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Discussion
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Written in 1966…. Turns out, philosophy in America became an empty husk, even earlier than I thought: has anyone ever heard the name George Santayana, does anyone ever assign William James or John Dewey? Do we speak of John Herman Randall Jr.? No, forgotten names, if not, forgotten works.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/04/24/121584742.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
“For what has happened, indeed, is that academic philosophy has become the antagonist of philosophy; the two are, in the long run, incompatible with each other. The great figures who founded modern philosophy were not academicians but men such as Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Locke and Hume — physicists, mathematicians, political scientists who had almost no connection with the universities.”
Later on in the article…
“[Bertrand] Russel began the separation of academic philosophy from philosophy; his descendants to his regret have completed it. They have reached the apex of dullness.”
When have truer words ever been spoken? I was forced, for instance, in college, to read an atrocity of hair splitting, mind numbing dullness. some 700ish pages on “epistemic [fucking] virtue.” A topic which could perhaps have made an interesting 12 page essay stretched into the most plodding, yet meticulously detailed, fine-toothed triviality. It is still the most nightmarishly boring thing I have ever read. Intuitively, deep down, we all know that philosophy is not supposed to be like this… we’ve apparently known this disavowed fact since before 19[fucking]66.
“Bereft of a sense that they have something to say, a curious style of writing has developed among academic philosophers. They seem to delight in conspicuous boredom; they multiply pages to explain what it is they are not going to discuss; they convey the sense of having an endless time to say what they feel is not really worth saying.”
Philosophy, like the university system, (and much like many other of our societal institutions) has been conspicuously presiding over its own decline for years and years. The greatest shame will not have been the murder of the university, but that it was dead long before it was murdered. Who will miss this behemoth of a walking corpse? The next quote describes my experience in 2015 far too closely, considering it was written 39 years prior.
“No student is as disoriented and bewildered as the average graduate student in philosophy. The young student comes to philosophy with a certain enthusiasm, moved usually by some personal religious problem or a quest for a way of life. he spends a year or two in a mishmash of studies. For a while he may cultivate the standard mannerisms of the linguistic analyst–walking around clutching his head and indulging in tedious verbalisms. Then he wakes up one day and wonders what it has all added up to. Existentialist students especially tend to be bitter about the System, and to regard their professors (in Sartrean idiom) as touched with bad faith.”
No wonder the average American either has no concept of what philosophy is or thinks it is silly, boring, pretentious nonsense… they are right, in the sense that ‘actually existing’ philosophy almost always is.
“Though academic philosophy withers in the colleges and universities, philosophy itself cannot be suppressed.”
Feurer goes on to describe all the ways philosophy lives on, in spite of the institutions which bear its name, we should add ourselves to that list.
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This discussion was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by
Sean Mittelstaedt.
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This discussion was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by
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Replies
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Isn’t this an example of the long term consequences of the industrial division of labor within capitalism? On this basis, perhaps we might conclude that the emptiness of academic philosophy merely reflects the emptiness of industrial production, which is done for the sole purpose of capital accumulation, and the domination of dead labor over living labor, as well as the domination of exchange value over use value.
If academic philosophy is “mind-numbing” and repetitive, that just means that the conditions of alienated philosophical labor in the academy mirror the conditions of capitalist wage labor in general.-
I’m realizing that this goes along with our fearless leader’s (David McKerracher’s) “taylorization of discourse” idea.
I agree with this sentence:
“If academic philosophy is ‘mind-numbing’ and repetitive, that just means that the conditions of alienated philosophical labor in the academy mirror the conditions of capitalist wage labor in general.”
I don’t think I agree with this sentence…
“Isn’t this an example of the long term consequences of the industrial division of labor within capitalism?”
…inasmuch as it might imply that the sphere of industrial production has influence on the sphere of academic production.
I’m not sure that that is what you are implying here, but I’m responding in order to drill down more closely on the idea you raise here, and I think there is something to it, precisely what, I’m not positive. The reason I like your last sentence (the first one I posted above) is especially because of the word “mirror.” To me that term could imply that academic philosophy is for some reason copying something formally, from industrial production. I wonder however if, historically, this would be disproven by a close analysis. I mean that in order to prove that, we would have to show a real historical actor who actually looked at industrial production and said ‘I’m going to import some aspect of this into the academy,’ and then actually did it. The alternative explanation would be that the academy “mirrored” not industry directly, but that it mirrored some cultural abstraction which industry either brought into being or itself mirrored, so that the mirroring between the academy and industry is indirect, mediated through ideological abstractions, or a third party institution.
I think the answer to your question in your first sentence may be basically yes, but, exactly what that means is a historical question. In other words, I’m not sure why or how it is the case that the academic production comes to ape industrial production, I’m simply not clear on how that process would work, and so I don’t just want to say a kind of knee-jerk, ultra-vulgar Marxist line of thought that capitalism is the root of each and every evil. It’s possible, in lieu of even a cursory historical study of academic policy, that it starts to feel a bit like the assembly line, somewhat accidently, or through a different causal chain altogether than what drives industrial policy; even as I write that though, it seems highly unlikely, however.
Speculatively, it seems most likely to me that what drives the taylorization of discourse in the academy is something I know is true: that we live in a culture that is so utterly defined by capitalism that it thinks it IS capitalism. In such a culture, everything would probably begin to bizarrely and irrationally resemble the misplaced image of the automatized warehouse. The academy begins to destroy itself by attempting to become streamlined machinic infrastructure, something it can obviously never be, based on the ruling ideologies of “efficiency” or, even more (post)modern “marketability.” That sounds a lot like the death spiral going on at, for instance, West Virginia University right now.
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This discussion reminds me of a debate that raged when I went to college. I went to Catholic U in DC, graduating in 1976. Their philosophy of education was that of the classical liberal arts education or learning for its own sake as opposed to vocational training. The Great Books program at St. John’s U is reminiscent of that approach. The irony of vocational training/STEM education is that businesses cannot predict what they’d need in job candidates 4 years out. Technological advances seem to make that impossible. A rigorous liberal arts education seems to offer the greatest flexibility. I would also add that the intended purpose of this liberal arts education was self-improvement. The Ethical Culture Society in New York held classes for working people with that intent.
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