生の「吟味」（メモ）

SARAH BAKEWELL*1 “Lives of the Philosophers, Warts and All” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/books/review/Bakewell-t.html

James Miller Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzscheの書評。
哲学の証明は生にありというニーチェの言を承け、ソクラテス、プラトン、犬のディオゲネス（Diogenes the Cynic）、アリストテレス、セネカ、アウグスティヌス、モンテーニュ、デカルト、ルソー、カント、エマーソン、ニーチェの哲学と生の関係を検証する。ディオゲネス・ラエルティオスの『哲学者列伝』の続篇という趣を持つらしい。また、哲学者たちの生の吟味を通じて、哲学の２つの意味、つまりパーソナルな知、「賢者に従って学ぶ何物か」という古来からの意味での哲学*2と（その発信者の人格性を問わない）impersonalな学理としての哲学ということを浮かび上がらせる。その新旧２つの哲学の境界に立っていた人として位置づけられているのがルネ・デカルト*3；

The most striking of Miller’s subjects is René Descartes, another “transitional” figure and a very strange person. We associate Descartes with the attempt to give mathematical clarity to philosophy, yet he was driven to this by a series of terrifying, irrational visions in 1619, and by life experiences ranging from vagabondage to periods of reclusive withdrawal. He made gripping use of this story in his “Discourse on Method,” the very work where he also set out his criteria of total certainty.

As Miller notes, Descartes opened up two divergent paths in philosophy. One was the old tradition, in which one seeks a better life and recounts the search in a personal narrative. The other led to the impersonal discipline now prevalent in universities, which in theory can be practiced by anyone. Yet Descartes himself would barely have understood this separation. For him, a philosophical life required both the quest for precision and the intense personal experience that drove one to it.

方法序説・情念論 (中公文庫)

さてそもそも「哲学的生」とは何なのか、また「哲学的生」は可能なのか；

Yet his entire book conveys a sense that the genuinely philosophical examination of a life can still lead us somewhere radically different from other kinds of reflection. At the end of his chapter on Descartes, Miller cites the 20th-century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whom he identifies as the major exception to the rule that places most post-Cartesian thinkers on one side or the other of the personal/impersonal divide. Apropos of Descartes, Husserl wrote, “Anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”

It is an extraordinary thing to do: a project that remains “quite personal,” as Husserl admitted, yet that reaches in to seize the whole world and redesign it from the very foundation. Perhaps this is what still distinguishes the philosophical life: that “once in a lifetime” convulsion, in which one reinvents reality around oneself. It is a project doomed to fail, and compromises will always be made. But what, in life, could be more interesting?

フッサールが言及されているが、フッサールの生については、ここで谷徹『これが現象学だ』の序章をマークしておく。晩年のフッサール曰く、「私は自分を不信の目でもって見ていますし、まるで敵のように、ほとんど悪意をもって見ています」（p.21）。

これが現象学だ (講談社現代新書)

James Miller*4はニュー・スクールの政治学教授。主著がロックの歴史（lowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947-1977）*5とミッシェル・フーコーの伝記（The Passion of Michel Foucault）であるというのは興味深い。

*1:See “Up Front: Sarah Bakewell” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/books/review/Upfront-t.html

*2:これについては、「功夫」についてのPEIMIN NIの省察も参照されたい。”Kung Fu for Philosophers”http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/kung-fu-for-philosophers/ “Philosophers for Kung Fu: A Response” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/philosophers-for-kung-fu-a-response/ See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101223/1293136913 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101231/1293784063

*3:See eg. http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101117/1290010834 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101223/1293136913

*4:http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty.aspx?id=10346

*5:彼は学者になる以前からロック評論家で、初期のRolling Stoneに寄稿していた。