Today’s New APPS interview is with Jeffrey Bell, Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and occasional contributor to New APPS. His own blog is here.
Hello, Jeff, thanks for doing this interview with us today. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. What are the pleasures and pains of philosophy for you?
Hi John, philosophy itself has always been for me an immense pleasure. I suppose I wouldn’t recommend that undergraduates pursue postgraduate studies in philosophy unless they too have the same affect from doing philosophy.
It’s got “love” right in the name! We could go on a whole Spinoza riff here. But what about the institution of philosophy today in higher education?
Yes, the professional side of philosophy –- the academic side -– is much more of a mixed bag. There is much misunderstanding, it seems to me (and you have discussed this yourself on this blog) of what an academic’s life consists of. There was a local congressman in my district who once quipped that academics only work 6 hours over the course of two days in a week and then spend the rest of the week working on their golf game. It’s unfortunately a widespread attitude, at least in this part of the country but I suspect more generally as well. As a result of this misunderstanding, and a general decline for the support of public institutions in general, support for universities has been on the decline and I know of a number of people whose careers have been cut short as a result.
That’s a factor for sure, but I think the attack has other factors involved in it. In any case, let’s talk about your daily practice of philosophy.
Agreed. On days I don’t teach I usually read in the morning. After a couple cups of coffee I’ll usually read until noon, and then in the afternoon I’ll either continue reading or work on writing and other commitments such as refereeing essays, manuscripts, etc. When I’m writing I usually have music on as a soundtrack that keeps my energy level fairly consistent through the process.
How did you come to study philosophy?
I came to philosophy almost by accident. When I was a child I used to spend a lot of time in the library while my mom took my sister to her gymnastics class. I would walk up and down the aisles and look through subjects that interested me at the time – which frequently entailed books on astronomy. One day I came upon the philosophy section. Not knowing what philosophy was at the time (I was 9 or 10) I tried to figure out what it was all about. I’d love to say I did figure it out at the time, but I didn’t. My interest was piqued from this experience and by the time I was a Freshman in high school I picked up a copy of Plato’s Dialogues. Despite this interest I never imagined at the time that I would become a philosophy professor.
When did that occur to you?
That came about as a result of a phenomenology class I took when I was a sophmore at Occidental College. Something about Husserl clicked and I ended up double majoring in physics and philosophy, eventually dropping physics and throwing my chips all in to philosophy.
Husserl! I’ve heard people mention Plato or Nietzsche or just a charismatic teacher, but Husserl has always been a duty for me, rather than something that captured me. In any case, what happened then?
As I look back on it I can’t help but agree that it is surprising that Husserl was the connection that worked. I guess you could say I encountered Husserl’s Ideas as a puzzle or problem that I needed to figure out and stuck with until I felt I had. From then on, Merleau-Ponty and the other phenomenologists were a breeze. In any event, what happened next was that I told the professor who taught my phenomenology class at Oxy –and he was a charismatic teacher too - that I wanted to go to graduate school. He did not discourage me but did try to convince me to pursue semantics and philosophy of language, with a concentration in ethics thrown in as well (he himself was a student of Carnap’s at UCLA and wrote his dissertation on Whitehead). With hindsight I can see that this was indeed good advice from the perspective of finding academic employment, but needless to say I did not follow his advice for my interest in Husserl and phenomenology led me to pursue a continental path.
I think I see where this is heading …
To make matters even worse for someone entering graduate school and then the job market in the late 80s and early 90s, I wanted to write on Deleuze, who was at the time marginal even among the already marginal continental philosophers who were lucky enough to have a job. I found support and encouragement from John Glenn and Michael Zimmerman at Tulane and was lucky enough to land a tenure-track job near New Orleans, where I had met my wife and where her family lives.
What was your early professional life like?
Early on I pursued philosophy of film. In fact, my very first publication was in the online journal Postmodern Culture (in 1994!). So you could say I was on the cutting edge at the time or desperate. In addition to my work on the philosophy of film I also began to develop connections I encountered while working on my dissertation between Deleuze and the work of Prigogine and Stengers, especially their Order out of Chaos. This did not loom large in my dissertation itself, which became my first book, The Problem of Difference, but it would become the topic of my next book, Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos. There is a lot of similarity between our work here as you well know.
Yeah, it’s very odd, but very nice, that we ended up at two different schools only 50 miles apart!
Yeah, who would have envisioned a little Deleuze nexus down here in Louisiana! Anyway, what I tried to do in these first two books, and then most recently in my book on Deleuze and Hume – Deleuze’s Hume: Philosophy, Culture and the Scottish Enlightenment – is to treat Deleuze’s philosophy as a philosophy that is actively engaged in problems that have been prominent throughout the history of the philosophical tradition.
Yes, we shouldn’t be fooled by Deleuze's notorious remarks about the history of philosophy being academic philosophy’s Oedipus complex to think he wasn’t also deeply involved with the great problems and great figures of the tradition.
That’s exactly right. I was trying in effect to avoid having happen to Deleuze what, wrongly I believe, happened to Derrida—that is, the sense that with deconstruction one can ignore the history of philosophy, and metaphysics in particular, since it’s all caught up with the philosophy of presence. One can instead, so this thinking goes, simply turn to deconstructing whatever texts happen to be before you and ignore the history of philosophy altogether.
Well, maybe there was a sort of grind-it-out quality to some “deconstruction,” but you’re not saying that about Derrida, but about some Derrideans, right?
Right. I’ve always gotten much from Derrida and some of his readings of the tradition are exceptional. His early work on Husserl’s Origin of Geometry is excellent. And not all Derrideans are to be tarred and feathered with the same brush. Rodolphe Gashé, for example, still has one of the best books out there on Derrida (Tain of the Mirror) and he shows very clearly how important it is to understand the philosophical tradition within which Derrida is working.
OK, that makes sense.
You might not agree, but I think there was a slight tendency for DeLanda to do this to Deleuze—DeLanda in effect ignores Deleuze’s engagement with the history of philosophy and reduces him to a dynamical systems theorist. For me one should not forget that the concepts of dynamical systems and emergence are being used as philosophical concepts, and hence that they can and ought to be employed in a way that illuminates particularly philosophical problems. In any event, that’s what my work has been an attempt to do of late, most recently with Hume.
Yes, I see what you’re saying, though I do have to admit that Mark Bonta and I tried in Deleuze and Geophilosophy to propose a Deleuzean conceptual scheme, rooted in DeLanda and Massumi’s reading of Deleuze in terms of dynamical systems theory, as a way to get physical and human geographers talking together. And I’m trying to do something similar in some recent work engaging with the enactivists in the biological, cognitive, and affective sciences. So I think you can, for particular audiences, play down the “inside baseball” aspect of Deleuze’s relation to philosophy in order to play up the dynamic systems side. I don’t think we disagree here though.
No I agree completely. As Deleuze and Guattari say, minor science needs major science, and vice versa. Similarly, philosophy needs to pursue and engender engagement with geographers, enactivists, historians, etc. and demonstrate how these disciplines in turn can benefit from the type of cross-pollination you refer to that philosophical concepts can make possible. And this is not feel good interdisciplinary work I’m talking about, but rigorous conceptual practice of the type that is exemplified in your recent work on 4EA cognitive science and what I attempt to do in my analysis of the history of the Scottish Enlightenment in Deleuze’s Hume.
Well, let's let others judge that! Let’s consider the institutional and professional side of things. The relation of continental and analytic philosophy has been fraught with tension for many years. How do you negotiate this conflict?
From my perspective there is no divide between analytic and continental philosophy as philosophy. There is certainly a divide with respect to the training one receives – the texts, problems, debates, and style of writing that come with working within particular traditions. If there is an important philosophical difference between the two traditions, I suppose I would say that analytic philosophy mitigates the importance of the history of its own tradition. It seems that for the most part analytic philosophers are focused on current problems and issues and the history of the debate that led to the current ‘cutting edge’ of research is largely irrelevant. As important as Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” essay was to the tradition, or Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” the current discourse has moved well beyond them and they are to be read in order to catch up with the dialogue that is ongoing. This seems to me to follow a scientific model (the model of major science as DG put it). A medical doctor’s analysis and resolution of a current problem, for example, is not likely to be helped by reading Galen, similarly with respect to reading Russell or Quine. This is an oversimplification I know. There are a number of people working within the analytic tradition who do draw much from historical figures such as Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, and Plato; but as a general philosophical difference it seems to me that there is more widespread acceptance of and use of the historical tradition within continental philosophy. Deleuze, for example, doesn’t just read Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, etc.; he makes something new of their work and hence gives one a reason, for me at least, of returning to their work.
Sure, as long as we talk about general trends, that seems fair enough. The trick of course is how to prevent on the one hand an endless commentary on the tradition and on the other hand a constant re-inventing of the wheel. Or as the old joke goes, continental philosophers want you to think they’ve read everything ever written in the history of philosophy, while analytic philosophers want you to think they’ve read nothing of that old rot but have just come back from a nice chat with some friends about an idea one of them just had.
What you say reminds me of one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms that claims you should neither ignore tradition nor get completely caught up in it. Tradition is like the running start one needs in order to leap into the creativity of the present, of life. That seems to me to be good advice. The trick is in realizing this advice, especially within a professional setting that places such pressure on publishing.
Let’s come back to our real-life situation. Philosophy and other humanities are under increasing pressure to justify their existence in universities on short-term economic criteria, sometimes in number of majors or tuition income, sometimes in terms of outside grants. What is your take on this crisis?
I’ve recently been reading the book Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. This book does a nice job diagnosing the problems with universities from top to bottom—that is, from the administration to the expectations and desires of students and parents—none are spared. They argue that the focus upon graduation rates along with the emphasis upon the amenities of university life such as sports events, study abroad programs, etc., have all detracted from placing emphasis on the hard work associated with learning – such as comes with many of the liberal arts disciplines that are currently the disciplines most under attack as being irrelevant from the perspective of a policy approach that is guided by the pursuit of practical ends.
How do you respond to this situation in practical terms?
As for what I do practically is simply to reiterate to my students that it is important to learn how to think, to be able to adjust and modify one’s beliefs, expectations, and knowledge claims if one is to continue to stay relevant in a more rapidly changing world. This is precisely what the liberal arts do, and philosophy in particular; and this is a point Arum and Roksa stress as well.
Let’s conclude by coming back to your individual situation. Where are you now? Looking back on your career so far, have you developed a single core idea, or have you significantly changed your perspective?
I would say that there has been a common thread of interest throughout my work which has been to develop Deleuzian concepts in the context of analyzing and interpreting the works of other philosophers, and most frequently philosophers Deleuze himself wrote on. As for a single core idea that joins it all together, or a philosophy that I can say is my own, that is difficult for me to say. For me the joy of philosophy is the work itself, and the freedom that comes with being an academic of being able to pursue interests and develop interpretations along the way. My work may exhibit a single core idea or philosophy, but as far as I am aware my readings are not predetermined by such an idea. A reader of my work may beg to differ. You, for example, might say there is a very clear core idea in my work.
In the first two books, as you mention above, there was a clear strand of thinking about chaos. But that seems less prominent in the Hume book. In any case, let's move to some more concrete matters. In what ways, if any, do you integrate art, science, politics, and other areas of life such as cooking, or listening to music, or physical / spiritual exercise – what have you – into your philosophy?
All that you mention here is important. In many ways you could say they make up the assemblage that is my life. Add to this list the parenting of two teenage girls and the result is no lack of opportunities for new ideas and problems to be generated, or shot down, at any given moment of the day.
How do you integrate teaching and research? How long did it take you to find the most productive practices here?
Since I have been at a teaching institution I have come to appreciate the role teaching and pedagogy play in philosophy. I wrote a couple posts about this a few months back on my blog. If a Deleuzian philosophy of difference is going to be a philosophy that makes a difference, and for me this is how it should be with any philosophy, then it seems to me that one needs to be able to convey this difference to students in a way such that philosophy becomes empowering, a tool that enhances one’s thinking. And it’s not just students, in the traditional sense, I’m talking about. For example, to get physical and human geographers to talk together, as you and Bonta did in your book, you needed to teach the implications of the concepts of dynamical systems such that they could come to learn the terms that would enable their conversation. There was thus an important pedagogical function at work in your book.
What are you looking forward to doing next? What are your short and long-term projects?
In addition to organizing the Deleuze Studies Conference in New Orleans for 2012, which will be no small feat, I’m working on a book that explores the philosophical intertwining of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume. What one can draw from these philosophers, both individually and in developed coordination, is a way of understanding the role of concepts in thought. This project should shed light on what was at stake in ancient and medieval philosophy and it will also elucidate many contemporary debates in philosophy, such as those regarding normativity, rationalism vs. empiricism, and continental vs. analytic thought, among others. It’s quite an ambitious project and will probably change as I continue to work on it. But that’s where I am at the moment.
Thanks, Jeff, this was a fun exchange for me.
Thanks for this John. I appreciate the time you are taking to do this and I’ve enjoyed reading your previous interviews. They have often been simultaneously quite informative, enlightening, encouraging, and discouraging. I suppose that means you’re doing something right.
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