Mohan ends his excellent original post on professionalization pressures driving publication ("Journals and Tenure") with an exhortation for us: "philosophy should begin in wonder."
We are here recalled to one of our tradition's most famous and most cherished sayings, Theaetetus 155d, where Socrates says to Theaetetus: "This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin." This is a mytho-factual claim, if I can put it that way, rather than the hortatory mode Mohan uses. Not that philosophy should begin in wonder, but that it does so begin. Thus a factual claim, although also mythic -- or at least "dramatic" -- in that it is made by the character Socrates to the title character in a dialogue concerned to interrogate (or to better to constitute) the distinction between philosophy and sophistry.
The other great classical instance that links philosophy and wonder is Metaphysics 982b12-29, but just before that passage we find accompanying philosophers not sophists but Egyptian priests, whom Aristotle calls on stage for a similar mytho-factual claim, this time distinguishing the sciences that aim at utility from those that do not. Here we find the term "leisure," which makes Aristotle's discussion one of the political economy of scholarship, which is Mohan's topic too.
As we all know -- is there a better opening line to any philosophy text than "all men by nature desire to know"? -- in the opening of the Metaphysics Aristotle establishes a hierarchy of prestige relative to knowledge, with those arts aiming at utility being less admirable than those aiming at non-useful pleasure, and those in turn less admirable than those aiming at neither. It's here that the Egyptian priests are evoked:
Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in places where men first began to have leisure [escholasan]. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly cast was allowed to be at leisure [ekei gar apheithē scholazein to tōn iereōn ethnos]. 981b22-25
The key is being in a position to receive free time, or leisure time, time free from the pursuit of the necessities of life. That's why today we give students "scholarships," to give them leisure, to free their time from the demands of making a living, so that they might pursue disciplines that do not aim at utility.
The problem comes with the future our students face: what are you going to do when your scholarship runs out to get the time to pursue the non-useful discipline of philosophy? You have to eat; to eat in our world you need to hustle; we don't just give food away ... all these point to the artificial scarcity imposed by capitalism to turn our lives toward gaining the necessities of life.
[{Update, to fill in some steps in the argument.} The way most of us provide for the necessities of life efficiently enough that we have leisure time for philosophical pursuits is to work as HE teachers. Now for complex historical reasons there is now pressure to publish early and often in order not just to get tenure but even to secure the sort of TT jobs that give some free time for philosophical pursuits. Now I take it that what Mohan and I are after is an understanding that philosophical pursuit does not have to result in publication, or at least not so many publications so early in one's career, and that such publications should not be aimed at securing employment, but at contributing meaningfully to a philosophical discussion. {End of update.}]
With the percentage of desireable TT jobs relative to precarious positions (which begin pre-PhD, so that we are not talking about a "job market" beginning post-PhD, but a "labor system" encompassing pre- and post-PhD components) continuing to decline then we see the pressures for publications as professional credentials ever-increasing, with the effects on the publishing system Mohan diagnoses.
So if we are going to stay with the useful / non-useful distinction, we can either make the case that we academics should be like the Egyptian priests -- a supported class whose work aims precisely at the non-useful -- or we can try to convince our masters that philosophy really is useful. If the latter, we can appeal to our university administrators that our research can pay off in grants and / or our teaching can pay off in student credit hours, and we can appeal to our legislators that public money supporting philosophy instruction in public institutions is money well spent, an investment in human capital whose payoff comes in unpredictable and untraceable ways as our students invent things that can be sold at a profit.
So what are we to do [{Update:} to decouple philosophical pursuits from employment-driven publication, so that publication can be aimed at philosophical communication, rather than as a means to the end of finding time for philosophical pursuits {end update}]? At least three four synergistic efforts suggest themselves: 1) work to increase the social wage so that everyone in precarious employment in any field is better off; 2) work to improve the working conditions of those in precarious academic employment; 3) work to increase the percentage of TT jobs relative to those in precarious academic conditions; [{Update:} 4) work to change tenure standards to emphasize the quality of philosophical work done in conferences and in the classroom {end update}].
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