I finished college in 2000 with a lot of student loan debt and no job skills as a result of my degree. I had a hard time making enough money to live on and pay off my student loans. This is part of how I ended up working in NGOs and stuff - I was good at it and it paid the bills. (There’s more too it than that, I really loved it for a long time too, which is part of why I was good at it, but that’s not the point right now.) During this long hard time before my first decent job I had a conversation with my youngest brother. He was 12 or 13 at the time. He asked my why I didn’t have a better job since I had gone to college. (Our dad is a skilled construction worker and makes bank comparatively speaking.) I hemmed and hawed. He said, but you got a degree. I said, yeah but my degree’s in philosophy. He said why don’t you get a job in philosophy? I said, well there really aren’t any unless I go back to school. He said, why did you study that then? I said because I love it. He said what is philosophy anyway?
Twenty minutes later as my babble ground to a halt he said, so your telling me you went to school for years studying something and got a degree in it and you can’t explain it is? You got ripped off! It was pretty depressing at the time.
Lately I’ve found myself repeatedly making arguments about the relative lack of usefulness of theory and philosophy. I find myself asking, what is the use of this stuff? Why bother? That concerns me. I’m fine to concede that the issue might be just my own, a defect in my abilities. The thing is, the “why bother” isn’t a throwing in the towel thing, rather it’s “why do I bother?” (because I do bother, I bother plenty), as in “why do I like the things I like?” (Kind of like why do I keep wanting more tattoos or why do I love stuffed grape leaves so much. The thing is, with the latter I’m happy to settle for “I just do.” Tattoos and grape leaves do not have self-reflexivity as part of their goodness. Philosophy does though, or is more likely to or should.) It’s not a negative why, a critical or attacking why. It’s a positive why, a “this could be even cooler” why, a “let’s figure out what makes this work so we can make it work more” why, or just a “gosh I love talking and thinking about this and this is one way to do so” why. Aside from why do I love this stuff, I also wonder why - in a more negative sense - I’m having the “philosophy isn’t useful” reaction lately.
Part of my having that response I think is because I do love philosophy and I don’t want that love to be predicated on some element external to philosophy. If I loved philosophy because it made me a better cook then I might stop loving it if I found something else that made me an even better cook, or if it stopped improving my cooking. I don’t want conditions I guess is what I’m saying. And also it’s like … philosophy doesn’t have to be useful for the revolution to be worthwhile, any more than a really good song or kiss or night of drunkenness or anything else. It just is worthwhile, full stop.
There are good things one can get from philosophy, though, of course. It contributes a sort of clarity (sometimes), to difficult questions and problems. One can get a type of self-discipline from it which can help one in other arenas. Here’s the thing, though, I think:
The good things one can get from philosophy - the things that philosophy can accomplish in places which are (for the lack of a better term) outside philosophy - are excellent reasons to do philosophy, but none of them are sufficient reasons. None of them are enough to recommend philosophy to someone who really needs convincing. That’s one type of instance when I get hesitant, I think, when I start to feel like there’s an implication or even just a sort of atmosphere of there being a clear criterion for recommending philosophy. The benefits of philosophy don’t recommend it. Rather they’re benefits listed by people who are already convinced.
The other thing, specific to political stuff and the use of theory, is wanting to defend other things from philosophy. Or rather, to defend both other things and philosophy from uses of philosophy toward other things. Philosophical training (maybe that’s part of the point so badly made about, training, self-making - philosophy is part of making oneself and appeals to the benefits of philosophy are heard differently by different selves, the benefits of philosophy are weighted higher by those for whom philosophy is part of their self-making? but I digress) can be useful in other settings, one can avoid or catch certain logical errors in arguments in meetings, for instance. Perhaps the patience of those terribly dry beautiful books can help one be patient in listening to people (I doubt that one, actually). But philosophy doesn’t provide unique insights such that the ones with philosophical training should speak and others listen, it doesn’t make one an expert. The bugbear here is the Leninist/Kautskyist conception I dissed on here, which is I think in a way a variant on the myth of the metals.
At the same time, I do want to say that philosophy can benefit those settings. Let me try it this way - it’s the direction that matters. Going from philosophy to politics (or whatever) doesn’t make one better at politics. But going from politics (or whatever) to philosophy is wonderful. It’s a way to reflect on and draw lessons from experiences. Doesn’t this mean basically going from philosophy to politics, though, after first having made the reverse trip? In a way, but two things. What one brings in the return (so to speak) from philosophy to politics isn’t so much a positive content but a renewal or openness to new stuff, maybe? An absence of getting tripped up in bad old habits and a flexibility to encounter and inhabit old spaces anew, maybe? But not a positive propositional programmatic content which one applies. (Said contents can be had and in some cases should be, but I don’t think that’s philosophical exactly.) Second, literalizing the philo-sophia bit — philosophy is the love of knowledge, one takes the knowledge and experiences of politics (or whatever) and relates to them in a certain way, reflects on them, basks in them - falls/feels in love with them (again?), as when one reflects on a partner, friend, family member in that way. That can have a positive external effect - renewing one’s commitment to the loved object/person, renewing one’s will - but I think the experience of it alone is enough to recommend it.
I don’t feel much further along, really.
I’ve been very much in this state of mind lately, and I did get a “job” in philosophy. I think you hit the key issue of this discontent in your final paragraph. It seems to me that prior to the 19th century philosophy wasn’t so much a “discipline” as an activity that emerged as the result of other activities. For instance, the “scientist” (I use square quotes because science wasn’t yet separated out as something distinct in its own right) came, at a certain point, to reflect on his experiments and asked what they implied as a way of refining his praxis. When philosophy became institutionalized and came to be treated as a discipline in its own right, it came to be separated from this fertile ground of praxis in relation to something other than philosophy. There are, of course, philosophers that philosophize out of an engagement with something other than philosophy: the Marxists who must theorize as a result of their political involvement. Figures like Foucault that are trying to make sense of their other engagements, or Lacan who’s trying to make sense of his analytic practice. I tend to gravitate towards these sorts of figures as there’s always a “little bit of the real” in their work, a point of resistance, the resistance we encounter in practice, that inspires their theorizing, gives it meaning, and functions as a corrective against “clever arguments” and constructing castles in the air.
Comment by Sinthome — May 17, 2007 @ 6:11 am
Hi nate…nice post. I wonder do you think there are ways of reading and using philosophy that are more legitimate (or “loveable”) than others? Is the most loveable/legitimate aim instrumental expropriation (what use can I put Plato to)? I know you are interested in history of a certain sort - do you think there is a kind of philological responsibility in the practise of (consuming, producing, using) philosophy product, I mean, a responsibility to apply an historical understanding to philosophy product? Would you consider different tactics appropriate for philosphy than for other genres of writing?
Comment by chabert — May 18, 2007 @ 9:02 am
Hi Sinth, Colonel,
Thanks for your thoughts.
Sinth, I generally agree. But I’m also okay with castles in the air. I’m just not okay with “we’re building castles in the air” being confused with “we’re storming the winter palace”. I get into this a bit more below in my response to Le Colonel. One other thing, your remarks about philosophy and other stuff… I remember reading a book on pragmatism once in college, arguing that philosophy should always accompany/be accompanied by other work, precisely for these reasons. In a way I think that’s what Badiou’s thing about truth conditions and philosophy is saying. One thing that’s interesting about this is that it’s a recommendation for theoretical work in other departments than philosophy, in a sense, because it makes those links or could. (That’s a better way to say it, it’s a recommendation insofar as those other place do make those links.)
Colonel, I’m of several minds on this. On the one hand, whatever people want to do with books, at least in good faith, is pretty much fine by me. Reading philosophy for enjoyment is fine. Reading philosophy to deal with important private ethical problems is great. A friend of mine who studied philosophy in college recently went through an ugly break up. He got out his Spinoza books and read the stuff on love and sadness in there and it helped him reflect on that experience. I think that’s a more important use than just enjoyment, that’s one case of a better reading than another, so yes we can rank ways of or reasons for reading to some degree.
As for politics, I think philosophy can have a use there too and that’s also important. I wouldn’t call v1 of Capital a work of philosophy, or at least not a typical work of philosophy. That’s a book that can be useful in understanding one’s workplace, and reading groups on it can be really useful - not just or primarily for the propositional content people walk away with in their heads but for the relationships that get built during a group like that and the convictions and stories people share.
I don’t want to say say that that’s a more important use than private ethical uses, though (by private or ethical I mean things that don’t change worlds politically, that don’t involve conflict and power - this isn’t a hard and fast distinction, but I think some things are existential invariants, like grief, dealing them is very important but is different from dealing with eliminable social ills). I’m not comfortable with categorical ranking of political and private things. Grief and loss, and love and responsiblity, in one’s personal life are no less important in general than collective action over all. I don’t know that they’re more important in general either. I say that because I think it’s important in order to avoid either making it simply okay to bail on one’s comrades because one has found a new love, and to avoid making it simply okay to bail on one’s obligations to friends, family, partner, etc because of involvement in collective action. These things have to be continually negotiated in specific situations.
That digression aside, I don’t think there’s a general responsibility to historicize. I think that in general that reading in relation to history is a better way to read, but - thinking of my friend w/ the break up - in some cases bracketing history can be useful too. In that case, I think this is treating philosophy more like a literary work - one can read literary work about grief, loss, love, etc and have it be productive without history. One can read it with history productively as well, in different ways. For instance, I could imagine a discussion group reading literature on love in a historical context as a way to open conversations and get people started thinking about sex and gender and power in new ways. I also think that reading history can have important uses too, some of which are the same as reading philosophy, some of which may be inferior to philosophy (clarity of principle, say) and some of which may be superior (dramatic and inspiring narrative of important events, say, or imaginatively experiencing the world being different as opposed to propositional content about the world being different).
My over all point in that post was to try and say that I don’t think philosophy (or art, or all kinds of things) is simply valuable for its ‘change the world’ capacity, in a political way I mean. Maybe a better way to have written that post would have been to talk about the different uses of these kinds of books. They have many use values which aren’t much more connected than the use values of an apple (nourishment, taste, way to suck up to a teacher, item to throw at a police officer, etc). What I wanted to say was that claims about the political use value of those kinds of books are not the only claims admissible for those kinds of books.
I say this in large part because I find many claims about the political utility of these books to be overstated, and I think those overstated claims have at least two possible uses. One is for academics who deal with so-called political topics to feel like their work is more important than others. That can be used to help them get jobs/tenure and compete for market share of readers etc. It can also be used to help them feel better about their jobs and to deflect criticism from oneself or others (like, say, on how one grades students or treats other staff). The second use, which isn’t likely in the short term but I think did happen at some moments in history (and does happen in small left sects like this group I was involved with briefly in Chicago), is as part of hierarchy of who should be listened to and make decisions and who should listen and carry out decisions. Knowledge of Hegel, Plato, Spinoza - or Marx, Engels, Lenin - does not provide substantive reasons for being a leader. That knowledge may accompany - or may be part of the route by which one attained - other knowledge which does provide more substantive reasons for leadership. But appearance and substance can be confused, as I know you know. This is part of why I find myself left cold by occasional laments about lack of attention to academic works. I’m not convinced that academic works have special insights such that they should be much more read than they are, I mean here substantive works rather than strawperson examples we could find of shoddy books. That many people don’t pay attention to academic work is to my mind at least as much an index of people’s intelligence as it is people’s being duped by ideology, incapable of critical thought, being anti-intellectual, and whatever other lamentations.
I don’t feel quite satisfied with what I’ve said here, but that’s the best I can do just now.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 18, 2007 @ 1:54 pm
thanks nate for the thoughtful answer.
I have been wondering lately why it is widely believed - “common sense” - that there is such a thing as a “dangerous philosophy” but at the same time it is widely acknowledged that there are no dangerous philosophical texts. It’s kind of a puzzle. It is as if literacy itself difuses the “danger” of “philosophy.” You could have a dangerous philosophy in your head, and you could spread it by talking to people face to face, but you can’t put it in writing or be persuaded of it by reading.
Comment by chabert — May 18, 2007 @ 6:03 pm
for the materialist the merit of philosophy is often not in what it gives you, but in what it enables you to get rid of, what it enabes you to overcome, and it may be in the end that most, or all, of what is considered “philosophy” is something to be dispensed with, circumvented, overcome … Of course, getting rid of something allows you to see something else, so there is always a positive moment (wait, I’m starting to sound Hegelian! - but to be truly Hegelian, I would need to turn these fleeting thoughts into a system)
Comment by David McInerney — May 19, 2007 @ 9:53 am
It is the continentalists, rather than the the positivists and analytical sorts, who are to be blamed for promulgating the idea of Big P. “Philosophy”, I believe. That doesn’t mean (according to Norma Rae-leftist “logic”), that one gives carte blanche to say Quine’s politics, whatever they were. Rather, the analytical move was about removing the clerical baggage, the great claims, the Absolutes, the scholastic jargon and platonic ghosts.
The left never tires of suggesting that analytical philosophers (or empiricism in general) somehow have to bear the guilt of the nazis or something (and that’s another great irony, given Bertrand Russell’s clear denunciations of the fascists even starting in 30s). Really, it is the Hegelians (links oder rechts) who should be held accountable, at least to some degree, for both fascism and marxist-communism. In terms of some putative historical guilt, ah would humbly suggest (in some sense echoing Popper) that the ideas of Hobbes and Locke (and their analytical descendants) did not have nearly the pernicious effect as those of Hegel and Marx (and arguments can be made that Kantianism belongs more with the analytical camp than with continentalism)…..
Comment by Perezoso — May 19, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
Perezoso, I fail to see how The Great “Analytical philosophy vs. Obscurantism and the Marxist Gulag” bullshit adds anything (worthwhile) to this discussion.
Some scattered reflections of my own (likely equally unworthy of reading)…
I was part of a (graduate) theory reading group for a while, and the question of what theory is arose in one of our first meetings. As the group was mostly Lit/English grad students, most agreed that “theory” meant something like “doing things with continental philosophy.” For many in the group, then, theory/philosophy was a matter of opening, revitalizing, approaching, reflecting upon, and politicizing literature, art, thought, and, ultimately (hopefully), life–in some sense theory (thinking/reading) is a way of doing and of being.
Recently, when I talked with the chair of one of the “top” English departments in the U.S., I was struck by the territorial (disciplinary) logic of his take on theory. He said that “Ranciere is very good for us, very good.” For him, theory that valorized and privileged literary studies was good, and theory that denigrated “what we do” was bad. Ranciere wasn’t good so much because he offered up new ways of thinking about class struggle (etc.) but because his work on politics and aesthetics reinforces the value of the latter. (And I think that’s fair, so far as it goes.)
I’m currently in a reading group comprised of a heterogeneous group of organic intellectuals. (Radical/Marxist) Labor/union organizers, community organizers, activists, artists, etc. I’m the youngest participant by about 20 years. Coming from an academic milieu, I think my experience with this group has been predictable: the lack of focus and/or systematic discussion (”rigor”)can be frustrating but the vitality of the group, and its demographic distance from my usual (academic) cohort, can be really enlivening. We’re reading both Lenin and David Harvey in the coming months and I’m excited, yet the group read some Zizek before I joined and has unanimous contempt for a figure I have found quite valuable (if very unevenly so). This latter seems almost purely a function of the academic/not academic divide.
For the militants in the group, theory is useful if it helps them get to a better understanding of reality as conceived in recognizable political/material formations. Those theorizing in abstruse realms such as the psyche and the putative logics of culture have no purchase. (And I think this is equally as fair as the English Dept. Chair who has little use for Robert Brenner.)
Things get pretty simple when I try to explain my interest in theory and philosophy: I can’t live without it. I like thought, I like life, I want explanations, I seek openings. Philosophy is inextricable from these.
Comment by Andrew — May 21, 2007 @ 2:54 am
the english department chair who had no use for robert brenner would be missing the most complete and satisfying reading of the peculiarities of the english figure of the “machiavel”!
Comment by chabert — May 21, 2007 @ 12:10 pm
Shutting down English literature, Postmod, Inc. and the MLA: that’s real “Praxis.” Shakespeare and Co. work for the King …And anyone who thinks Lacan has something to do with progressive politics should be STF down as well. John Rawls did more for progressive goals than any Zizek ever did as well: but he’s not sexxay enough for the Literary KGB……….
Comment by Perezoso — May 21, 2007 @ 3:25 pm
For me the questions come from a different direction. Philosophy accompanied me through my coming of age, and was my deepest love from the age of 13 on. Philosophy has always been a bedrock for me, a series of activities and questions that I pursue in order to clarify my living, my world, and my direction. I don’t think there’s an element of my life that is untouched by philosophical reflections. Studying it in school helped me hone my analytic skills, but I was most struck by how distant that process (Academic philosophy) was from what I had done all along. In the end I decided to abandon the latter, but am essentially unshaken on the former.
Historically my favorite philosophers all had an integrated and grounded in living approach to philosophy. In some ways the rise of academia nurtured the formalistic and wankerdom of present philosophy, but there has always been technical-irrelevant mental masturbatory philosophy. It sounds cheesy, but I deeply believe that philosophy is a strategy for living, and therein is justified as such (as a better way to live, at least for some). One has to temper that by the fact that it can and does make you miserable sometimes, but happiness isn’t the good so…
I’d encourage you to drive a wedge between philosophy as you live it then and as it is studied. In many ways I think it is impossible to teach or institutionalize the former. It can be justified then in so far as it has a transformative role in your life (and telescoping outwards to the world around you). Maybe it’s pathological, but I couldn’t actually see myself wanting to live at all that approach was closed off to me. This reply seems particularly tautological… so I hope it was helpful and not just me saying, damn I like philosophy *blush*
Comment by todd — May 21, 2007 @ 4:45 pm
hey all,
I was away from home for a while then needed time to catch up on my sleep. Thanks for all the comments. Todd I think part of what I’m on about here is just a restatement of “damn I like philosophy.” As part of my liking philosophy I find that some injunctions to like philosophy make me like philosophy less, and so since I like philosophy I want to defend my liking from those injunctions. It’s like when a parent is like “you should like person P and date them, they have X, Y, Z qualities which are found in reasonable
relationships” that attempt at swaying actually makes person P less desirable. The other thing of course that I should have started off with is that there’s not one point to any of these books or types of books, but many. (Use values are retroactively posited after uses, and are multiple.) At the same time, I do want to get clearer on what I like about these books. It may be multiple things, though. Rorty says somewhere that philosophy is a family resemblance term, so there’s no clear criterion for sorting philosophy from non-philosophy that doesn’t leave out some work some people hold to be philosophy. I find in general I’m drawn to works that do what David said, that help one divest oneself of encumberances. That’s definitely a lot of what I like, deflationary arguments. Another type of philosophical work I think goes the other way, pointing out complexity/extra-ordinary-ness and sort of instilling a sense of wonder about things which are otherwise taken for granted or considered simple/ordinary. I actually find some analytic philosophy stuff does this for me, like that Grice essay “Logic and Conversation” — it points out the tremendously complex systems involved in ordinary conversation and which people navigate so flawlessly (given the complexity I mean). Rather like how attempts to teach robots to catch or hit a pitched baseball demonstrate the incredible amount of data, calculations etc which go into all of that. I think of this latter as a literary or aesthetic function, shining up the world so to speak. I think of the former as more scientific or common sense function, providing sunglasses to see through the shiny bits. Both are useful depending on the context.
Per, I’m an agnostic about the degree to which one can hold a thinker to account for what’s done with their work, on the one hand I want to do that all the time (Lenin be damned!), on the other I don’t know what that amounts to be performative gestures (though very satisfying ones - Lenin be damned!). And none of that tells one the uses or effects of reading a thinker in a different context, nor does any of that explain members of traditions founded by thinkers who dissented from the (retroactively?) hegemonic line - there were hegelian marxists who opposed the bolsheviks and their communism, for instance, and to say that the latter had the heart or truth of marxism and hegelianism while the former were deluded just repeats the bolshevik line, siding with the victor. (Plus you and I just have different political views which I think are unlikely to be productively discussable.)
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 24, 2007 @ 4:47 pm