Philosophy: What is to
be Done? — Bleak Prospects
[from
Topoi, 25,
2006, pp. 97-99]
What indeed? Piety, or its simulacrum, is everywhere on the rise, and the three dominant monotheistic religions offer us only a choice among institutionalized superstition, institutionalized self-righteousness, and institutionalized barbarism. The job of philosophy, as one of my mentors once put it, is to keep Father Christmas at bay, but what card-carrying academic philosopher nowadays has the courage to be a serious iconoclast in public, to challenge the disturbingly convergent cherished idols of collectively embraced religious and political mythologies? Especially a philosopher can hardly overlook the cautionary tale of the fate of Socrates. Not, of course, that there exists a suitable forum. Our agora is simply too vast. Without high-profile access to the mass media, one might as well converse with the walls and lecture to the winds. Nowadays, if a philosopher wants to be heard—indeed, if any serious thinker wants to be heard—his first job is to make himself notorious. Failing that, his lone voice will simply be lost, buried under an avalanche of sanctimony and hucksterism.
We are, in
other words, well overdue for a Second Enlightenment, but the chance that
contemporary philosophy could contribute meaningfully to such a thing, much
less help instigate it, is near vanishingly small. Indeed, the very notion of a public
intellectual is rapidly becoming an oxymoron.
In
The symptoms are everywhere. Not one person in ten thousand has even a rudimentary grasp of the logical structure of explanation in evolutionary theory or its indispensable centrality for all of contemporary biology, but let some old familiar religious nonsense be attractively repackaged as “intelligent design”, and suddenly the push to introduce “creation science” into elementary and high school curricula is once again in full swing. A dispute over the public placement of stone tablets engraved with the text of the Ten Commandments becomes an instant media sensation, plainly more important than personal conformity to any of those commandments, even among the handful of people who would be able to enumerate and elucidate them, that is, who would be able to say what they are and, more importantly, what they mean. Private altruism is still publicly praised, but corporate selfishness is publicly rewarded. The flag is revered with idolatrous piety, while the traditional values of the country that it symbolizes, the civil and human rights of individuals, undergo continuous erosion. Intolerance for the diversity of adult lifestyles absurdly manifests itself in denunciations of the appearance or behavior of animated cartoon figures. With complete disregard of their human costs and actual worth, those who can afford them purchase shockingly expensive Nike sport shoes, Louis Vuitton purses, Rolex wristwatches, and Mercedes automobiles, all enviously coveted by those who cannot. And the most influential opinion-makers of our day are the most opinionated makers of media “info-tainments”— Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Al Franken, Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil. Meanwhile most philosophers take pains to distinguish mention from use and to recognize a metaphor when they see one—and their media presence is, to put it mildly, in short supply.
There was a time when practical philosophy played an essential role in grounding and shaping the most basic commitments of nation-states. There was a time when theoretical philosophy played a significant role in replacing gratuitous beliefs and baseless superstition with scientific knowledge. Those times, alas, are long past. The hard fact of the matter is that philosophy today is already well into its second monastic period, its Second Scholasticism. In the middle ages, one couldn’t be a philosopher without having mastered the Aristotelian syllogistic and having a command of such higher arcana as formal and objective modes of being and the supposition and distribution of terms. Nowadays the characteristic tools of our trade include mathematical logic and such conceptual esoterica as two-dimensional semantics, reliabilist externalism, and the formal and material modes of speech. Small wonder that philosophy today has no public.
So what is to be done? One could try to follow Rousseau’s advice—to live in a house by the side of the road, cultivate one’s garden, and be a friend to man—but it is getting harder to locate a peaceful garden in the old Geisteswissenschaften nowadays. There is such a clamor of disparate voices—black, female, gay, African, Asian, Islamic, Hispanic, native American—each with its own socio-philosophical agenda. Alternatively, there is the French Surrender—the curious “postmodern” idea that everything is a text, that texts are either about nothing or about themselves, and that no one person’s reading is or can be any better than anyone else’s. That this sort of thing is taken seriously is hard enough to understand; that it had a shot at becoming the new orthodoxy boggles what is left of the mind. The party line is that this is the only alternative to “essentialism” and “foundationalism”, both of which have allegedly been thoroughly and effectively “deconstructed”, but one can’t help hearing an awful lot of babies hitting the ground along with that used bathwater.
A philosopher is supposed to be a lover of wisdom, but you can’t be a lover of wisdom if there isn’t any wisdom, and the bottom line of “postmodernism” seems to be that there isn’t any wisdom. An aspiring philosopher must then presumably choose between remaining in academia as a merely clever dilettante or packing it in completely and seeking honest work—as a WalMart greeter, say, or a fry cook or ditch digger. Or one can choose, as one of my esteemed colleagues did, to haunt the op-ed pages of the local newspapers with enlightened and articulate visions of a more humane and reflective world. Everyone who read them found them inspiring and poignantly correct. But, of course, nothing ever happened because of them. It does give one pause.
When we look outward, in short, our choices seem to be reduced to rage or resignation. So perhaps we should look inward. How are things in the academy? We are philosophers by inclination, by discipline, and perhaps even by calling, but many of us—probably most of us—are educators by profession. One question, consequently, is whether there is anything useful that we might be doing in that capacity. Here I think that the answer is ‘Yes’. Many of our students enter our universities with minds like the Augean stables; they are full of muck. It is a Herculean task, but we can at least try to begin the process of cleaning them out.
The great texts from the towering figures of our history can, of course, be extremely helpful in this effort, but only if we use them properly. What is not helpful, for instance, is to introduce our students to the Meditations on First Philosophy or the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in such a way that they are moved to become miniature Cartesian external-world skeptics or Berkeleian empirical idealists, even if only temporarily and in the classroom. That, in essence, is only replacing their public muck with our own disciplinary muck, and serves only to reinforce the widespread opinion that philosophers are merely casuists of the absurd.
What our students rather need to learn is that common sense should not end at the classroom door, that a silly claim doesn’t stop being silly because some very intelligent and famous or respected person once believed it and argued for it, that any argument which leads to a silly conclusion must be a bad argument, and that the only way that one can find out what has gone wrong is by ceasing to talk about the conclusion and starting to look inside the argument. This last step is the hardest one to get across—students quite prefer the much easier task of repeatedly expressing their own disagreement with the silly conclusion—but it is an essential step in developing the sort of critical perspective that is ultimately the only genuinely effective tool for muck-removal. Progress here is inevitably slow and incremental, but if we can bring even one student to grasp the fact that “It says in the Bible that p” is not a good argument for p, we will have accomplished something worthwhile.
But perhaps I’ve misunderstood the question. Perhaps the question was not meant to be “What should we, who happen to be philosophers, be doing?”, but only “What remains to be done within the discipline of philosophy?”, i.e., what specifically philosophical problems are still unsolved, and which among them merit our critical and constructive attention? Here tastes will certainly differ, but I am personally convinced that some of the perennial favorites have long ago lost their intellectual charm and challenge and are nowadays best regarded and treated as objects of benign neglect—“the problem of universals” and “the problem of skepticism”, for example, and “the problem of free will”, and anything and everything having to do with God, e.g., “the problem of evil”. It is, in other words, high time that academic philosophers stopped purporting to take seriously “problems” which only academic philosophers ever could or did purport to take seriously.
Even after setting aside such musty old favorites, enthusiastic practitioners will surely find plenty of puzzles to occupy their minds and fill their time—puzzles, for example, about minds and time. Contemporary science invites us to rethink our classical metaphysical categories. Medical technology constantly challenges calcified ethical thought. And there is almost always something new to learn from the best of our predecessors—Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein. When all else fails, we can always take refuge in our unique disciplinary omphaloskepsis, the metaphilosophical search for our proper problems and our proprietary methodologies. So there is no shortage of engaging topics to think about—and write about.
For the important thing, of course, is to get into print. Since our institutional administrators have embraced the creed that frenzied productivity is a main measure of merit, what one publishes has become much less important than that one publishes. The editors of our best disciplinary journals resolutely reject ninety-five percent of the manuscripts that they receive, and so try to keep the gap between acceptance and appearance down to a couple of years, but it’s a losing battle. “Cutting edge” philosophical work increasingly makes its first appearance on its author’s website, and when it finally appears in print, if it ever does, the discussion has long since moved on.
The tempo of philosophical activity is consequently dramatically increasing, but its value is correlatively becoming increasingly ephemeral. A great deal of energy gets expended, but, like a hamster in an exercise wheel, philosophy doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Picking up the tempo doesn’t help the hamster make any progress. On the contrary, in order to accomplish anything, what it needs to do is to slow down, stop, and then move sideways. I’m inclined to think that, in the last analysis, this is also what needs to be done in philosophy. But hamsters have it easier. I certainly don’t know in which philosophical direction sideways currently lies, and I suspect that, as our history repeatedly suggests, it will take a rare and quite remarkable thinker to figure it out.
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