Provocative essay here by Charlie Huenemann on how academic philosophy broke bad and what might be done to correct it. Most people that make these kinds of criticisms assume that it would be easy to fix the problems so that all of us could get back to doing old-style philosophy like Plato, Kant, and Hegel did. What's most interesting to me about Huenemann's essay is that he explicitly rejects this assumption.
Huenemann first argues that the modern cult of management in academia brought about a situation where there is:
(1) more attention devoted to narrow problem-solving activity rather then efforts to deepen philosophical wonder; (2) increasingly narrow specialization and less general knowledge of the discipline itself and its history; (3) less engagement with anyone outside the professional guild; and (4) development of various cants and shibboleths to patrol membership in the guild.
There is a lot of wisdom here. However, as noted above, whenever I read this kind of whingeing (and I routinely write it in this forum), I'm almost always struck by the whinger's optimism that there could be any alternative, i.e. if we were all just less narrow we'd be able to do the same kind of stuff that Kant or Schopenhauer did. But is this not exactly like telling a music theory professor that he should compose late period Beethoven quartets and stop with all of the articles on Schenker Analysis? It's a transparently silly demand.
. . .genuine advances in philosophy will not happen with the frequency of advances in younger and more technological disciplines, like computer science and chemistry. Genuine advances in philosophy are as few and far between as are the geniuses of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
I applaud the realism. But I'm not comfortable with his solution, which is that our job is to "enlighten the masses." He contemplates graduate training changing to where instead of research dissertations we write popular books accessible to a wider audience.
First, as someone who has co-written (here) and co-edited (here) two moderately unsuccessful popular philosophy books (and will almost certainly write more), I can say that what Huenemann imagines is already happening to some extent. More importantly than the pop culture and philosophy phenomena, the paper of record in the United States has a philosophy series (God bless Simon Critchley) and some of the most prominent contemporary bloggers have backgrounds in philosophy (Andrew Sullivan, for example). Could Critchley's authors bring so much to the table if they hadn't themselves mastered a discipline with rigorous research standards? I'm not seeing it. And, in my experience, goodness of philosophical writing about pop culture tends to vary proportionally to how serious the writer is about her own research projects not involving pop culture (read Roy Cook on comic books or legos some time).
Second, the whole thing sounds a little hubristic to me. Socrates was the smartest person in Athens just because he realized what a fool he was. And how did Syracuse work out for his student? And for that matter, we should not be too quick to dismiss Socrates' opponents. The murders committed by his students strike me as philosophy's original sin, one that gets recapitulated over and over again throughout history (Pol Pot as student of Rousseau, Stalin and Mao as Marx's students, contemporary neo-liberalism and Adam Smith et. al., etc.).
Third, to the extent that the idea isn't dangerous, it's wildly optimistic. People who love philosophy tend to take their own beliefs very seriously. Which is fine. But then we make the mistake of taking other people's beliefs way too seriously. Which is silly. We're bald apes, and (Robin Williams youtube video notwithstanding) all that stuff about poor Koko apparently wasn't true.* Beliefs simply don't have much to do with what most of us do most of the time. Moreover, for our most serious problems everybody already knows (if you need evidence, listen to the song posted above) what the proper solutions are. If you look at specific polls about issues, most Americans and Europeans have sensible (justified, true) Krugmanesque beliefs about what our governments should be doing. But this knowledge has no causal efficacy. Perhaps we just need meta-knowledge about how knowledge and action (fail to) hook up in rational ways? We do actually have this kind of meta-knowledge, and it also has no causal efficacy. Regressing further isn't going to bend the twisted arc of history further towards justice and mercy one bit.
I have no interest whatsoever in being an "educator of the masses." The conceit is only effective to the extent that it is dangerous.
On the other hand, specialization and hair-splitting gives those of us lucky enough to secure stable employment something at least marginally useful to do in between teaching and administrative make-work. We get to do our eensy-weensy little bit to help matter become spirit, the universe attain self-consciousness. And as the galaxies of unread bloviation disappear into history, some little bits of wisdom and understanding will remain (if not on our planet, then somewhere). And some few among us will surely join the mighty dead. That seems like not only the best to realistically hope for, but also a worthwhile task. I set my queer shoulder to the wheel.
[*As Quine might have said, anthropomorphism starts at home. The problem isn't that we're wrongly importing "human" qualities to animals, but that we do the same to ourselves. Heidegger is sometimes credited with this observation but I think probably it originated spontaneously (and with much greater consistency) in the interplay between students of Althusser and Lacan.]
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