The Philosopher in Private

When I was sixteen I decided I was going to be a philosopher. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind. To be a philosopher, I thought, was to dedicate one’s life, and to take as one’s vocation, the investigation of a certain set of perennial questions and answers—questions and answers fundamental to human life and inquiry.

Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Banquet

Today I am what is called a philosopher—I’ve got most of the right certifications, and I even get a little paycheck, issued for the primary purpose of funding my practice of what is called philosophy. What I have found is unfortunate: in present arrangements, engaging directly with any of the perennial questions and their answers is a matter far beyond the paygrade of almost any living philosopher. It is basically unimaginable that I take as the object of my next piece of writing the introduction of a truly original system of moral thought (it’s still permitted that I make a minor alteration to an existing one). It is basically unimaginable, in fact, that I dedicate the whole of my life to the introduction of such a system, and this is only one of the perennial matters. The only such people who attempt these contributions are quacks, narcissists, and Dunning-Kruger victims who do not really have any conception of what the task entails. The reason for this is not (as we have so convinced ourselves) that taking up such a project is in itself quacky, egotistical, or stupid, but that social and institutional arrangements constitute a thorough disciplining process such that any starry-eyed, good-faithed, (even relatively) socially-adjusted sixteen year-old will, before their next decade is up, be rendered totally incapable of imagining herself undertaking such a project on her own two feet.

There are two popular recourses for professionals clinging to this originary desire to practice philosophy, both of which are forms of specialization:

(1)   narrow the content of your investigations to very small matters in the context of the whole of philosophy, and hope that these small matters are particularly important, or well-connected enough to other matters of particular importance,

(2)   become an x-ian (where x is some grand historical figure); if you become an x-ian, you can still attempt to concern yourself with this set of questions in its totality, because x did so y-hundred (or thousand) years ago, and you can attempt to use x as an avatar, a mouthpiece through which you may speak substantially about philosophy (faithfully or unfaithfully to x).

Both of these recourses, in their concrete academic forms, amount to abandoning the practice of philosophy.

Let’s start with (1). Narrowing the content of your writing (and indeed your career) to the very small, is not only permissible but expected. This usually is not suggested for mere reasons of professional expediency but is defended on apparently objective grounds. At least two grounds are most common, and are often offered in some combination:

(1.1) If we dedicate the great amount of our resources to concern with the very small, we will have a better chance of getting it right—spending time fleshing out the logical space in a given domain is a fruitful exercise, that takes sustained engagement;

(1.2) If we have the appropriate level of humility, projects concerning the very small are the ones we will end up pursuing.

(1.1) at first sounds tenable—indeed as Liam Bright reminds us, it was one of the founding ambitions of analytic philosophy as a unified project, as expressed by William James: If we each dedicate our time to exploring the logical space in distinct domains, what will emerge is a whole greater than any of us could have conceived attempting to deal alone with the fundamental questions in their totality. At least part of this ambition was handicapped when we stopped explicitly dealing with the fundamental questions altogether, even if one at a time. But there’s a more important methodological issue I’d like to address here.

Imagine you were attempting to understand a book, say a novel, to have the clearest, highest possible comprehension of it. To do so, you devised, you were going to have the clearest possible understanding of each and every paragraph before preceding to the next, even the clearest possible understanding of each and every sentence before that. You’d never finish the first chapter—and today, many philosophers end their careers and lives having never finished the first chapter.

But, says the disciplined academic, the work done is not strictly speaking for the given philosopher or their life—instead it is for humanity, and we are a community of dedicated inquirers engaged in a larger, shared contribution.

Imagine again you are the methodical reader, and your aim now is to understand only a single chapter of the book—to understand this chapter in greatest clarity you will narrow yourself to reading just this chapter, you will pour over sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, attempting, with rigorous analytic finesse, to understand their contents. Even if you can present stellar, scholarly arguments that the syntax of each sentence implies such and so, and the distinctive ordering of each paragraph must mean such and so, your understanding of this chapter is almost certain to be impoverished. The reason for this should be obvious: the method of isolating your interest to the single chapter obscures all the virtue for which an understanding of the whole of the text qualifies. You have to understand a chapter as a chapter that finds itself situated in a greater work, and the whole of the work, more often than not, illuminates in careful analysis the deeper meaning of its parts. Philosophy, if in any sense things “hang together”, is something like this. The narrow issues with which we concern ourselves stand in certain systematic connections to all the rest—without an understanding of the other issues with which they are systematically connected, and without attention to the character of those very connections the prospect of the truth-seeking philosopher is something like the primate posited by the infinite monkey theorem. Keep hitting the keyboard, eventually you’ll get there.

(1.2) is easier to defend in present social arrangements than in abstraction —the people who end up undertaking the project of philosophy in the form that the sixteen year-old hoped are most often megalomaniacal crackpots. The reason for this should also be obvious: these are some of the only people willing to violate well-defined, strongly-enforced social and professional norms concerning the kind of work that is permissibly undertaken and made public. But is it the case that, in abstraction, concerning oneself with more narrowly defined subjects (and certainly not the classical ones, in classical formulation) indicates greater humility? I’m not so certain. Undertaking systematic philosophical projects under the auspices that you will certainly get them right is unwarrantedly egotistical. The philosopher, whoever, that attempts to undertake such projects under the near sure (but not sure) understanding that she will fail, is a different story. Indeed, it seems that by undertaking much smaller projects we shield our egos. We say so little, and of so little importance, that we stand a chance to get the little we say past the logic-police, and what a marvelous victory it is! How comforted, how protected our ego remains with the prospects of this sort of success. By contrast, when we undertake projects of exceeding difficulty, but of exceeding importance, this not only demands putting much of ourselves on the line, but it demands doing so under strong suspicion that what we put on the line amounts to a failure of potentially embarrassing proportion.

It’s worth noting that this, in my view excessive, narrowing of scope and thinning of concepts constitutes a radical departure from the great majority of the history of philosophy—if this departure is left substantially unjustified, practitioners have little reason to conform to it aside from the relevant norms issuing from the community in which they themselves happen to be situated. If one wants to find real hubris one needs to look no further than she who supposes the wisdom of her age is the wisdom of the ages.

So much for (1).

The other path we can take is (2) become an x-ian, and use x as a mouthpiece through which you may speak substantially about philosophy as a whole. I have personally indulged, to some extent, in this latter method. I have, and often still do, identify myself as a “kinda Kantian,” borrowing David Velleman’s expression.

This path is importantly distinct from the mere attempt to be a historical scholar, as the desire remains to practice philosophy itself, and not just to document instantiations of its previous practice (this is noble work, but not the work in question). One logistical difficulty that follows, that the academic-desiring-to-be-a-philosopher is sure to imminently encounter is confusion about what exactly one is up to. Using x as a mouthpiece, besides incurring the guilt of instrumentalizing those worthy of respect, generates an immanent tension in the criteria of interpretation (both in the work of interpreting the x-ian, and in the work of the x-ian interpreting x). Are the criteria with which I assess the work those of history, or those of positive philosophy? Those who have straddled the line of the historical and the positive, over the years they’re apt to have reduced the volume of the question to that of a pesky background buzzing in the ear (I have done so myself). And while it is surely annoying, I do not think it unfair.

The x-ian positive philosopher saddles herself with a burden of being faithful to x, and a burden to espouse a philosophy that she takes to be true. But one will be more faithful to x if one is guided by the thought that x may be wrong (and if they are wrong, they cease to function as a mouthpiece), and one will more readily and adequately express what one takes to be true if one speaks in one’s own voice and asserts on one’s own terms. One might make explicit the sacrifice of faithfulness, at which point the question as to why one does not speak in one’s own voice becomes unavoidable. Or one might make explicit the sacrifice of espousing what’s true, at which point one ceases to engage in philosophy.

Any apparent middle ground, I’ve begun to suspect, turns out to be only apparent. Hegel’s conception of philosophy as its history does not render Hegel an x-ian, nor his philosophy scholarship. Hegel’s conception of philosophy as history means knowing that one’s own philosophy, at its best, is one’s own time comprehended in thought. Schleiermacher and Schlegel’s claims that the aim of interpretation is to know the author better than they know themselves, and that every great work aims at more than it knows, do not entail that knowing the author or the work is knowing them as true. It means being aware of the unconscious, and having a virtue the author never could—hindsight. Fichte’s acceptance of much of Kant’s critical project does not entail that his oeuvre would be better off as a body of Kant exegesis, suggesting certain positive revisions where he saw them fit. What a pedantic, excruciating exercise it would be.

We’re better off admitting that the reason none of these figures were x-ians, and that we are, is sociological. That it’s a last grasping at the practice of philosophy—one must retreat to previous ages because one lives in an age where philosophy is no longer, or where it survives only in glimpses, and we’d rather reach out to the whole thing. But taking this path necessitates that the whole thing will never be one’s own, and so nor will the truth. Robert Pippin claims that today we ought to be engaged in a kind of preservationist project, keeping alive the reading of texts that embodied the practice of philosophy, so that one day some post-apocalyptic populace might practice it themselves. I think he actually suspects that this day will never come, that, in his words, “we’re screwed,” but it’s better to hold onto something. I should like to be less despairing; I’m a young man, after all.

I think it’s clear to many that what we’re up to is not what it could be, not even what it once was. If, as a profession, we hope to do anything about this we’ll have to stop relating to the acknowledgment with avoidance, with irony, with short memory, or with any other means of stilling an uneasy conscience. We’ll have to face the problem squarely: what remains of philosophy has been reduced to a fringe cultural element, such that the folks back home have hardly heard of the term. The questions of philosophy, which are really the questions of life, have become alien, unfamiliar to those who go on living nonetheless. Social and political existence is entirely severed from foundational reflection on the principles of social and political existence. The most powerful form which survives it in the Anglo-sphere is its mutilation by hobbyist tech-titans abusing amphetamine and ketamine, running algorithms to identify how they can best donate to charities and dismantle the administrative state, unencumbered by any depth of thought or feeling which once constituted the humanistic. And the profession of philosophy is presently unequipped to speak compellingly as to why any of it should be otherwise because it has itself gradually decayed into an uninspired scholastic enterprise. This time it’s not the reign of the Church, forcing specialization because one began philosophy already equipped with true doctrine. This time it’s the reign of first the industrial and now the technocratic market, forcing specialization such that philosophy is in the production business, the business of producing discrete knowledge outputs (something it has never really been equipped to do). The ever-reaching tentacles of market logic have so thoroughly established the instrumental principle that even that which took as its point of departure a concern for the unconditioned now takes this form.

But, what followed the age of the old schoolmen was the age of enlightenment—the rigor and precision and cautiousness of the prior enabled the daring, and by no means embarrassing, ventures of the later. It’s no accident that Nietzsche, before being the living poet, was the philologist. Professional philosophers today are incredibly technically proficient, skilled at thinking slowly, step by step, identifying subtle and sometimes crucial distinctions, revision after revision. But we’ll have to become skilled at far more: sprinting, writing on and not over again, honest-to-god aspiration, charisma, getting to the heart of things by way of the kind of instinctive insight that causes one to struggle to articulate all the reasons that got one there, a trust that there were such reasons, a courage to assert oneself even when one is unable to lay them all down, and finally, what likely enabled the former, an enduring sense of the whole. Sociological problems, it’s true, only have social solutions, but we, the flesh and blood and free human beings attempting to practice philosophy are contemporary philosophy. And we really can and ought to do things differently.

I’ll leave you with the majority of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, written about related circumstances, and with far more force than I can muster:

The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.