The Practicality of "Slacking"

From "A Slacker's Apology", signed by "Philonous" who is (according to Leiter) Morris Cohen:

I believe in the division of labor. I am a priest or philosopher, not a soldier or propagandist. I yield to none in my admiration for the brave fellows who gave their all' on the bloody fields of Flanders, but I have no respect for the bigots who cannot realize that "there are many mansions in my Father's house," and that it would be a poor world if there were no diversity of function to suit the diversity of natural aptitudes. And when people begin to admonish me that if everyone did as I did, etc., I answer that humanity would probably perish from cold if everyone produced food, and would certainly starve if everyone made clothes or built houses. I admit the desperate need of men to defend the existence of our country, but I cannot ignore the need of men to maintain even in war the things which make the country worth defending. Purely theoretic, studies seem to me to be of those fine flowers which relieve the drabness of our existence and help to make the human scene worth while.

I think there must be much that is right about this--in particular, his rejoinder to a bad, thoughtless kind of universalism (or misapplication of the test of universalizability).

Morris continues:

My fellow philosophers for the most part are too ready to assert that theoretic philosophy can justify itself only by its practical applications. But why the fundamental human desire to know the world is any less entitled to satisfaction than the desire for kodaks, automobiles, india-paper or upholstered furniture, they do not tell us.

True. But one might argue that this is a narrow way of construing "practical applications." Morris almost suggests this point, but it isn't quite the point he explicitly makes--which is more about the intrinsic value of knowledge. That aside, philosophical knowledge might have practical applications that challenge or undermine narrower (e.g. merely economic) notions of practicality. Perhaps this would be particularly true if it turns out to be part of philosophical wisdom that the good life (or the moral life, etc.) don't strongly depend upon, or even radically opposes, conventional (or common/vulgar) ideas about the good life. The good life might not be a "practical life"--a life that contributes to the increase of the gross domestic product, etc., etc.--and as the Stoics suggest (and the example of Socrates illustrates), others may well think the wise person a fool. This isn't really to dispute Cohen's point, but rather to add to it--or perhaps to begin the philosophical critique of what is genuinely "practical" which his comments above invite.

Socrates, Know-it-alls, and Underachievers

A colleague of mine told me roughly the following yesterday:

When I taught at [large private research university] I spent a lot of time convincing the students that they weren't as smart as they thought they were. Here, I spend a lot of time convincing them that they're smarter than they think they are. And I'd rather do the latter.

I've never taught anywhere where the sense of entitlement was overly high, but I certainly do find the students at EKU different. Perhaps some of it is, as suggested above, a kind of lack of self-confidence. There are lots of reasons for that: growing up surrounded by poverty (10 of the 20 poorest counties in the US are in EKU's service region) and in many cases (so I'm told) without much strong family support for going off to college. A lot of first generation college students, so often a lot of uncertainty about what exactly is going on. (And the amount of drama in my student's lives, again compared to other places I've been--real drama, not dorm room drama--speaks to much of this.)

This made me wonder whether I should be starting my Beginning Philosophy courses with Socrates (and soon after Descartes), where one of the messages is that we don't know much of anything . In a way, students who lack confidence in their own intelligence don't need to be told (or reminded of) that. They don't need modesty or humility, but a boost of confidence, a bit of pride. (This is a point well-made in connection with minorities by Michael Eric Dyson at a Chautauqua Lecture he gave at EKU this year on what Black Pride is about.)

But on another level, Socrates is still the best place to start, because even if he knows little or nothing, at least he knows it. And maybe those students who need a confidence boost, who are smart and capable, but surrounded by a culture not particularly friendly to intellectual inquiry (I've been told stories of pastors coming to biology classes to find out whether the children are being indoctrinated)...well, maybe Socrates is the kind of hero they could use. But I think for a lot of them, they need more than Socrates, too, but a positive sense of direction. Philosophy, I think, is probably less good at this (and better at ruling things out), but more on that another time.

(Apologies for being so cliché in my romantic views of Socrates...but hey, if it works, it works.)

Philosophy & Play

My daughter is at an age (five) where she now sometimes likes to play in her room by herself. I poked my head in the other evening, and she was playing with some horse figurines (which I brought back when I interviewed for the job here at EKU). We exchanged a few words--Are you playing? Yes. Is everything ok? Yes. And then she said, "You can go now."

That was remarkable enough. Then later that evening (or maybe the next day--they run together too often) it struck me that just as she shuts herself into the room to play for awhile--to let her imagination run--so, too, I shut myself downstairs at night to play at doing philosophy. The thought hit me very quickly, and at first it seemed like a rather pessimistic one--I'm still just "playing." (Making things up? Pretending? Building castles in the air?) But later it occurred to me that this can't be a bad thing. Play is good, and good philosophy can be playful. Socrates could be playful, but also dead serious; this seems true of Wittgenstein, too. Play can be serious, insofar as keeping alive the imagination, and exercising it, is important business. Perhaps much more so than "growing up" and becoming consumed with the everyday crap which threatens to take away the time for play, and extinguish first our energy, and then our capacity, for imagination and vision.

So, yes, sometimes I'm just making things up, playing with ideas, parading them around the room like figurines. Is this a bad thing? I guess the question is: where is it going? To what end? But maybe the answer is: we can't know the answer ahead of time. And that is why the play is necessary, even when the ideas and problems philosophers play with are themselves quite serious.

Kitcher on Philosophy

Leiter points to a new paper by Philip Kitcher in Metaphilosophy about the state of philosophy and the need for philosophy that is more clearly engaged with the problems of our age (and in part, he seems to think, more engaged with other disciplines). The paper is primarily a challenge to the "core areas" of philosophy (roughly, metaphysics and epistemology). There is quite a bit of discussion going on at the Leiter thread. I am somewhat in sympathy with "Docent's" comment that, "I boldly predict that (a) most philosophers will find considerable merit in the argument, (b) believe their own niche to be exempt from the charge of scholasticism, and (c) nothing will change." That said, I also find this final part of Kitcher's response on Leiter--especially the last sentence--heartening:

I regret the fact that so much graduate education, and so much philosophical writing sets itself in dialog with a recent “literature”, with a tiny readership. History of philosophy is often healthier than “systematic” philosophy, precisely because it inherits the wider focus that was so typical of the career of culturally significant philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle, through Kant and Mill, to Dewey and Rawls. My article is intended to encourage those who want to think and write with a larger frame of reference.

But I think if the final point was Kitcher's primary aim, then perhaps he could have done that without being, as it seems, fairly dismissive of the "core." I don't work in the "core areas," and so have no stake in this per se. Kitcher's worry--as others have suggested--is perhaps described even more succinctly by Dennett: getting caught up in a cottage industry with a limited shelf life and a very narrow audience can be a problem.

I tend to think that the best thing to do is to follow one's philosophical interests, and what Kitcher is (I take it) trying to do is to encourage (especially young) philosophers not to confuse that with simply trying to keep up with and respond to all the current literature on one's interests (though doing some of that is surely important), and not to be afraid to "think and write with a larger frame of reference," which may mean that much of one's time must be spent doing other things besides carefully reading every article in the latest issue of, say, The Journal of Philosophy. There are too many things to do within philosophy, and too many interesting topics, and too many interesting puzzles. There are also people to meet (outside of philosophy), novels to read and films to view, science to learn about. And of course, there's the world to be saved. (More on that another time.)

Obviously, jumping onto a particular philosophical bandwagon (or contributing some "cottage industry") can be a way to get one's foot in various doors (to produce a publishable article, etc.), and doing some of that may be unavoidable (and even desirable). But perhaps there's more to being a Philosopher (capital "P") than being a good professional philosopher, and perhaps that's part of Kitcher's point. (The capital P doesn't have anything in particular to do with being "famous" or whatnot.) Some may not like that distinction, but for me, outside of the academy, I don't like being introduced (say, by my wife) as "a philosopher." I teach philosophy, and have published some articles in academic philosophy journals. But I generally don't feel like I am yet a Philosopher. (Sorry if that sounds sort of pathetic; this isn't a self-pity thing, I hope!) Figuring out how to become that has been on my mind ever since I finished my dissertation, and realized that I was now free to write and pursue whatever issues I chose to pursue. That is at once liberating and terrifying. (And maybe that's why it's easy to get pulled into a "cottage industry" as it were.)

A Sweeping Claim About (and Plea to) Philosophy

This is rather sweeping and (too?) grandiose, but it's the best I've got at the moment--painted in broad strokes--on a possible worry about the interest in how bad we are at lots of (important) things (or misunderstandings about the implications of such study). From some work in progress:

"If philosophy is conceived of as an entirely (and negatively) critical activity, then philosophy will be regarded as an enemy of life-affirming inspiration and a hazard to conviction. There have, of course, always been some who issue warnings about philosophers, but often not for intellectually honest reasons. Are these warnings always incorrect? There is a trend in some recent philosophy, particularly that informed by empirical research in psychology and other social sciences, which might be viewed as providing new ground for a lack of self-trust. An optimistic response would be to hope that these findings can be employed in the service of more careful (and informed) reflection, rather than causing a general loss of confidence in our own emotional responses and judgments. If philosophy is to make itself (or preserve itself as) a constructively critical activity, then those working in these areas should be thinking and writing not just about our failures as reflective and emotionally guided beings, but also about how our new understanding of those failures can transform our self-conception, and improve our capacity for judgment, so that we aren’t simply left with a sense of how bad we are at being ourselves."

Is that (too?) unfair?