition for the just city, we can see here a theme of descent, from the heights of the contemplative life to the greed of the mundane. Later, in The Republic, we will learn of the myth of the metals, of the bronze class, who love wealth and who come last, underneath the honor loving silver class and the wisdom loving gold class.

There is a problem with the totalitarian reading of Plato’s The Republic that Karl Popper popularized. It concerns the very form the dialogues take, it concerns this opening line that I have asked us to consider. The dialogue on philosophy and on justice begins by Socrates going down to the Piraeus, with Glaucon. Immediately he will begin to ask those around him what they think of justice. The Republic, we should note, does not begin with the forms, with any of those theories of intellectual superiority that make all but those paid six figures to contemplate bristle. It begins with others. Others too must be present for the very dialogue of philosophy to take place at all. If it appears that here, already, much of what is said in The Republic is now undermined or at least thrown into doubt, this should not worry us, many of the Socratic dialogues are aporetic. Socrates goes down to the Piraeus to ask the citizens and denizens of Athens what they think.

Philosophy then might have a communal dimension. All thinking is thinking with others. This seems obvious enough, but if philosophy has such a dimension, what does it mean for philosophy to be a profession enshrined in the institution of the university?

You will object, surely, that institutionalization does not mean the layman cannot do philosophy, merely that there are those who are lucky enough to be paid to do so. Profound and great thoughts come from many outside academia. If you only see philosophy occurring in the Ivory Tower you must simply stop and listen to those around you and then you will find a omnipresent philosophy. One that perhaps does not speak in terms of the categorical imperative or the development of Geist, but one that speaks nonetheless.

It should be clear that I already share something close to this folksy view. People get things wrong, commit errors of thinking and do not know the terms of a technical discussion. This does not mean they are incapable of philosophizing. Philosophy is for and by all.

Given this, however, I find myself staring into a literary void of philosophical writings. There are thousands upon thousands of philosophical journal articles, academic titles and so on. Yet there is a dearth of affordable editions of philosophical works and a dearth of philosophers outside the academy. It was not that long ago, however, that contemporary works of academic philosophy where widely available and affordable. One should recall the Pelican Book editions that now litter used bookstores and covered every imaginable topic and included serious, scholarly works. One should recall that there were philosophers – writers who undeniably tackled philosophy, not journalists who happened to have read Husserl - whose status in relation to the academy was somewhat external and who wrote in a style that was decisively not academic. Examples from the past abound, think of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Yet it is also true for several philosophers who rose to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and E.M. Cioran. If one wishes to object that there is something in the water in Paris, one can also mention A.V. Miller, the translator of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit into English, who was a civil servant for most of his life. Now what do we have for public philosophy? Academics neglecting their students to write in the New York Times and our modern philosopher of the masses, Jordan fucking Peterson. The decline of serious, non-academic public philosophers and the decline of affordable works of philosophy are symptoms of a decline in not just intellectual life, but also philosophy itself.

It is in this context that I think it is worthwhile to talk about Christina Tudor-Sideri’s Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, published by Sublunary Editions. Under the Sign of the Labyrinth is Tudor-Sideri’s book length essay on trauma. This essay is by no means academic. Tudor-Sideri does not proceed via literature reviews, engagements with the must reads of the field, and a clear introduction in which she carves out her research niche. One will find many names they know in these pages – Charles Baudelaire, Maurice Blanchot – and many they do not - for example, the aptly named John Manwood, author of A Treatise and Discourse of the Laws of Forest or the poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga – for Tudor-Sideri cites what is useful and necessary and not what convention demands.

Tudor-Sideri’s argument proceeds along two paths. A standard one that invokes references, the ideas of others and definitive claims that will develop and become illuminated as the book unfolds. The first sentence has this declarative function: “Trauma lives in the body.” Unobjectionable and obvious. Then, with the delicate hand of a philosopher, Tudor-Sideri will disentangle this sentence’s implications, lead us to the realization that this banality is in fact deeply complex: “It [Trauma] lives in the body of all things – past, present, and future. Yet to write of trauma is to write of the nature of an eternal and interiorized present.” This may not be rigorous or academic, but it is philosophical.

The second path unfolds across reflections and reminiscences. We learn of her upbringing, of a car accident in 2005, of her earliest memory (it is of “running water”). This is, however, not a collapse of the abstract and universal into the singular and personal. It is rather philosophically necessitated by Tudor-Sideri’s topic. Towards the end of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth she writes:

To write of the self is to plunge your fingers deep into the rivers that carry fossils, memories, animal bones, desecrated flesh, ashes, thorns and trauma – to dive into the collection of lifeforms that your body and mind have gathered along the way. To retrace and extract with implausible precision the very things that you want buried, in an attempt to sketch a beginning and an end – the lines of a personal history, blended together in a manner satisfactory enough to let into the light. In philosophy, anamensis belongs to Plato. In medicine it belongs to the patient. For the rest of the world, it is merely a recollection of things past. Out history is a poem we get to reword over and over again – bending time, redefining moments, healing wounds, being gentle with our scars and the scars of others. A poem that is both deeply personal and universal, its lines taking the shape of stories we pour on ourselves and into the hearts of those around us.

In invoking anamnesis in its philosophical and medical context Tudor-Sideri links abstract knowledge and personal history, and winds them together. Her book then, is a work that is both “deeply personal and universal.” This conceptual care, a lengthy treatise on trauma that takes seriously trauma as something we should treat philosophically to such an extent it affects the very form of the book itself, marks out Under the Sign of the Labyrinth as unambiguously philosophical. Its personalized style, its lack of academic references and its brevity, all mark it simply as not academic philosophy. Yet given the dire state of academic philosophy, this is a mark of distinction. It is, perhaps, the first serious work of philosophy by a non-academic I have read in a long while.

In the dedication to Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia he writes that:

The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter’s conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life.

Adorno is not so sure we can simply return to teaching the good life; “our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.” Yet Minima Moralia, as dense and difficult as it is, is a work of philosophy that abandons the rigor of the academic tome in favor of the aphorism, the style of Nietzsche (whom Adorno read) and Cioran (whom Adorno did not). In disregarding the method of academic philosophy – make no mistake Minima Moralia has a method – Adorno, perhaps, wanted to make his way back to the teaching of whatever was left of the good life. One would be mad to call Minima Moralia non-philosophical. And if one were a publisher, academic or otherwise, today, one would be mad to publish a collection of dense aphorisms. Yet a little madness can go a long way.

Philosophy as an act with others has been replaced by a market place of hyper-priced and hyper-specialized titles. Affordable and needed only by those for whom philosophy is a job, and as such a private affair. Books that used to be widely available in affordable copies now appear under the copyright notices of university presses. Philosophy happens, but apart from the world, without others. In this context then Under the Sign of the Labyrinth is a welcome reprieve from the total collapse of public philosophy into private method.