Another Definition of Philosophy (continued:)

It seems that the Shamanic function is the reverse of the philosopher; like the philosopher he deals with "language on holiday" but he does so in a way that is intended not to disrupt the working of his people, but to maintain that work in the midst of the people's own constant deterritorializing of language. This is happening all the time, but it happens especially in primitive societies where conversation, dreaming and the interpreting of dreams, song, dance and art generally, and thinking are consistent occupations of all. The shaman, on the one hand, maintains this space but simultaneously regulates it from excesses that he has already experienced ahead of the society, and has seen as destructive in the sense of closing off the space and serving to inagurate to people the "Pandora's box" of alienation.

Yet, this is not to the discredit of the philosopher, since the people he is imbedded in, being already alienated, cry out for his kind of freedom, being "shut up" as they are in consistent and well-inscribed patterns not only of daily life, but of thought. The philosopher has made the conditions of civilization *almost* impossible. He has discovered constants that only work by being allied to a mega-machine fueled by massive, dead energies. And yet he has also founded the technology of thought necessary for that machine, and at any rate he never sees to free the people like he wants. This may be because, like the shaman, his own right working arises out of his people, whether they are alienated in the case of philosophy, or unalienated in the case of the shaman. The philosopher's impulse for freedom, in the midst of in an alienated form of life, can only reach the bare forms of alienation--but without working simultaneously on the form of life, he can offer no freedom but only a more perfect control. In short, even the philosopher is revolting against "the system"--but the system exists precisely as the force that converts revolution against it into the impetus for its continued expansion.