Today’s New APPS interview is with Taylor Carman, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University (Barnard College).
Thank you for doing this interview with us, Taylor. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. What are the pleasures and pains of philosophy for you?
The pleasure of philosophy is, for me, the pleasure of cutting through confusion, evasion, and distraction and getting right to the bottom of some very basic question or problem. “A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar," Wittgenstein said. Unlike Wittgenstein, though, I think philosophical progress, getting to the bottom of things, sometimes increases rather than dispels the halo of mystery surrounding ourselves and the world.
How do you experience solitary study and writing, collaborative writing, camaraderie at conferences?
For me, philosophical writing is a very solitary activity, but it would wither away if it weren’t sustained by conversation, exchange, and – even more important – long-standing intellectual friendships.
Who are some of your friends? Do you co-write things, or simply bounce ideas off each other?
My primary philosophical friends are Bert Dreyfus and some of the people who have been lucky enough to work with him over the years: Bill Blattner, Wayne Martin, Mark Wrathall, Dave Cerbone, Sean Kelly, Iain Thomson, Stephan Käufer, among others. I’ve only co-written a few book reviews with others; it’s not my favorite way to work. I see my friends fairly regularly on conferences, and we do often ask each other questions and bounce ideas off other by email.
What is your daily practice? Do you have a set routine?
Well, caffeine definitely figures prominently. Otherwise, no fixed routine. To do serious work (thinking and writing) I have to have the feeling – even if it’s not true – that I have a large expanse of time, at least all day, in which I have nothing to do but work out an idea or write a paper.
I’m asking everyone about how music fits into his or her daily practice.
Actually, for me, silence is necessary. If music is playing, I listen. I can (and do) grade papers with music on – in fact, it helps enormously – but I can’t struggle with new and difficult ideas with a chunk of my brain musically engaged. I just can’t not listen.
Can you tell us a little about your childhood?
My family moved around a lot until I was six, when we moved to Laramie, Wyoming, where I stayed until I graduated from the University there, fifteen years later. My father was a clinical psychologist and taught at UW. Laramie is a small western town, population around 25,000 when I was growing up, and very isolated, high on the Great Plains. I was bookish, but in that world it was hard to avoid camping, hiking, skiing, and hunting, all of which I got my fill.
What about high school? Did you know philosophy existed?
I discovered philosophy in middle school (I was eleven) when I had to write a research paper, and I decided to defend atheism. My father suggested I look into existentialism, and I became fascinated with Sartre. His bold pronouncements that life is futile and absurd and that God is not just imaginary but impossible, I found absolutely captivating.
Let’s talk about your undergraduate days: where did you go to university? Any memorable teachers? When did you know you wanted to do philosophy as a career?
University of Wyoming. My main teacher was Richard Howey, who was the resident existentialist in a department of five faculty members, two or three masters students, and just about as many undergraduate majors. I took graduate seminars on Plato and Kant taught by Jim Forrester, but the figures who made the biggest impression on me were Heidegger and Wittgenstein. I had decided to go into philosophy pretty much when I started my freshman year in college.
What about graduate school?
I studied with Eckart Förster and Dagfinn Føllesdal at Stanford, from whom I got the best possible education in Kant and Husserl, but since Heidegger was my passion, my mentor was Hubert Dreyfus at Berkeley. I was glad I was at Stanford, though, because I found the environment there much more relaxed and friendly, in part because we all had fellowships and didn’t have to compete with one another as much for attention and support. My dissertation was on Heidegger’s conception of meaning, which I took to be a departure from and a repudiation of Husserl’s.
Can you tell us what that entailed?
Briefly, I argued that the key element of Husserl’s theory of intentionality that Heidegger rejected was his notion of the “positing” or “thetic” character of intentional states, which specifies whether the object-directed content is advanced, say, assertorically, interrogatively, or as a memory, an act of imagination, hope, fear, and so on. The concept is Husserl’s generalization of the notion of illocutionary force, and he takes positing or existence-asserting attitudes as basic. Heidegger, I suggested, denied that object-directed acts are basic, although he retained the notion that all our attitudes, practical as well as theoretical, involve an understanding of being. So, when you turn the doorknob on your way into a room, you don’t take it to be an objectively existing object with properties; instead, its being is just its availability for use. The last few chapters stressed the importance, as I saw it, of discourse and language for Heidegger’s account of authenticity.
Yes, that really gets to the heart of the Husserl – Heidegger relation I think. So, having finished your dissertation you set out on your career. What was your early professional life like? What were the students like? How did you integrate teaching and research?
I taught as a Lecturer for one year at UC San Diego, so the teaching load was slightly higher than usual. The following year I started at Barnard, which just recently switched from a 3/2 to a 2/2 load. The students at Barnard and Columbia are first-rate. Integrating teaching and research has been easy, since I have freedom to teach almost anything I want.
What were your first publications? Is there one that stands out as your breakout piece? How did your early research relate to your dissertation?
When I was at San Diego I wrote a reply to Fred Olafson’s criticism of Dreyfus, and since I was stepping into a debate, that paper got a fair bit of attention. That was encouraging. Olafson, like others, thought that Dreyfus was overemphasizing the concrete practical dimension of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, as if Heidegger were describing something very general and abstract. In particular, he couldn’t accept Dreyfus’s claim (which is in fact just Heidegger’s claim) that the normativity of social practices and institutions – what Heidegger called “the one” or “the anyone” (das Man) – is not just a contingent deformation of Dasein’s self-understanding, but an indispensable existential structure of being-in-the-world. I thought Dreyfus was obviously right.
So do I for that matter, but let’s move on. As you progressed through your career, what were your colleagues like? Did you feel supported? Was there a formal mentoring process? What was your tenure process like?
I have had virtually no professional mentoring in the institutions where I’ve taught, in part because almost no other faculty members have worked in my area of expertise (late modern European philosophy), and in part because the first five or six years I was here, the Barnard and Columbia Philosophy Departments were barely even on speaking terms. Things changed dramatically for the better about ten years ago, and now we function as a single department. Happily, I came up for tenure just as interdepartmental relations were thawing, so although it was a long, drawn-out process, I rode a wave of good feeling into a relatively easy promotion. I was very lucky.
The relation of continental and analytic philosophy has been fraught with tension for many years. How do you negotiate this conflict?
I cannot tell you how tired I am of thinking and talking about this. The conversation is too confused to be productive. What is “Continental” philosophy? What is “analytic” philosophy? Yes, there are cultural and stylistic differences – some mild (say, between Husserl and Frege), some abysmal (say, between Davidson and Deleuze) – but fitting them all under one rubric is hopelessly simplistic. I think Richard Rorty got it right when he said we should ignore the supposed gap between Continental and analytic philosophy and hope it’ll go away. Happily, both Stanford and Columbia have been largely free of that ideological distinction, so I’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring it.
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. How is this pressure manifest at your university? How do you respond to it, practically and theoretically?
It hasn’t affected me very much personally, beyond its corrosive effects at large. As a matter of principle, I think we ought to resist being baited into justifying the existence of the humanities, or liberal arts education more generally. Once you take the bait, you’ve conceded too much. The serious, sustained – and of course well-funded – study of history, language, literature, philosophy, and religion is vital to a flourishing and well-informed culture. Even making the otherwise plausible argument that humanistic study produces better-informed and more responsible citizens in a democratic society, I think, grants too much to the other side. Suppose that weren’t true? Would it then be reasonable to conclude that the humanities are a frivolous luxury? That, I think, would be disastrously shallow and short-sighted.
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?
My perspective has changed profoundly, but the change has been a widening and deepening of things I’ve been thinking about since I was in college. I was always drawn to philosophers who had a robust sense of the mystery of existence, or ourselves and the world at large, and the limits of thought and language. I’ve learned over the years (or tried to learn) how to combine that interest in things enigmatic with sober, critical prose and analytic thinking. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about truth, which is a subject perfectly suited to this tension between mystery and clarity: on the one hand, truth seems abysmally deep; on the other hand, it’s also at the heart of fairly technical discussions in logic and semantics. I’m less interested in the technical problems themselves than in the point of contact, as it were, between those problems and the sense of mystery that I think is essential to our understanding of truth.
I really like relating truth to both mystery and clarity, to our immersion in existence as well as our access to the clarity of logic. As we move to a conclusion, let me ask what has been the most frustrating experiences for you professionally?
The most frustrating has been dealing with the increasingly competitive, corporatized culture of higher education: the pressure to publish early in one’s career, the scramble for jobs, the defensive posture of colleges and universities in the face of various threatening forms of political scrutiny – most recently, the accreditation requirement that we promise to produce measurable “learning outcomes.” It’s an extraordinarily wrong-headed initiative, and it’s depressing to see how eagerly many colleges and universities are trying to satisfy it.
Thank you, Taylor, I think you’ve expressed very well something we all face. But we shouldn’t end on a down note! What’s been the most rewarding experience for you?
The most rewarding experience of my professional life has been the pleasure of teaching.
That’s a great note to end on! Thanks very much for doing this with us.
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