Philosophy, Know Thyself

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.

Thoreau

One of our professors once explained the nature of the dissertation and one's subsequent philosophical career:

Find a small topic that no one has studied; dig into it for a few years. Don't stop until you know it better than anyone – except for the other 30 or 40 specialists in the area. When you graduate you will then spend the next 30 years writing for that group of specialists. That's how it works.

It's time that we question our allegiance to this model of philosophy.

THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE POLIS

Everyone struggles to live a rich and fulfilling existence – even, or especially, as many of us are surrounded by an abundance of means and opportunities. But frame the question in terms of philosophy and the conversation goes stale. People grow impatient: philosophy is fine in the seminar room, but in the real world such abstractions are dismissed as wool-gathering. It's a contradiction: people describe ethics as merely a matter of opinion even as they struggle to ensure that their children are treated fairly. And they dismiss aesthetics as subjective even as they plan trips to national parks and pour over the details of their kitchen remodel. Philosophy is impractical – and unavoidable.

To philosophize today – by which we mean professionally, in a salaried position, at a college or university – is to live within this paradox. One could claim that it has always been so, that a gap has always existed between the concerns of philosophers and our real-world philosophic problems. Tension between the language of philosophers and the philosophical dimensions of everyday life has been part of our cultural DNA since the milkmaid laughed at Thales tumbling into a ditch.

Of course, Thales had practical chops too, which he showed by making a killing in the olive market. Nonetheless, the vexed relationship between philosophers and society is a perennial fact. The most famous example, of course, is given by the fate of Socrates. Philosophy has always alternated between boring and irritating the outside world. It is a tension that philosophers have sometimes cut, Gordian knot-like, by retreating into abstruse speculation. But this has always prompted a countermovement decrying the irrelevance of philosophy. Chief among those complaining about the uselessness of philosophy have been philosophers themselves. Thus, Descartes scorned the abstractions of the Schoolmen and Marx said the point of philosophy was to change rather than merely interpret the world.

If the relationship between philosophy and the polis has always been fraught, and perhaps laced with a bit of subterfuge, it has also been in the end a workable one. Until the twentieth century, that is. Since then the tension has grown into a paradox, the gap into a chasm. Socrates Tenured offers an account of the development of this chasm – how philosophy, the most practical (if not always the most efficient) of subjects, lost the creative tension between contemplation and engagement and slipped into cultural irrelevance. We also offer more than critique: we propose a way forward, describing how philosophy, especially philosophical research, can regain a role in culture.

Our argument focuses on the single greatest impediment to philosophy's societal relevance: the emergence of the field as a discipline. The early twentieth-century research university disciplined philosophers – or more precisely, given their limited set of options, philosophers chose to discipline themselves. Philosophers were placed in departments. They inhabited libraries and classrooms. Their writings were restricted to professional diction and concerns. And they wrote for and were judged by their disciplinary peers.

William James was among the few to notice this shift in the circumstances of philosophy. As early as 1905 he lamented the "desiccating and pedantifying process" that philosophy had become. He had a word for it: "Faugh!" The young philosophers then coming of age regurgitated "what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought" (Bordogna 2008). Such was the birth of the academic discipline of philosophy, which, like a snake, turned and swallowed its own tail.

In the main, however, these changes were little noticed. They were treated as merely the matter-of-fact stuff of being 'rigorous' and 'serious' – the professionalization of the field. The fact that this constituted a new material culture that institutionally speaking turned philosophy into a regional ontology was passed over in silence. It continues to be passed over today. Like Moliere's Gentleman, to whom no one had explained that he had been speaking prose, philosophers seemed innocent of the fact that they had been disciplined. Or that they might have reasons to object to this fact. Their field of play now consisted of texts; a la Kuhn, their work consisted of puzzle solving or 'normal philosophy'. Everything outside their research portfolio counted as the 'gossip' of conference dinners after the real work of listening to one another's papers had been completed. Matters like being housed in individual offices next to other philosophers, the job possibilities of their graduates, or the philosophic dimensions of the day-to-day work of private firms and public agencies, while perhaps interesting, were peripheral to the real stuff of philosophy. The institutional trappings of the field were treated as simply the banalities necessary to provide a space for the pure flower of philosophy to bloom.

In hidden ways, however, these 'banalities' have structured and directed the theoretical content of philosophical work. They've helped define standards of rigour, suitable topics and styles of discussion, and appropriate audiences. The purity and neutrality of the philosophical enterprise, in other words, has been neither. The field has assimilated its social and material conditions in a dogmatic manner. Philosophy has become the creature of twentieth-century disciplinary culture.

We seek to revive a Socratic practice. The first step towards doing so is to note the obvious: that Socrates was not an employee of an institution of higher education, but was privately employed, supporting himself as a stone mason, while spending many of his days hanging out in town talking to all kinds of people. The second step is to note that if he went by any other name, Socrates wouldn't be hired today by any department of philosophy: his way of practising...