Simon Critchley

Inconsiderateness in the face of tradition is reverence for the past.
Martin Heidegger, Sophistes

Funk not only moves, it can remove.
George Clinton, P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)

Philosophy tells itself stories. One might go further and claim that the life of philosophy, the memory that ensures its identity and its continued existence as something to be inherited, lived and passed on, consists in the novel repetition of certain basic narratives. And there is one story in particular that philosophy likes to tell, which allows philosophers to reanimate, theatrically and sometimes in front of their students, the passion that founds their profession and which, it seems, must be retold in order for philosophy to be capable of inheritance. It concerns, of course, Greece - or rather, as General de Gaulle might have said, a certain idea of Greece - and the passion of a dying Socrates.

Philosophy as de-traditionalization
Socrates, the philosopher, dies. The significance of this story is that, with it, we can see how philosophy constitutes itself as a tradition, affects itself with narrative, memory and the chance of a future, by repeating a scene of radical de-traditionalization. For Hegel and Nietzsche, to choose two examples of philosophers who affect themselves with a tradition - although from seemingly opposed perspectives - the historical emergence of philosophy, the emergence of philosophy into history, that is to say, the decisive break with mythic, religious or aesthetic world-views, occurs with Socrates' death.

Who is Socrates? So the story goes, he is an individual who claims that the source of moral integrity cannot be said to reside in the traditional customs, practices and forms of life of the community, what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit; nor, for Nietzsche, in the aesthetico-religious practices that legitimate the pre-philosophical Greek polis, that is to say, attic tragedy. Rather, Socrates is an individual who demands that the source of moral legitimacy must lie in the appeal to universality. It must have a universal form: what is justice? The philosopher does not ask `what is justice for the Athenians?' or `What is justice for the Spartans?', but rather focuses on justice in general, seeking its eidos. Socrates announces the vocation of the philosopher and establishes the lines of transmission that lead from individuality to universality, from the intellect to the forms - a route which by-passes the particular, the communal, the traditional, as well as conventional views of ethical and political life.

The vocation of the philosopher is critique, that is, an individual interrogation and questioning of the evidence of tradition through an appeal to a universal form. For Hegel and Nietzsche, Socrates' life announces the death of tragedy, and the death of the allegedly sittlich (ethical) community legitimated through the pre-philosophical aesthetico-religious practices. In Hegel's words, Socrates' death marks the moment when tragedy comes off the stage and enters real life, becoming the tragedy of Greece. Socrates' tragic death announces both the beginning of philosophy and the beginning of the irreversible Greek decline that will, for Hegel and Nietzsche, take us all the way from the legalism of the Roman Republic to the eviscerated Moralitat (abstract morality) of post-Kantian Germany. Of course, one's evaluation of Socrates' death will vary, depending on whether one is Hegel or Nietzsche. For the former (not without some elegaic regret for the lost Sophoclean polis) it is the first intimation of the principle of subjectivity; for the latter, Socrates' death ignites the motor that drives (Platonic-Christian) nihilism. But, despite these differences of evaluation, the narrative structure is common to Hegel and Nietzsche; the story remains the same even if the moral is different: Socrates' death marks the end of tragic Greece and the tragic end of Greece.

It is a beautiful story, and as I recount it I am once again seduced by its founding passion: the historical emergence of philosophy out of the dying Socrates is the condition of possibility for de-traditionalization. It announces the imperative that continues to drive philosophy, critique, which consists in the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of tradition without that tradition having first submitted itself to critical interrogation, to dialogue viva voce.

Philosophy as tradition
However, if on my view philosophy is de-traditionalization, that which calls into question the evidence of tradition, then what is philosophy's relation to its own tradition? What is the relation of philosophy to the stories it tells about itself?

With the admittedly limited examples given above, one might say that the philosophical tradition is a tradition of de-traditionalization, of stories where the authority of tradition is refused.