Philosophy’s Possibilities

(or anyway, a few more than usual…)

Anthony Weston

My point of entry to the proposed seminar is the very question of the job of philosophers itself.

One way or another, implicitly or explicitly, that question has been the persistent theme of my recent work. Most explicitly, I recently published a little book called simply Jobs for Philosophers (Xlibris, 2004). In form, it is a collection of reviews of philosophical books that actually do not exist – a conceit to allow me to cover a lot of ground very fast, without the usual expectations and scholarly baggage. The underlying project is to re-envision philosophy’s own possibilities – now, at this cultural moment, given not only philosophy’s past but the immense possibilities of the present, mostly not spoken for anywhere else. Here are some parts of the introductory chapter of Jobs for Philosophers (a somewhat grumpy review of the book itself):

The specialists’ conception of philosophy has very little philosophy behind it, so to speak. It has no theory – no systematic account of why this, of all things, should be natural or best shape philosophy might take – and for that matter very little historical weight either. Philosophy is 2500 years old but has been a significant academic profession for only about a century. For the other 2400 years its heroes were haranguers in the Athenian marketplace, mercenaries between wars, pre-syphilitic philological madmen, raconteurs and rabble-rousers and lens-grinders, often on (or over) the verge of exile or excommunication. Recently things have calmed down a little, but even less than a century ago we at least had philosophers as social and educational reformers, like John Dewey, running his own school and spinning off unions and political magazines. The idea that philosophy could become merely a “job” in the modern economic sense would scandalize most of the figures in the professionals’ pantheon. More normal were figures like Spinoza, who despite extreme penury declined a university appointment for the sake of freedom of thought. Contrast that to our own professionals, echoing Socrates’ mockery of the Sophists for teaching for money while somehow continuing to overlook the fact that they too teach for, well, money. Spinoza and Socrates may have been wrong, of course: the point is only that this sort of question is – not surprisingly! – seldom seriously raised. For it is also possible that they were right: that (to transpose the argument somewhat) the demands of professional self-preservation and self-promotion may have their philosophical effects as well – they do not leave the content of the philosophy, so to speak, unaffected.

There is a case to be made, at least, for a bigger vision of philosophy. The suggestion is in the air. The renegade philosopher Richard Rorty has spent several decades elaborating a notion of philosophy as “edifying discourse”, a mode of practice dedicated to carrying on the culture rather than a professional speciality claiming a privileged position from which to judge the culture. The author of Jobs for Philosophers, however, quotes approvingly Louis Menand’s veiled retort, in his magisterial narrative The Metaphysical Club, that “[Dewey] didn’t just want to keep the conversation going; [he] wanted to get to a better place”. This book, then, is more specific, less intellectual, less patient perhaps, more reconstructive in the Deweyan sense. It puts more on the line…

The author’s [proposed] philosophical “jobs” are for social inventors, theologian-cinematographers, guitarists who jam with orcas, and assorted other misfits, cultural tinkerers, iconoclasts, and free spirits… The chance to recover radical imagination, to reinvent a world beyond and beside what we know right now – this is for the wild-eyed and the youthful, surely, not for any settled professional. Or: the “hidden possibilities of things”, the problem of the “unrecognized Other” in everything from each other to animals and aliens, and the peculiar contributions of self-validating processes to that failure of recognition and to unsuspected ways around it. Or: the question of what ethics, that hoariest of subjects, could look like against the background of an unsettling, creative, susceptible, “possibilistic” kind of practical intelligence (or, more exactly, the possibility of ethics itself as such a form of intelligence)…

Full text of the introductory chapter of Jobs for Philosophers can be found at http://www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/book_excerpt.asp?bookid=22813.

Three of my recent writings linked to this site exemplify this vision of philosophy’s possibilities. One is a piece I just completed in the aftermath of the November. 2004 elections: “What Now?” This piece has been published in our local Independent weekly and submitted to several national periodicals. Its invitation, in the context of the proposed seminar, is to deliberately take up philosophy as an imaginative endeavor, as a project of cultural transformation that underlies and also is largely independent of specific engagements like, say, contesting elections. Writ large, this becomes what Chapter 2 of Jobs for Philosophers somewhat hyperbolically calls the project of “reinventing the culture.” This piece is based in turn on a (real) project to which I am trying to give shape: an attempt to form a “Center for Creative Futures” to conceptualize and launch transformative change programs of this sort.

The other two linked essays specifically concern teaching. “What if Teaching Went Wild?” proposes a range of ways in which the larger-than-human world can be invoked even in the most inhospitable of environments, for example contemporary classrooms – for there is a good bit of wildness still there, including even ourselves! “Teaching on the Edge” is the last chapter Jobs for Philosophers, and as such devotes itself to the actual job of most philosophers today: college teaching. Here too, I argue, an unsuspected wildness opens up. “What teaching could be!” the chapter concludes. “As with so many other things, we still have only the barest idea.” Both of these pieces, I hope, suggest that philosophy’s transformative possibilities do not just lie out somewhere beyond the classroom – though that is certainly true also – but are also as close as our most familiar everyday practice.

And what about, say, a philosophical science fiction? Philosophers Without Borders? Philosophical medicine or counseling or, who knows, hermitage or pilgrimage? New earth festivals, rather than the familiar environmentalism of moralizing and fear? This is not a time to be limiting our possibilities: they’re already far too circumscribed. Let us think together in the widest and wildest ways – who knows where we might go?