🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏

The Ladder: Philosophers of Context vs. Philosophers of Scope

If you have somehow become a philosopher, you either like the ladder that brought you here or you don’t. You either choose to reconcile yourself with the indefinite tangles of your context (your ladder) or you attempt to fight it in order to digest a well-defined scope out of it.

If you like the ladder, people call you a continental philosopher and you know something about psychoanalysis and castration:

Castration means that enjoyment must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire. (Jacques Lacan, Écrits)

If you don’t like the ladder, you still keep the word “analysis” as trophy, but you trash the Freudian ladder that brought you here, which is why you call yourself an analytic philosopher:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

It’s more fitting to call these two categories philosophers of context (who keep the ladder) and philosophers of scope (who trash the ladder). The second category steals the word “analysis” from the first category and attempts to isolate the body of the first category under an imagined “continent”. Since nobody’s imagination can digest the context of philosophy into a scope, the ultimate result of this pseudo-analytic attempt is incontinence: What finally remains is not a letter from (world-home) Europe but a latcher from (world-symptom) Neurope [1].

Philosophers of scope are not “analytic” but critical philosophers. If they choose to disavow the reality of the ladder (calling it a dream, a joke, an accident, just masturbation, etc.) this is precisely because of the esprit d’escalier (staircase wit: too late to respond) that they suffer when confronted with the truly analytic works of the philosophers of context [2]:

In my view the contemptuous critical judgement, “It’s only a dream”, appears in a dream when the censorship, which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been taken unawares by a dream which has already been allowed through. It is too late to suppress it, and accordingly the censorship uses these words to meet the anxiety or the distressing feeling aroused by it. The phrase is an example of esprit d’escalier on the part of the psychical censorship. (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams)

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “The latcher from the world-symptom Neurope”

[2] See “From hypo-critical reason to hippo-queery-tickle reason: Just a dream → A just dream → Adjust dream”