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Clive Bell, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Jayarāśi, Lawrence Harvey, Mozi, music, Zera Yacob
Writing advice often rightly asks authors: “When was the last time you wished a book was longer?” Well, now I can say: it was when I recently read Lawrence Harvey’s Offbeat Philosophers: Thinkers Who Played A Different Tune (whose publishers offered me a review copy). This book clocks in at a mere 73 pages, plus bibliography. Fortunately it’s priced accordingly ($10 for the paperback, $8 for the e-book), but Harvey doesn’t leave himself a lot of room to do the job. The book catalogues ten “offbeat” philosophers; it could have used more of them, but more than that, it could have given them each more space. They get about six pages each (including a list of questions-for-further-reflection), which leaves little room to explore the depth that makes a philosopher’s thought exciting.
Harvey doesn’t say a lot about what makes a philosopher “offbeat”, or his criteria for inclusion. He develops the musical metaphor: as in musical syncopation, where “the regular rhythmic flow is disrupted with accents and stresses occurring out of step with the expected norms”, so “the philosophers in this short anthology all play to what might be termed a different tune – one that serves to disrupt and unsettle the fixity of rhythmic thought.” (1) That’s a very imprecise way of putting things, the sort of imprecision that might drive an analytic philosopher crazy, but perhaps that’s just the point: in a philosophical world still ruled by the analytic tradition, to be “offbeat” may well mean to avoid putting precision first.
Indeed, none of Harvey’s philosophers are affiliated with analytic philosophy, with one exception. The exception is the sort that proves the rule: Clive Bell, who was deeply influenced by the OG analytic G.E. Moore, but wrote on art and aesthetics – topics generally disdained by the analytic movement. To place a value on “disrupting and unsettling the fixity” of thought seems more like something a postmodernist or other “continental” philosopher would do, and indeed “continental” philosophy makes more of an appearance here, featuring Donna Haraway and Emmanuel Lévinas. These are probably the least “offbeat” philosophers in the book, just in that if you know more than a little bit of continental philosophy you have probably already heard of them. But fortunately, the rest of the book addresses philosophers who are more genuinely outside the mainstream – or one might say mainstreams, both the analytic and the continental.
The real appeal of a book like this is in introducing you to thinkers who you might not have heard of – or if you have, you’ve only heard the name and not really known much about them. You get a taste, which allows you to follow up and dig deeper (thus there’s a bibliography on each thinker, which is essential). I’ve long found value in the approach of Friedrich Schleiermacher that looks for the coherent worldview of an author, a philosopher and not just their individual arguments: the words that come to the surface are based on unspoken assumptions that lie below, and you can often learn more by getting into that depth and seeing how a worldview fits together. The book itself doesn’t go into enough detail for you to see that depth – but it gives you a starting point that shows you where you might be interested to look. The thinkers here have all left enough of a corpus that you can rediscover them and get into them in depth. Frequently, as with Bell or with Max Stirner or Paul Rée, they are thinkers who have been mostly forgotten – but not entirely.
Harvey’s approach of focusing on “offbeat” philosophers opens up a great opportunity to diversify. The reasons we have for normally focusing on a standard Western philosophical canon – the vast majority of whom are male – are underappreciated; those philosophers have shaped our ordinary unphilosophical thought in ways we are unaware of, even if we are not Westerners ourselves. The nice thing about writing a volume explicitly on more eccentric philosophers is that you are free to ignore that constraint; you can write about the philosophers you find interesting who, for whichever reasons, didn’t wind up shaping the world in the same way. That means you can go as female, and as non-Western, as you like.
Harvey, fortunately, takes up some of that opportunity, including two very different female philosophers (Donna Haraway and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia) and one (Jalal al-Din Rumi) outside what’s most typically considered the West. The Rumi chapter is particularly instructive in that it shows what makes Rumi so offbeat within his context: having a philosophical vision, a love of wisdom, that he expresses through mystical poetry rather than through the syllogistic argument of those (like al-Kindī and al-Ghazālī) who preceded him.
I do wish Harvey had taken the opportunity further, though: there are so many other offbeat philosophers outside the West. The most obvious – at least to those who know the history of philosophy – might be the classical opposition of Mozi or Jayarāśi, the ones who rejected the prevailing tendencies of their respective cultural worlds: Mozi rejecting the familial partiality that characterizes the general tenor of Chinese thought, Jayarāśi rejecting the common Indian aspiration to transcendence. But there are plenty of other choices beyond that. The most offbeat philosopher of all time might be Zera Yacob, writing his ideas all by himself in an Ethiopian cave. Harvey’s Western focus is a missed opportunity – but the book still provides an interesting glimpse of philosophers we might otherwise not have thought about.