The Partially Examined Life

Hey Phil – good to hear from you. Mark actually touched on this in one of the last two episodes (Kant or the soon to be released Nietzsche episode, can’t remember which). I think philosophy as an academic discipline suffers no more or less than any other subject that is ‘academized’.

The Academy is a business whose products are ‘knowledge’ and ‘education’ – which is the transmission of knowledge. As a worker, your job is to either produce knowledge, transmit knowledge, or both. The ability to transcend straight knowledge transmission to a dialectical relationship where mutual exploration or wisdom sharing is possible only really starts at the graduate level and truly only happens when one is working directly with an involved mentor/advisor. [Yes, this can happen at the undergraduate level at small colleges, but I'm speaking generally here.]

Mark’s point in the recent cast was that professors now can’t create free-flowing works on major ’subjects’ because they must get tenure, which in turns means publishing, which in turn means being accepted by peer review groups, which in turn means adhering to the institutionalized norms, etc. This means writing commentaries and criticisms of other works, usually. Only when what you publish ‘doesn’t matter’, can you actually say what ‘really matters’.

The consequence of this is that many people in academic philosophy treat it like a job and, I think, aren’t either passionate or frankly that good. Certainly not the types likely to ultimately write anything that will survive their generation.

So, to answer your point, I think that academic philosophy has, structurally, weakened it’s potential to reach and enlighten people by creating an atmosphere where people who otherwise wouldn’t get a forum for their ideas become tools and where people who deserve to have their unique voices heard get pressured into silencing those voices. [Insert sour grapes comment here]

What’s more concerning to me is that Philosophy as a discipline has lost (if it ever had) its reputation as a source of meaning, truth, insight and significance for a larger audience. Even assuming the general populace is not aware of the academic factions, specialization, petty politics and other sundry activites in the tower, the discipline as a whole has little cultural relevance.

It’s “Chicken Soup for the Soul”, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven”, literature, new age metaphysics, self-help books, etc. People are looking for answers, but answers which are given, not those which come from self-reflective insight and a generous curiosity about assumptions. Philosophy doesn’t give answers, it makes the questions harder, but much more interesting. No one really wants that. And fortunately, few academic philosophers are laboring to give that to them.