When Jonathan Swift had a rather outrageous proposal to make about the Irish and their children, he entitled his essay “A Modest Proposal.” I, too, have a proposal. Being not as swift as Jonathan, I am going to pilfer from his irony and call my rather modest proposal “outrageous.”
Just as the time to do something outrageous to your house, like putting up pink awnings or adding a turret, is when you first move in, so I believe even modest proposals should be made right away. Doing so clears the ground for later treatments of really important questions such as “Where did all the sense data go?” (long time passing) and “true or false: supervenience is as supervenience does.” Since this blog is just starting, "right away" is now, and I will make my current proposal without further ado.
Here it is: We should close down all philosophy departments as quickly as possible, and disperse their members through the rest of the institution.
The main reason for this, and I feel myself getting serious here, is that philosophy departments, by and large, are lousy places to do philosophy. I should know; I have taught in five of them. I have also taught in two German departments, a classics department, and a political science department. I haven’t formally ranked them all, but with the exception of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where Reiner Schürmann and I were joined by Véronique Fóti to make a grand total of three, the philosophy departments cluster at the bottom.
There are several reasons why this is the case. One is that philosophy has since Plato been the most critical of intellectual enterprises: it takes nothing for granted and exempts nothing from questioning. To gather up everyone in a university who engages in that sort of globally critical thinking and put them in one place, and then go on and advertize it in the catalogue, is like putting fish into a barrel and handing out shotguns.
When the UCLA Philosophy Department attempted to give a visiting professorship in philosophy to a known atheist in 1947, for example, it received hundreds of letters of protest, some of which said that the professor in question would be welcome to teach in any other department of the university. Only in philosophy, they said, could the existence of God become an issue. Six years later, the UCLA Philosophy Department was still attracting outside scrutiny: UCLA’s Dean surprised Abraham Kaplan, the incoming Philosophy Chair, by telling him that the Department could have a new, permanent line—if they made it in metaphysics or philosophy of religion, and gave it to someone friendly to those fields. The stated reason was “ongoing criticism from the clergy and others.”
Nowadays, to be sure, the clergy have subsided. But the UCLA protest letters, almost without exception, came from the flocks; and there are still plenty of people out in the pews who hate critical thinking, especially about religion. Most of them, these days, seem to be armed. Unless you want to make your “critical thinking” entirely and openly innocuous (and, admittedly, there are lots of ways to do that), philosophy departments just aren’t very safe.
A second problem with philosophy departments concerns the psychology of philosophers. Let’s face it: philosophers of all stripes have a penchant for abstraction. Some of us even think that the ability to conduct abstract thought is intelligence itself. When we are placed in a position where we are speaking first and foremost to other philosophers, as we are in a philosophy department, this penchant takes over and propels us to the outer limits of the conceptual universe—losing in the process any vocabulary which might enable us to think and speak about concrete matters.
One result is some pretty awful departmental politics, an example of which is the Analytic-Continental Split. Everyone knows on which side of this she or he stands—but no one knows what is on the other side, and so no one knows what the Split is about. We have lost even the ability to converse about it, except with the like-minded. What makes them like-minded? Who knows?
So you tell me: would you rather stay in a philosophy department and hear another paper on the newest way to index indexicals? Or ponder some newly discovered text that maybe, just maybe, opens us to the Call of Being without turning us into anti-Semites? Or learn that Michel Foucault was or was not a postmodern, depending (somehow) on whether Hegel was a Spinozist?
Or would you rather hear the kinds of paper I hear in my German Department—about such things as the very peculiar structure of Germany’s railroad system, or the strangely intense, entirely Platonic "spiritual friendships" that sprang up among certain rabbis and prominent married women in their congregations in 19th Century Berlin? Which sort of paper would make you a better philosopher? (I’m not betting on Foucault, Heidegger, or the indexicals.)
Some philosophers, Kantians for example, think putting philosophy into a separate department is fine; they think that philosophy’s modest and abstract (i.e. “transcendental”) content is all it needs to be a viable academic discipline. But this just leads to yet another problem, for it means that such philosophers are more comfortable being located in a separate department, and so are favored by the arrangement. What if the present prominence of Kantianism (for example) in American philosophy were an artifact of department structure itself?
So I propose that we close the philosophy departments down and disperse the philosophers to other departments. The logicians will go off to mathematics, the philosophers of language to linguistics, the Derrideans to Comp. Lit., the Foucaldians to sociology, and so forth. We shall encourage them to earn honest livings, and someday they will thank us.
But what then happens to philosophy? How can you have a university without the Queen of the Sciences?
You needn’t. For one thing, you can still have a History of Philosophy Department. The history of philosophy is one of the most important components of contemporary intellectual life, because it is (still) at its core: most of our basic concepts were hashed out over centuries by philosophers, and many of them have not fully jettisoned the philosophical freight they carried when they left our predecessors' hands. Truth still has an aura, even in the most contemporary discussions, of nearness to the divine; notions of race and gender are still predicated on the supposed presence or absence of something called “rationality” in a human being; and so on.
These follies go unchecked partly because the current pretense that there is a subject matter to philosophy over and above its historical core has hidden them. If the history of philosophy were the focus of History of Philosophy Departments, rather than a disfavored adjunct in Philosophy Departments, the conceptual complicities that cause trouble even today would be more vigorously smoked out and rectified.
But philosophy is not just its history, and the other place where it should be present is as a program, drawing its faculty from among full professors in any field. Since one normally makes full professor in one’s mid-forties or later, this would mean that senior scholars who had interests in foundational issues would have a place to talk and teach about such issues other than the Faculty Club.
Upon acceptance into the Program staff, a professor would be allowed to add "and Philosophy" to his or her title: "Professor of English and Philosophy," or of "Electronic Microbiology and Philosophy," etc. These honorifics have a nifty ring and would bring candidates scurrying from all across the campus.
If we wanted to be nasty to them (and why not?) we could make our candidates take a course in philosophical methods as a condition of joining the program. I am pretty dubious, however, that philosophy has enough distinctive methods to require more than a couple of weeks.
There are of course excellent philosophy departments, places where philosophers can do philosophy and enrich each others work without cutting themselves of from everything else; but they are increasingly the exceptions. From what I see (and have seen) of the rest, I am happy to be out of the field.
May I suggest, with all due modesty, that you should try it too: you’ll be outrageously happy!
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