Enough

Enough about academic philosophy. Like all institutions it has its good and its bad. It is easy to focus on the less than perfect features of anything, and keep harping on those features as if one is fighting a great battle. But this can become a bit like running in place, huffing and puffing without getting anywhere.

 

The more interesting thing is to just think and to try to understand the world.

 

The point of the experiment is to do philosophy in everyday life. Not to harp about professional philosophy from everyday life. There is much that is good about academic philosophy. It is best to leave it at that, and to focus on the philosophy itself.

 

The joy of simply trying to understand the world. What a precious thing. Let me not take it for granted.

 

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The desire to rail against professional philosophy comes from fear. The fear that I have lost out on my opportunity to do philosophy. That out here, in this everyday world, I am lost.

 

There is a lot of this fear. Often I now feel as if I do not belong anywhere or to any group. This blog, for instance. Who are its readers? To most non-academics it might seem like gibberish. What would or can most of my family or friends who have not read academic philosophy make of my reflections on Rorty or Wittgenstein or how classes are taught? Perhaps the blog seems to them as impenetrable as picking up Kant's First Critique or a random philosophy journal article. I imagine them thinking, "A lot of noise. But to what end? What is the point?" And to most academics the blog might seem like the ramblings of a disgruntled soul, someone who couldn't make it and yet can't let go. Can they relate to the blog as a space for seeking the kind of knowledge they seek? That the very same intelligence which I might have channeled into a journal article is channeled into the blog. I imagine them thinking, "But why does he have to do philosophy over there, in that way? Why not here, the way he used to? This is just confusion."

 

The fear of being stuck in between. Lost to both sides.

 

And what if something happens to me? What if I get sick? Or struggle financially and get lost in the efforts to simply survive? Then what? The fear that the experiment will have failed for purely non-intellectual reasons. That perhaps my life would become meaningless. That no one would understand why I chose the path I did. The fear of the remark, "How unfortunate. He wasted his life." The fear of the pain this would cause those close to me. The fear of letting people down. The fear of losing myself.

 

In the face of this fear, a desperate grasping for any sense of achievement. Any sense of I am doing something rational and good. What is the easiest thing I can try to prove so that the experiment will not be deemed a total failure? Ah, atleast this much: here are the problems with that institution. If nothing else, I managed in my life to show the inconsistencies of that. Maybe that will help future people avoid those inconsistencies. I can contribute in that way at least. Something tangible that I can leave behind, so that my life will not have been for nothing.

 

Balancing Philosophy and Life

In my previous post I gave one reason I haven't been blogging. There is another reason as well. It is that I was having difficulty balancing my philosophy and my everyday life.

This was most obvious in the case of my work. I have been working at a non-profit as a temp for the past six months. In the first three months I completely enjoyed the work: it was new and refreshing, a welcome relief to be working again after the six months I took for myself after leaving academia. And it was invigorating to be doing something practical after years of thinking of work in terms of making progress on interminable conceptual problems. It was great as well to come home from work and not have to think about it. The work felt fresh and freeing, as if it drew me into itself and I was doing it with a smile.

 

Then I started blogging. I wrote the blog posts with the exhilaration of long pent up ideas and emotions. To even just be writing about these ideas into a public space felt new and amazing. Here was an experience I had never had before with philosophy: expressing it in public from the bottom of my heart, with full conviction, with complete identification with what I was saying. As a student and even as a professor I always felt that an essential part of me was missing from my expressions, that there was always a part of me which held back from affirming what I said or wrote. As if I wasn't fully present in my expressions. And I wasn't. Back then I was so busy constantly trying to show only this side of me here, and only that side of me there that I hardly had the feeling of expressing myself fully. After a while it became such a habit that I would do it even when it wasn't necessary, just because I never developed the capacity of expressing myself with a unified voice. But when I started to blog, here was this unified voice which I was suddenly writing with. What a gift and treasure to speak with one's whole being! Instead of all the parts of oneself squabbling amongst themselves, they work together, march together and point towards a common goal which they aim to achieve together. The way a country enjoys the declaration of peace after years of seemingly interminable civil war, so too my spirit rejoiced at the peace I felt at having finally found a unified voice.

 

Part of the excitement was also that I was doing philosophy publicly again. True, it wasn't the same as talking philosophy with colleagues or students. With a blog many of the joys of doing philosophy physically together are lost. But when blogging there is at least the having of a public voice of philosophy--of speaking out into a public space and expressing oneself philosophically. In a way I had not expected when deciding to leave academia, the thing I missed the most about academia was the opportunity it provided to have a public voice. A teacher is like an actor or an athlete in that she performs her task on a public stage, a platform which unites her with the history of the subject and with all the men and women through the ages who have contributed to that platform. To speak with a public voice in this sense is to speak with the voice of humanity, as part of something larger than oneself. Certainly any person can speak with this voice when they express the common humanity they share with all people. Just as any person can enjoy the pleasures of basketball in their driveway or of singing in their shower. But it is a different thing to do it in a public way where other people look to you to channel such a voice. Once one experiences this public persona, it can be addictive.

 

And I was addicted to it, even though I didn't know it. I realized it after I left academia when I found myself thrashing about for something that I seemed to have unexpectedly misplaced. I was grasping for the public voice I had lost. No longer a professor, I discovered that when I did philosophy by myself it was still fun and pressing and exciting, though it felt 2-dimensional instead of 3-dimensional. A certain resonance was lost. The boom of the voice displaced by a quiet speaking to oneself. That I had gone from playing in the NBA back to playing in my driveway. No doubt it was an unconscious desire for my lost public voice which drove me to blog in the first place. And having found some semblance of a public voice, I held on to it for dear life, as if I would never let go of it again even for a second.

 

And after blogging for a few months that holding on desperately to a public voice started to suffocate the rest of my life. Suddenly I wanted to blog all the time, feeling excited to have found again some link to a public voice. I was most happy when I was blogging. When I wasn't blogging, I was thinking about possible blog posts. In a way I had not anticipated when I started to blog, the blog suddenly threatened to take over my whole life, and I was loathe to distance myself from it lest I lose the public voice of philosophy once more.

 

Philosophy in Public Spaces

A striking fact of non-academic life is how little philosophy comes up in one's interactions with other people. In my normal exchanges at work or at the shopping mall very rarely do philosophical topics come up in conversation. When sitting on a bus or walking down a street, there is hardly any sign that at one time Socrates or Plato existed, or that even in this century there was a Wittgenstein or a Dewey, or that even at this very time there are thousands of people pouring over philosophy texts seeking the deeper truths of life. In the normal course of life, everything seems so settled, as if the only task for each person is to get through the events of the day.

Of course, it is not that philosophical topics can't be found at every street corner or in every interaction with another person. Certainly they can be found. When looking at a Gap ad, one can wonder, "What concept of human excellence is being assumed here? Why do people find it natural to think that this is a form of excellence?" Or when seeing people packed like sardines into the subway, one might ask, "What is individual and what is communal in each person? How much can people be in control of their lives, and how much are they at the mercy of nature and society?" These strike me as completely natural questions, which arise from just looking at the world. And yet, try raising these questions with other people in the flow of everyday life. It is exceedingly hard. "What is the matter with you? It's just an ad. Get it together. Are you feeling ok?" Or: "Damn. We shouldn't have taken the subway in rush hour. Stop pontificating, and move further in!" The real difficulty isn't even that others will shoot down the philosophical questions. It is to even express it to another person. And even more: to hold on to it within oneself as something important and pressing and exciting.

This isn't because most people are stupid or disinterested in broad questions of human life. I think the reason for the paucity of philosophy in everyday life is that the world one engages with is now so diverse. Here is a European descended Christian. There an African descended Muslim. And here an atheist from Australia. And there an agnostic from Chile. And it is not just about countries. Or religions. Here is a person without many extended family ties, and who thinks of the world more in terms of friends than family. There another person who is defined by his family ties, and identifies with them deeply. Here is a person who loves sports. There a person who doesn't care about them at all. Here is someone who loves Hollywood movies. There someone who thinks that such movies are trivial. Etc. And etc. Society is now so diverse that there is no guarantee that one shares palpable deep values and commitments with most people one encounters.

 

Philosophy concerns abstract questions. But this doesn't mean that therefore one can talk about philosophy with anyone. As if since philosophy is abstract, conversations about it can bypass the ordinary norms of human bonds. To the contrary. Ironically, the very abstractness of the questions implies that they are best pursued with people with whom one has a certain kind of closeness fostered by shared habits: friends, colleagues, family, etc. One doesn't say to a stranger, "So, about the meaning of life..." More likely, one keeps quiet. Or else: "It's a nice day today", and so on. A philosophy conversation is a joint reflection on shared forms of life. When there is no palpable sense of a shared form of life between people, a philosophy conversation seems out of grasp. When it feels as if one can't even talk to a person about the weather, it is hard to talk about the nature of the self or freedom or the good life.
 

How Not to Leave the Profession

In the 1970s Richard Rorty was a professor of philosophy at Princeton. He was well-known in the profession. He had edited a well received anthology, The Linguistic Turn, and was considered a sharp, if idiosyncratic, thinker since he defended views such as that mental states don't exist. He could have spent the rest of his life at Princeton, fine tuning his views and resting on his laurels. But in 1979 he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The book made him infamous in the philosophy profession, and a celebrity in the humanities.

 

Written as a cross between a scholarly work and a manifesto (Word and Object crossed with The Communist Manifesto), Rorty argues that certain projects of philosophy which have been dominant since the 17th Century are bankrupt and have run their ground. The book aimed to deliver the final blow to these projects, and to help start a new way of doing philosophy. He claimed the old way tried to find universal philosophical truths which were supposed to be independent of humans, and that this project has to be dismissed because there are no such truths. It was a hopeless search. On the new way, philosophy isn't about finding universal truths, but about creating interesting conversations which mobalize the world towards greater social justice. On the old way philosophers are more like physicists. On the new way philosophers are more like artists. Actually, on the new way even physicists are like artists! Viva la revolution!

 

The publication of the book was an event. Like any academic text, Rorty's book is filled with arguments, interpretations of authors, subtle distinctions. But what gives the book life, and its distinctive voice, is that one senses in Rorty's writing deep wells of pent up frustration, resentment, anger. As if he woke up one day and decided, "Enough is enough. I will finally say what I really believe." One has the feeling that he is coming out of some kind of a closet. As if he is emerging from the Ivory Tower of Princeton with some glimmering secret. That some gig is up. Kind of like an informant who was on the board of a corrupt company and is finally speaking out.

 

The book reads in a way more like a piece of investigative journalism than like a normal academic text. Where a mild-mannered professor might have written, "Descartes had a false view of the mind, and here are my reasons for thinking so", Rorty writes as if to insinuate: "Descartes pulled a wool over our eyes, but we can finally overcome his treachery! We can now wake up!" There is the persistent feeling in the book that there has been a centuries long conspiracy, and that Rorty is uncovering it with the help of his intellectual heroes such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey and Davidson. I remember reading Rorty's book periodically in grad school. I am not sure I ever agreed with much of what he was saying. But given my own frustrations with the profession, it was the tone of the book which I found soothing. In contrast to the normally self-satisfied tone of academics, here was a genuinely frustrated academic. Most strange to me as a grad student: he had gotten tenure and was still frustrated! And he tried to express that, however vaguely. I admired that.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature made Rorty one of the "IT" guys in literature departments and the humanities. Academics who felt that philosophy had lost its way, and that it had become reduced to squabbling over the meaning of words now had something to point to and say, "See, even a Princeton professor of philosophy says so!" Naturally the idea that philosophy should seek to emulate literature was a welcome view to many literature professors. By the 70s this idea already had some grip in literature departments due to the influence of "continental" thinkers such as Derrida. The real coup provided by Rorty was that he was using the seemingly logic chopping views of "analytic" thinkers such as Quine and Davidson to argue that actually Derrida was right. The broader academic world applauded the call to revolution. Rorty won the MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 1981. And in 1982 Rorty left the philosophy department at Princeton to become a general professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. It was if Rorty had called out the philosophy profession with his book, and then decided that he can't wait for old-fashioned philosophy professors to catch up to him. He was going to lead the revolution from outside philosophy departments.

 

The Experiment

When I was a student I wondered if it was possible to do experiments with respect to philosophical topics. It seemed so cool that scientists could formulate hypotheses, structure experiments, and work step by step towards knowledge. An experiment suggested a democratic approach to knowledge: it is not the prestige of a thinker or her charisma which dictates what is true. It is the facts themselves, which are carefully accumulated to avoid biases of any kind. I felt this is the method of finding knowledge. And as a philosophy student, I wanted to find philosophical knowledge. And yet: what kind of an experiment could one do in philosophy?

I have finally found a form of experiment which is applicable to philosophy. It is to think of one's life itself as an experiment, and to use philosophy to explore new and interesting ways of life. In this blog I will think out loud about an experiment of this form I am engaged in. The blog will be a space to process my thoughts about it. And to discuss it with anyone who wishes to engage with me about it in the comments section. No background knowledge is required in order to talk about the issues addressed in this blog. It only requires the desire to think about life and to engage in conversation.

The Question

For sixteen years I was trained in professional, academic philosophy. Four years in undergrad, nine years in graduateschool and three years as a professor. This was for me a very beneficial period in which I learnt a lot and worked with good people.

During this time I learnt the trade of professional philosophy. This involved two things:

1. I learnt the manner of thinking which is taught in philosophy classrooms: questioning basic assumptions of life, analyzing arguments, articulating one's views, drawing connections between abstract viewpoints, etc.

2. I learnt the habits of being a professional philosopher: writing journal articles meant for fellow professionals, going to conferences, grading students' essays, applying for grants, etc.

During my initiation into the profession in graduate school, there was no distinction between (1) and (2). In my twenties when I was getting a graduate education, I was learning to think philosophically by learning the habits of being a professional philosopher. Like any graduate student I tried to improve my philosophical thinking by improving my ability to do the things professional philosophers do: by improving my dissertation, trying to get better at writing grants for funding, by aiming to get published, seeking to go to conferences. It felt as if the better I did at these activities the better I would be at philosophical thinking, and so the better I would be better as a philosopher.

It never occurred to me then that perhaps (1) and (2) can come apart. That maybe I could improve my philosophical thinking without worrying about the habits of professional philosophers.

A few years ago I started to wonder: What would happen if I used my ability to think philosophically completely independently of the habits of being a professional philosopher? What if I used my ability to think philosophically not to write for professional philosophers or to teach Plato and Russell to undergraduates, but to reflect on my life without the trappings of a profession? What if I took the energy I was expending on trying to publish or keep up with the latest journal articles (like any professional philosopher, I was expending a lot of energy on this), and instead used that energy to cultivate habits for improving myself as a human being? What would happen then?

If I did that, would I gain a kind of philosophical knowledge which perhaps I wasn't gaining as a professional philosopher? Could it be that philosophical thinking free of professional habits might lead to a kind of knowledge which maybe I wasn't learning or teaching in the classroom? Is there any such non-professional philosophical knowledge to be found?

The more I thought about this question, the more exciting it seemed.