Rethink.

Jordan Weissmann reports that job opportunities for academics are pathetic and shrinking. He wonders why humanities Ph.D. programs haven’t “collapsed:” “From 2011 to 2012… the number of first-time students enrolled in arts and humanities Ph.D. programs had grown 7.7 percent.” [my emphasis] He’s curious to know what drove the decision making of those of us in these programs generally. The market’s been bad for years now, after all.

I don’t know what to say. I’ve always felt kind of dumb, and the fact that I could rant incomprehensibly or find questions that almost make sense bothered me. My first real experience with the humanities was in undergrad, when I realized that reading a book or a poem was tough work that never really ended.

I guess that’s a testimonial-type answer, and I don’t really like giving it. But along the way, I’ve seen so much pettiness within academia and have had real doubts about the value of the classroom. I honestly don’t know how valuable a classroom is unless someone already cares to master the material. I want to change the question: Why do many of us stick with the humanities? Why don’t we just give up? Why do we want the time to read and write and have pointless debates?

Now I know I have something closer to the heart of the matter, because I have a line of questioning that isn’t reducible to a testimonial or a career plan. It involves a sense of value, to be sure, but that sense of value is informed by a want to be relevant, if not practical. And this line of questioning can easily turn into a larger critique of our age without getting snobby. It is true people like Jefferson and Hamilton read everything, including a lot of stuff we would dismiss out of hand as useless. But it’s also true they were very mindful of the practical and probably didn’t care that most Americans could cite the finer points in Montesquieu if they were busy mapping a mountain range or making money by brewing craft beers.

I’d rather get snobby. What I suspect is this: we are at an absolute nadir in terms of people caring about literature or the classics or rhetoric. Our best talent in terms of writing makes movies and tv and comics. They, being exceptional, read a ton and know that the experience of carefully reading – of extracting the opinions of another slowly from a text by working through what you yourself think and eliminating the worst ideas – they know that experience does not sell. What sells is nostalgia, which might be the true porn of tumblr (other than the stuff that is porn). To not put a too fine point on it: when we’re complaining about too many Ph.D’s in the humanities, what we’re really saying is that we have too many people who care to read and write. We need that number to be 0. It’s a similar phenomenon to journalists being told to stop blogging and start tweeting because people who consume print media are little better than heroin addicts. But again, this is just a suspicion.

On a more serious note, I do think a little bit of Marxist-type criticism helps here. There’s capitalism and the culture of capitalism. The latter demands everything conform to its sense of value. The university as a whole does not fit comfortably into this mold, so it has been transformed. It’s now a tax shelter for oligarchs who run sports leagues with unpaid labor and collect federal subsidies. Maybe the reason why some people are in the humanities is that they want to make sure, despite our corruption, that future generations can have access to the past. Maybe they think an example needs to be set, that it needs to be shown someone cares about fashion in 15th c. England or an obscure treatise on horsemanship. Maybe that’s what’s going on, that the humanities are more a vocation and less a career. Maybe.

for Madeline Frohlich – happy birthday

Dear Madeline:

Humid air yesterday and today weighed us on campus down. It refreshed at first. Before – too much dryness, an annoying cold. A breeze and some accompanying warmth, moisture and sunshine invigorated many. Then we started feeling sluggish and sleepy. I got little done yesterday, a bit more today in the air conditioning.

I am surrounded by students who seem to work at things not many others take seriously. Students here pride themselves on mentioning things about Thucydides, papal encyclicals, Auden. Sometimes this means being comically divorced from the most basic news. One student, three weeks after the BP oil spill, confessed having no knowledge that anything happened in the Gulf. They read a lot, often very quickly. I remember when one read something like 100 pages of Nietzsche in a night. They attend a lot of lectures where smart and insightful things are said frequently. There is mandatory attendance for most classes. Many people here date in a somewhat serious manner. They come from large families where being asked “when are you getting married?” is a question that comes from nearly every family member.

Even here, though, virtually no one has taken an interest in Xenophon. People sometimes ask me about it and then forget what they’ve asked. One gentleman, who I must have told what I’m working on about 30 times over a period of years, still asked recently and I said something completely different.  Now any complaints about my campus – if I have any complaints – would probably hold true for a number of schools. Climates of opinion create expectations and habits. A certain degree of achievement can be had and measured within those climates. Nothing is wrong with this. In fact, it’s essential for the functioning and production of a number of institutions.

Still, when someone like you takes an interest in Xenophon – something I had trouble getting people who do classics to give a damn about – it’s like everything else in the world is insignificant. You were in high school and wondering about women in the ancient world. You certainly had and have a set of activist concerns. And you’re reading about women in Sparta one minute, my little comment on the Oeconomicus the next, about Percy and Mary Shelley later, asking me about Heidegger, telling me about Australian politics and your coursework, and enjoying every minute of it.

You don’t realize how rare a student you are. In my life, I’ve come across only a handful like you. That handful makes the world better many times simply by being themselves. Because there are so many students, quite a few are pale imitations of ones like you and sometimes are well-disguised. There are plenty of people I thought more devoted to bettering themselves who quit when the grades or material rewards diminished, let alone ceased to be around entirely. Being a genuine student – someone who wants to learn what life is about – is far more than hitting the books or even using one’s free time to read. It’s all about the questions one asks.

This critique extends to teachers. You’ve started university and they’ve got lots of information, stimulate lots of discussion. You’re not going to believe this, but most of what you learn are things you would learn on your own anyway. That doesn’t mean to be ungrateful, just as one should never be snob to one’s peers. But it means that for a personality like yours, your learning is your first priority in a way the rest of us can only admire. There are going to be many times where artificial expectations will hold you back from exploring the library, talking to someone worthwhile, going elsewhere to see things firsthand. Your grades may suffer. You might also compose an article or essay that brings injustice to light. You might tell a story that preserves a memory. You might think something that appreciates the truly human.

The most ludicrous aspect of our time is the joining of the words “education” and “business.” This isn’t to say capitalism is bad: the problem has been there longer than the sophists. It is to say that education is an investment in a deeper sense than any of us realize. You are the future. You’re going to show us what a truly intellectual climate can do.

Note: someone pointed out that McGinn’s piece is probably satire. I had suspected this, but was looking for “A Modest Proposal” type reasoning. Still, the acronym he uses for his renaming committee is “C.R.A.P.” Is that enough to make this whole thing a joke?

I’ll admit I’m not the best at spotting jokes. I did feel this piece more tragic than comic, as nothing alluded to the value of philosophy in an age which very much questions that value.

Colin McGinn’s argument that philosophy departments should be renamed is crazy. Why can’t people in philosophy departments say they study philosophy? It’s not like everyone expects people in English departments to write novels.

Still, it’s worth going through some of his observations. They don’t rise to the level of a serious case for what he wants, but they offer grounds for clarifying some issues:

Isn’t everyone employed in a university, and indeed some people beyond, a “lover of wisdom”? Most academics are not “sophists”! Physicists, say, have the attitude described as much as philosophers. But why should one particular discipline be characterized by reference to an attitude instead of a subject matter?

Literally, most academics are sophists. Xenophon’s Socrates repeatedly calls attention to the fact that he doesn’t charge for teaching because he wants to be free to work with whomever he wants to. Still, this is one of McGinn’s better points: there are people who I consider philosophic working in a variety of fields, at a variety of tasks. And philosophy – loving wisdom – is very much an attitude. Unfortunately, there’s the rest of McGinn’s proposal to consider:

(Is a chemist in love with wisdom concerning chemicals?) Moreover, “wisdom” really refers to having good judgment as to how to live one’s life, not to knowledge concerning abstract theoretical matters; and academic philosophy is only partly concerned with wisdom in that sense (ethics, political philosophy). Wisdom means practical wisdom, not scientific understanding. So the original meaning of “philosopher” misdescribes the nature of philosophy as an academic subject.

This shows a very poor understanding of the history of thought – Plato’s Republic in particular. Not that I’m going to hold a philosopher accountable for knowing all that stuff all the time. I’m deficient in key respects myself. But this is bad enough that I’d say I hope students never follow McGinn’s lead here. Sophia (wisdom) is sharply distinguished from techne (art, technique) though both used to mean roughly the same thing once upon a time in Greek. The distinction probably brought any kind of philosophy into being. You can see that very clearly in the Republic without leaning heavily on the terms. “One man, one art” (people with techne) brings the city in speech into discussion, is a ground for natural justice. The philosopher-king (one with sophia) is what you would need to bring it into being. That’s not practical wisdom. That’s theoretical wisdom dictating the practical. You can’t dodge this by saying “well, that’s political philosophy.” If Socrates doesn’t die, then it isn’t clear what we would have of philosophy. The pre-Socratics are fragments for the most part. (Moreover, in Aristotle, prudence and wisdom are again sharply distinguished.)

I’m not saying there aren’t ironies or difficulties all over the place. The point is that McGinn oversimplifies the theoretical/practical problem and wants to rest his case exclusively on what academic philosophy is now. He can’t do this, though, because the core of his thinking is simply laughable:

…it is really quite clear that academic philosophy is a science. The dictionary defines a science as “a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject.” This is a very broad definition, which includes not just subjects like physics and chemistry but also psychology, economics, mathematics and even “library science.”

See? The dictionary calls academic philosophy a science. The DICTIONARY. It gets better:

We may as well recognize that we are a science, even if not one that makes empirical observations or uses much mathematics. Once we do this officially, we can expect to be treated like scientists.

Ah, that’s what this is about. It’s about securing the money and prestige for the discipline by playing a renaming game that will work with university administrators and pseudo-intellectuals. I obviously don’t think McGinn is completely forthright in his declaration “whether to classify ourselves as a science or an art is strictly not the issue I am considering.” Philosophy is to be renamed with reference to “physics” and “chemistry.” This would be fine with me, if it didn’t threaten the existence of the field and the reading of books much greater than McGinn’s. After all:

…it is quite false that philosophy studies human culture, as opposed to nature (studied by the sciences); only aesthetics and maybe ethics fall under that heading. Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics and so on deal not with human culture but with the natural world. We deal with the same things the sciences deal with — the world beyond human culture. To classify philosophy as one of the “humanities” is grossly misleading — it isn’t even much about the human.

It is true that Socrates characterizes philosophy as something inhuman: the practice of dying and being dead. He does this in the Phaedo, a dialogue where he explains his break with Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras held mind a dividing power. This resulted in mind being cause, as the world mind divided couldn’t be assumed a unity except inasmuch mind treated it a unity. Anaxagoras’ books weren’t good natural science, but they consistently gave a scientific-sounding description to the world. Socrates could describe his presence in jail as the arrangement of his bones a certain way. Unfortunately, one has to wonder whether “mind as cause” itself became lost in the process. Wasn’t Socrates in jail for doing philosophy, for having led a life he saw as most just?

What philosophy is about: mind as cause. What is the true unifying and dividing power of mind? Just because the practice of some in academic philosophy today takes on the trappings of scientific inquiry doesn’t mean we should abandon a name much greater than ourselves. It is true the proper study of being may lead to some conclusions far outside the scope of the humanities. It is true the practice of philosophy today seems divorced from much of what goes on in the humanities. It is also true things change, and philosophy has inherited a grand, awesome name. Maybe instead of renaming the field people can start living up to their potential.

1. In some ways, it was natural for the university to become a type of sports franchise. I think of the pettiness of various professors, administrators and students I’ve encountered at a number of schools – schools that may not have Division I teams – and can’t help but wonder what end that spirit of “one-upsmanship” serves. That base competitiveness, that need to feel better than others, will not leave even if one does away with the corporate culture making things so much worse than they are:

…every “merit pay” scheme demands that increases be determined by a committee within each department. That is, some colleagues are put in charge of determining which other colleagues have been “productive,” and thus compelled to adopt a model of business or corporate competition in their relations with each other.

The colleagues who have been left behind wind up hating the colleagues on the committee — everybody thinks he or she is as “meritorious” as the next person in these situations — and they wind up hating each other, and all hate the people who have been given the largest “merit raises.”

The effect, in short, is to turn what had been a “republic of scholars” into a group of mutually resentful individuals each of whom detests all the others. (William Dowling, “Rutgers after Lawrence”)

I don’t know you’re going to have a “republic of scholars” if we got rid of considerations that are strictly business, stopped fetishizing the sciences to unnatural degrees, and placed more of an emphasis on reading, writing and the liberal arts. In fact, I know exactly what you get and the problems are manifold. Those problems, again, trace back to pettiness. People would rather put each other down than do good for each other. And they find innumerable ways of putting each other down when there are issues of understanding involved.

2. The fight against big-time collegiate athletics is refreshing in that it forces one to account for what the academy does. We know it isn’t just to advance the sciences, although that’s important. We know it isn’t just to form young people into a certain sort of person, although that too is important.

It really is about that clichéd sentiment: the purpose of the university is to allow minds to think independently. Not an empty mind, but an open one. I remember ISI’s “Choosing the Right College” guide being snarky about this once upon a time: there were liberal professors who couldn’t tell you what education was (because, apparently, minds less than Socrates’ can solve this problem). It didn’t take me long to learn that the problems identity politics posed were not unique to the Left.

Of course there are certain goals and standards to be met. No one can tell you “aha! You are thinking independently” at some prescribed moment (well, some can, but they are teachers of the highest order). We do want some reasonable standards set for a body of knowledge that is to be obtained. I will give ISI credit here: distribution requirements are no substitute for a Core curriculum and comprehensive examinations. Whatever says “here’s what you need to know, go learn it” is a good thing given how short and chaotic university life is.

3. But it’s what the Core and comps say that’s truly important. The intangible purpose – the hope – of the university is why the university exists. It ultimately does invest in its students. Every university could be doing more for its students in a multitude of ways. When I read, say, about Yale versus other schools -

There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

- I immediately think how much better it would be if every school was just a little bit more like an Ivy, treating their students like they’re deserving, like they’re the future. And by students, I mean more than undergraduates.

Until the academy realizes that it is to be a solid, serious institution for the sake of those it admits, more than just the fight against big-time sports will be lost. The university as a whole is endangered. People really are willing to create places where others go play around with dangerous, experimental ideas. They may get mad at times about these places. They may want a bit of spectacle attached to them. It’s the university squandering the fact it exists that’s the fundamental problem. I noticed a friend involved in educational issues – she’s not formally affiliated with any school at the moment – never wasted a moment online in terms of learning herself or trying to teach something (her command of Shakespeare and Rousseau were something else). There are many like her. Would that universities as a whole adopt that seriousness of purpose. There are places that provide an education, and then there are educated people.

1. At Barnes & Noble today. It looked trashed from holiday shopping. There wasn’t much left on the Philosophy shelves. Very few volumes of Nietzsche or Plato; couldn’t even find a copy of “Twilight and Philosophy” (my favorite book, besides this).

The store was also reorganized. Philosophy was back in a corner that it took me a little while to find. I realize fully that sales have always been hard to come by. I imagine most of us have put our private collections together through a combination of “needed it for class,” Amazon, university presses, used bookshops.

But it didn’t take long for it to dawn on me that if the basic titles aren’t in print, philosophy as a discipline is going to have some serious issues. For myself: how can I write on philosophy if my readers can’t get access to the primary sources?

2. Ah, but one can say the issue isn’t accessibility. We have the web, where most of these works are public domain. Anyone interested probably will take a class and have an anthology which will contain a number of works. And there are online book retailers selling many works very cheaply. Heck, the philosophy major has enjoyed a resurgence of sorts. What’s the problem?

The problem is that none of that, strictly speaking, is the accessibility anyone needs for study. I loved Barnes and Noble and Borders when I first found them, because the public libraries with which I am familiar, for the most part, are full of crap. Nearly everything there is mass-market fiction: we’re not talking Vonnegut. The store I went to today has philosophy shelves. The public library nearest me, last I checked, pretty much has a philosophy shelf.

That’s not to say the library doesn’t have some virtues or some hidden gems. Rosen’s book on Plato’s Symposium is there. I could spend months with that. Last time I looked, he had tucked away in there a few pages interpreting Prometheus Bound.

Let’s say, though, I do as I was planning to the other day and write up a little something on Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides and Heraclitus. That would involve quoting heavily from “Four Seminars,” where Heidegger does his unconventional reading of Greek and argues they are both the same. Obviously, I can’t expect a bookstore or public library nowadays to have this on hand so someone can peruse it. However, that puts me in the ridiculous position of writing a more or less specialized secondary source which will be found far more easily than the primary source.

Do I have to start linking to primary sources when I write? If the shelves laid waste and thrown in the back of the store are an indication, yes, and we’re not talking about “Four Seminars” here. Where am I going to be able to link to those primary sources? 90% of the good translations with notes are for purchase only. What’s going to happen when a good copy of the Republic can’t be found immediately? We need our students to see things like the Cave for themselves: there are a million little details hiding that only the most detailed, over-exhaustive account could hope to convey the import of. It’s up to a serious student of philosophy to figure out for themselves what details they want to focus on.

3. Accessibility for the study of philosophy means quality and on demand. A translation of Plato from 1910 with no notes is not acceptable. I need the notes telling me about the Greek and the culture and I’ve been doing this for years. A student of philosophy needs to be able to access good primary sources fairly quickly, especially in this environment where the discussion is lively and thorough. You don’t read philosophy for class ultimately. You do it because there are serious people, past and present, who seem to have had serious thoughts and you want to think them through and see if they’re any good.

We’re going to need to figure something out. We can’t just insist everyone get a Kindle or buy Hackett editions. I suspect we’re going to have to dump a ton of quality primary sources online somehow. One other thing about philosophy: it may involve leisure, but it doesn’t exclude poverty. Poorer students, poorer people deserve the access to thinkers like Hume, Xenophon & Montesquieu, access people like Madison and Jefferson had. Asking them to learn Greek or French to make some sense of what’s online isn’t right. My feeling about all this: the business of academia has conspired with our populist, commercial tendencies to keep ideas which changed the world away from the people who most need the world to change.