Socrates Tenured

The Institutions of 21st-Century Philosophy

Robert Frodeman, Adam Briggle

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783483112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Professional philosophy has strayed so far from its roots that Socrates wouldn’t stand a chance of landing tenure in most departments today. After all, he spent his time talking with people from all walks of life rather than being buried in the secondary literature and polishing arguments for peer-reviewed journals. Yet somehow this hypertrophy styles itself ‘real’ philosophy. Socrates Tenured diagnoses the pathologies of contemporary philosophy and shows how the field can be revitalized. The first part of the book sketches the crisis facing philosophy in a neoliberal age and traces its roots back to the 20 th -century move to turn philosophy into an academic discipline. In the second part the authors look at various attempts from applied ethics to their own brand of ‘field philosophy’ to confront the resulting problems of insularity and societal irrelevance. Part three connects this evaluation of philosophy with wider discussions in the politics of knowledge about the impacts of research on society. The final chapters consider both what impacts philosophy might have and what a philosophy of impact might look like.

Part I

Philosophizing in Neoliberal Times

Chapter 1

Philosophy, Know Thyself

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.

Thoreau

One of our professors once explained the nature of the dissertation and one’s subsequent philosophical career:

Find a small topic that no one has studied; dig into it for a few years. Don’t stop until you know it better than anyone – except for the other 30 or 40 specialists in the area. When you graduate you will then spend the next 30 years writing for that group of specialists. That’s how it works.

It’s time that we question our allegiance to this model of philosophy.

The Philosopher and the Polis

Everyone struggles to live a rich and fulfilling existence – even, or especially, as many of us are surrounded by an abundance of means and opportunities. But frame the question in terms of philosophy and the conversation goes stale. People grow impatient: philosophy is fine in the seminar room, but in the real world such abstractions are dismissed as wool-gathering. It’s a contradiction: people describe ethics as merely a matter of opinion even as they struggle to ensure that their children are treated fairly. And they dismiss aesthetics as subjective even as they plan trips to national parks and pour over the details of their kitchen remodel. Philosophy is impractical – and unavoidable.

To philosophize today – by which we mean professionally, in a salaried position, at a college or university – is to live within this paradox. One could claim that it has always been so, that a gap has always existed between the concerns of philosophers and our real-world philosophic problems. Tension between the language of philosophers and the philosophical dimensions of everyday life has been part of our cultural DNA since the milkmaid laughed at Thales tumbling into a ditch.

Of course, Thales had practical chops too, which he showed by making a killing in the olive market. Nonetheless, the vexed relationship between philosophers and society is a perennial fact. The most famous example, of course, is given by the fate of Socrates. Philosophy has always alternated between boring and irritating the outside world. It is a tension that philosophers have sometimes cut, Gordian knot-like, by retreating into abstruse speculation. But this has always prompted a countermovement decrying the irrelevance of philosophy. Chief among those complaining about the uselessness of philosophy have been philosophers themselves. Thus, Descartes scorned the abstractions of the Schoolmen and Marx said the point of philosophy was to change rather than merely interpret the world.

If the relationship between philosophy and the polis has always been fraught, and perhaps laced with a bit of subterfuge, it has also been in the end a workable one. Until the twentieth century, that is. Since then the tension has grown into a paradox, the gap into a chasm. Socrates Tenured offers an account of the development of this chasm – how philosophy, the most practical (if not always the most efficient) of subjects, lost the creative tension between contemplation and engagement and slipped into cultural irrelevance. We also offer more than critique: we propose a way forward, describing how philosophy, especially philosophical research, can regain a role in culture.

Our argument focuses on the single greatest impediment to philosophy’s societal relevance: the emergence of the field as a discipline. The early twentieth-century research university disciplined philosophers – or more precisely, given their limited set of options, philosophers chose to discipline themselves. Philosophers were placed in departments. They inhabited libraries and classrooms. Their writings were restricted to professional diction and concerns. And they wrote for and were judged by their disciplinary peers.

William James was among the few to notice this shift in the circumstances of philosophy. As early as 1905 he lamented the “desiccating and pedantifying process” that philosophy had become. He had a word for it: “Faugh!” The young philosophers then coming of age regurgitated “what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought” (Bordogna 2008). Such was the birth of the academic discipline of philosophy, which, like a snake, turned and swallowed its own tail.

In the main, however, these changes were little noticed. They were treated as merely the matter-of-fact stuff of being ‘rigorous’ and ‘serious’– the professionalization of the field. The fact that this constituted a new material culture that institutionally speaking turned philosophy into a regional ontology was passed over in silence. It continues to be passed over today. Like Moliere’s Gentleman, to whom no one had explained that he had been speaking prose, philosophers seemed innocent of the fact that they had been disciplined. Or that they might have reasons to object to this fact. Their field of play now consisted of texts; à la Kuhn, their work consisted of puzzle solving or ‘normal philosophy’. Everything outside their research portfolio counted as the ‘gossip’ of conference dinners after the real work of listening to one another’s papers had been completed. Matters like being housed in individual offices next to other philosophers, the job possibilities of their graduates, or the philosophic dimensions of the day-to-day work of private firms and public agencies, while perhaps interesting, were peripheral to the real stuff of philosophy. The institutional trappings of the field were treated as simply the banalities necessary to provide a space for the pure flower of philosophy to bloom.

In hidden ways, however, these ‘banalities’ have structured and directed the theoretical content of philosophical work. They’ve helped define standards of rigour, suitable topics and styles of discussion, and appropriate audiences. The purity and neutrality of the philosophical enterprise, in other words, has been neither. The field has assimilated its social and material conditions in a dogmatic manner. Philosophy has become the creature of twentieth-century disciplinary culture.

We seek to revive a Socratic practice. The first step towards doing so is to note the obvious: that Socrates was not an employee of an institution of higher education, but was privately employed, supporting himself as a stone mason, while spending many of his days hanging out in town talking to all kinds of people. The second step is to note that if he went by any other name, Socrates wouldn’t be hired today by any department of philosophy: his way of practising philosophy would be dismissed as hopelessly amateur. Socrates is venerated, but not taken seriously.

We think this is a problem.

The response to Socrates hasn’t always been veneration. In our period Socrates has been presented as a slightly cranky saint. But in earlier times he was taken seriously enough to be worth criticizing. Denunciations began during his lifetime (e.g. The Clouds); he was charged with impiety and corrupting the youth, accusations that, even setting aside the political context, were plausible enough. In the years after his death, Socrates has had a wealth of additional critics: Aristoxenus wrote a Life said to be even more censorious than that of the accusers at his trial (Morrison 2011). And the grievances of the Epicureans were substantial, questioning Socrates’ claim that virtue cannot be taught and describing him as a sceptic and sophist.

The Platonic texts were lost with the fall of Rome, and so Socrates largely faded from view. With the Renaissance and the rediscovery of Plato, the hagiography grew: Mill was one of many who compared him to Jesus, that other victim of a judicial murder. Nietzsche presents the great counter-instance. He criticized Socrates as a decadent who rejected the truth of the senses to devote his life to abstract theorizing: “The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts” (Twilight of the Idols, section 11). But we aim at neither hagiography nor condemnation. We simply want Socratic practice to be taken seriously as one possible model of the philosophic life.

Today the institutional trappings of disciplinarity have built a wall between philosophy and its social context. Even when their subject matter consists of something of real significance to the wider world, philosophers discuss topics in a way that precludes the active interest of and involvement by non-philosophers. Philosophers may have much to say to their fellow citizens, but unlike Socrates they no longer tarry in the agora to say it. It’s pretty ironic for a profession premised on the dictum ‘know thyself’. One finds no explorations of the effects that the department might have had on philosophical theorizing, or of where else philosophers could be housed, or of how philosophers, by being located elsewhere, might have developed alternative accounts of the world or have come up with new ways and standards of philosophizing. When philosophers leave behind their disciplinary habitats, living and working elsewhere than in philosophy departments, the standards for their work change. For when you change the place, and the audience, you change the criteria for determining what counts as ‘real’ or ‘good’ work.

Philosophers once recognized that their work is not simply one discipline alongside the others. It was understood that in addition to fine-grained analyses, philosophy offered perspectives that undergirded, capped off, or synthesized the work of other disciplines such as physics or biology, and then connected those insights to our larger concerns. Such work lost favour in the twentieth century – dismissed as Weltanschauung philosophy by analytic philosophers, and as foundationalism by continental philosophers. But reopen this perspective and questions abound: If philosophy is not, or not exclusively, a regional ontology, why are philosophers housed within one region of the university? Why is peer-reviewed scholarship the sole standard for judging philosophic work, rather than also considering the impacts that such work has on the larger world? Why, for instance, when we want to rank philosophy departments, do we only ask other philosophers – and ones at the so-called top universities at that? And why are there only two social roles for those with PhDs in philosophy – to teach undergraduates, and to talk to other PhDs in philosophy?

Michael Rinella notes that, in an interview with Paul Rabinow shortly before his death, Michael Foucault spoke of his concern with “what one could call the problems or, more exactly, problematizations” – how we decide what questions do or do not get asked. As Rinella (2011) puts it:

Over time a domain of action previously accepted as given evolved into something deemed worthy of sustained critical commentary, often in association with particular social, economic, or political processes.

By what trick of intellectual history have philosophers not asked questions about their disciplinary status? Or developed robust accounts of the societal impact of their research, rather than relying on hackneyed accounts of the virtues of critical thinking? And so we seek to problematize a series of questions that philosophers have passed by without notice.

The Problem

Compare two quotes, from two of the most prominent thinkers of the twentieth century:

Think of organic chemistry; I recognize its importance, but I am not curious about it, nor do I see why the layman should care about much of what concerns me in philosophy.

Quine

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

Dewey

These quotes represent not just two different attitudes, but two different models for how (and where and with whom) to conduct philosophical thinking.

In 1917, John Dewey published ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’, a reflection on the role of philosophy in early twentieth-century American life. In it, Dewey argued that philosophy had become “sidetracked from the main currents of contemporary life,” too much the domain of professionals and adepts. He took pains to note that the classic questions of philosophy had made immense contributions to culture, both past and present. But he was concerned that the topics being raised by the new class of professional philosophers were too often “discussed mainly because they have been discussed rather than because contemporary conditions of life suggest them.” Dewey soon travelled to China, where he delivered nearly 200 lectures on education and democracy to large crowds across a two-year stay. Upon his return, he continued to comment on the public questions of the day, a role he filled until his death in 1952. But since then another set of expectations has come to rule the philosophic community.

The reasons for this shift are open to debate. Jacoby (2000) chalks it up to the allure of academic careerism during the post-World War II expansion of universities. McCumber (2001) notes the chilling effects of McCarthyism. Reisch (2005) sees it as largely a matter of historical accident – who survived the war years to set the direction for post-war philosophy. Soames (2005) describes it as the playing out of the logic of specialization. And we will argue that it is largely a matter of the consequences that flow from the uncritical embrace of a certain institutional housing.

But whatever the cause, over the course of the twentieth century, philosophers increasingly abandoned the way of Dewey to follow Quine’s path in treating philosophy as a technical exercise of no particular interest to the public. While it is possible to point to philosophers who work with (rather than merely talk about) non-academics, among the mass of philosophers a lack of societal engagement is treated as a sign of intellectual seriousness.1 As Quine put it in a 1979 Newsday piece, the student who “majors in philosophy primarily for spiritual consolation is misguided and is probably not a very good student.” For Quine, philosophy does not offer wisdom; nor do philosophers “have any peculiar fitness for helping … society.” It’s hard to imagine a less Socratic approach to philosophy. Even more surprising is the historical amnesia where such an attitude goes unchallenged by the philoso...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• The Argument in a Nutshe
• Prelude: Philosophy Purified
• Part I: Philosophizing in Neoliberal Times
• Part II: Disciplinarity and Its Discontents
• Part III: Reaching Escape Velocity
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author