Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, third quarter of the 17th century. Tempera on wooden panel. Yaroslavl Art Museum

It has recently come to my attention that I have detractors—more, indeed, than I would have thought. Many of their slanders can be found on the interweb by means of a simple search—though one was brazen enough to critique my work in a foreword to my most recent book—so I won’t dignify them with hyperlinks here. Nevertheless, their condemnations can be summarized thusly: Beauchard is too inventive. Beauchard takes too many liberties. Is he writing philosophy or poetry? Does he write in earnest or is he simply having a laugh? He is not a scholar! What makes him think he can throw off academic conventions? Does he fashion himself some sort of philosophical titan or is he merely clowning like some trickster god of old?

Funny that they should lob that last question my way. Why, it’s as if they think me a modern-day Prometheus. And for what reason? Do I, like him, make men out of clay? No, better to compare me to Daedalus; for my arguments run hither and thither and refuse to stay put. Do I steal fire from the gods and bequeath it to man? No, I’m more like Theuth whose art appears to assist those it hampers. Do I possess preternatural foresight? No, like Epimetheus, my insights come too late, when they can no longer do any good. Am I some devilish jester? No, call me Momus, for my jokes are holy, approaching the divine. Do I deserve to have my spleen pecked out by the birds? Well, on that score, they may have a point—

What is really behind the chastisements of these eggheaded bookmongers? What has my humble philosophy done to merit their ire? I have some guesses, none of them charitable. Better, then, to forgo a detailed explication of my suspicions and simply outline my philosophical project and what I believe it portends. To do so, I will employ some questions of my own. First, is philosophy a science or is it an art? That is, what is proper to philosophy—knowledge or invention? Second, what distinguishes the philosopher from the scholar; and, supposing there is a difference, which ought one to aspire to be? Third, is it possible to be philosophical while being poetical? Can one be serious even in play? Finally, what rankles the uninitiated about true philosophy and are they right to fear it?

These questions, the attentive reader will no doubt notice, are arranged rhetorically, each preparing the way for the next. Taking them in order means acquiescing to the responses they were designed to elicit. And yet, now that they have been written, they do seem to demand a response. To pass over them in silence or cherry pick which we’d like to answer while ignoring the rest would not be lawful. Let us, then, take each in turn—like dancers moving one at a time across the stage of this essay—beginning with the first and concluding where we are destined to conclude with the last.

Is philosophy a science or is it an art?

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche condemns Socratism as the precursor to the scientism that plagues us to this day. Our demand for proof and objectivity, he claims, was born of Socrates’ search for truth through reasoned argumentation. Nietzsche forgets, it would seem, that Socrates was rightly condemned for making the weaker argument into the stronger. (The justice of this charge is so obvious that only a professional academician could read the dialogues and fail to see it.) He does so, of course, not merely for the sake of sophistry—though one oughtn’t to dismiss Socrates’ sophistry too rashly—but for the sake of philosophy which could aptly be defined as the art of making the weaker argument into the stronger.

You disagree? Think, for just a moment, about every major claim made in the history of philosophy. The world in which we live and move and have our being is not the real world but an illusion that conceals a deeper order of supra-intelligible forms? The goal of human life is happiness and human beings are ordered by nature toward virtue and justice? The existence of God can be proved and the immortality of the soul demonstrated to all rational creatures? Animals are automatons and we can never know for certain whether other human being(s) exist? Cause and effect, space and time, the very notion of being a self are constructs of the human mind that have no reality beyond our perception of them? History is moving progressively toward some ultimate sublation? Ridding the world of capital will rid man of his malice? There is no truth, only the perpetual play of language? All human behavior is motivated by a deep-seated desire for death? Life has no meaning and that is the very reason to go on living? We are all just characters in some mad author’s farcical book?

Now, be honest: Do these sound like the kinds of conclusions that are built upon rock-solid arguments to you? Do they sound like assertions made by men overly concerned with truth? Or could it be that philosophy is not a discipline that aims at discovery but one that facilitates creation? Could it be that what philosophy yields is not proofs but perspectives, newly minted interpretations of the world that enable us to see the world anew? And if so, then oughtn’t philosophy be categorized as a poetic art? Oughtn’t we agree with Aristophanes—that great author of philosophers and inventor of philosophies—that “To invoke solely the weaker arguments and yet triumph is an art worth more than a hundred thousand drachmae” (Clouds, lines 1324-1326)?

What distinguishes the philosopher from the scholar?

There is nothing so rare as the man who calls things what they are. A colleague recently told me he had to leave early to get his son from school. When I gave him a quizzical look—for I knew the boy was a toddler—he said that that’s what he and his wife call daycare. What motivates one to intentionally misspeak? The same thing that motivates all of us to be loose with our words—we hope that doing so will allow us to elide the truth. Yet my colleague knows as well as I do that daycare is not the same thing as school and calling it such will not make it so. Is there anything wrong with daycare? Of course not. But the euphemism—employed, one suspects, to emphasize that very point—makes it seem like he and his wife think there is.

This example may be trivial, but it highlights a laxity with language woefully common among the educated class. In my discipline, there are many willing to call themselves “philosophers” and yet, as the saying goes, “the Bacchants are few.” You see being a philosopher is not the same as studying philosophy, just as reading Aquinas does not make you a saint. A good scholar is a connoisseur. A mediocre one is an intellectual lackey. Neither, however, is a philosopher. For, as we said above, the job of the philosopher is to create, to use his knowledge and his talent and his art in the service of invention. The job of the scholar, on the other hand, is to appreciate, to admire the creations of another enough to dedicate his life to explicating them. In this way, the scholar is like the scientist. His task is to investigate an “outer world,” one created for him by the philosopher. Is he too allowed to play and invent? Well—why not? But he plays within the rules of the game set for him by another and his ultimate aim is to elucidate those rules so that as many as possible can learn to play along as well. It is the philosopher’s job to set the rules. The game is his invention.  He, as Plato often insists, is a lawgiver, one capable of forging new perspectives and thus manifesting new worlds.

Take Plato for instance. Is he versed in the works of his predecessors? Of course. But are his works merely commentaries on his predecessors? Not at all. Instead, he provokes others to write commentaries on him. Such is the case with every true philosopher. The philosopher can appreciate the ideas of another, but only insofar as those ideas can be employed in the service of his own vision. He may be an expert, but he is no mere expert. He is an artist, driven by the creative impulse to invent new ideals, new worlds for us to inhabit. Does this mean it is better to be a philosopher than a scholar? Who am I to say? Even Olympic victors need spectators to crown them with laurels. But those in the stands ought not confuse applause with achievement. An observer is not an Olympian, no matter how vigorously he cheers.

Is it possible to be philosophical while being poetical?

Every poet of merit is a philosopher and every true philosopher is, in his heart, a poet. The division between the two art forms is not a difference of medium but maturity. While the poet retains the license of a child at play—the freedom to be frivolous and at times flippant—the philosopher recognizes that even play is serious business. The poet’s art may have consequences beyond the work itself; the philosopher’s cannot but. A poem, as a work of art that exists in and for the world, can be taken up or left aside. But a philosophy—if, that is, it is to be worthy of the name—must be lived. The one who espouses it, at the very least, must see to it that it is made manifest. For any given philosophy is nothing more than a way of life. It is a means of interpreting and interacting with the world, and reshaping the world in the image and likeness of its creator.

Does that mean that the philosopher can never be cheery and even foppish like the poet? Not at all. For the most serious of affairs are also the most comic and those who appreciate the gravity of the human situation have earned the right to enjoy its levity.

What rankles the uninitiated about true philosophy and are they right to fear it?

And so, at last, we have come full circle and I am now ready to confront the slanders leveled against me by my first and most dangerous accusers. Their chides, you will remember, were rooted in the fact that I, like some Promethean archetype, mock the gods while stealing their power and assume for myself the mantle of a literary giant or prophet capable of throwing off the shackles of petty academic conventions in pursuit of my sprawling philosophical vision. Well, are such criticisms warranted? I leave that to you, dear reader, to decide. For they are only fair and just if they are directed at a true philosopher, one who recognizes himself as no mere scholar but an artist in the truest sense of the word, a maker of worlds, one who fashions new ways of existing.

Whether this can be said about me or not is irrelevant. For the truth is that anyone who dares to live philosophically will be viewed as a threat by those beholden to conventional perspectives. Were the worldviews of such unremarkable uninitiates fashioned for them by a previous generation of philosophers? Without question. Do they recognize the fact? Almost certainly not. And since the new philosopher’s creation stands in stark opposition to the ideas and ideals inherited from those bold enough to create before, his art cannot but be met with ire. He will be called unserious and unphilosophical. His ideas will be scorned. His work will be diminished. How will he respond?

Well, if this splenetic essay is any indication, I suppose he will don the accusations as a crown and dub himself a modern Prometheus.

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Jean-Luc Beauchard is a philosopher and Catholic priest. He is the author of The Mask of Memnon: Meaning and the Novel (2022), City of Man: A Novel Reading of Plato's Republic (2023) and The Fruit of Death: Fragments on the Theory of Sexuality (2024). He can be reached at jlbeauchard@gmail.com

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