I originally intended the previous newsletter to consider what my old research discipline of philosophy, with its unique and curious special abilities, could do to resolve this unprecedented situation where arts, humanities, pure sciences, and college programs are starved and dried up out of existence. But the last post ran much longer than I’d originally planned, and so now my final point arrives a month later.
The Fate of an Entire Field of Knowledge
When I reflect on my career in higher education and learning, I can think about it in two ways. I could consider the last decade as an admission of professional failure, which doesn’t look too good on me or my mental health. Or I could consider the last ten years as a tough arc in my professional development that has taught me hard lessons as a foundation for future success. It all depends on how much charity and value you want to give my reflections in this space. These first few entries are about the turning points in my own professional career for why I wanted to start this newsletter now, and the kind of value I want it to create for my readers and myself.
Because if I’m going to talk in the most crass terms, this is an exercise in personal branding. It’s a place to demonstrate my expertise, at least so far as it’s a place for me to offer worthwhile and interesting explanations of the things in which I claim expertise. I do actually want to use this as a space to coordinate professional connections among like-minded people in my fields and the fields related to it, so that we can help change the direction of our society, business cultures, and governance back in a more progressive and inclusive direction. It isn’t enough simply to post and let what happens happen, but to use where you post as a place to build connections and make plans.
So Where Did We Leave Last Time?
Our cliffhanger was the crisis in higher education. More accurately, it’s the system-wide crash of multiple crises at once hitting the post-secondary education sector in Canada and the United States. As I ask that question about the power we can build as professionals growing and curating our networks, we seem disconnected and adrift. Institutions of higher education and government that once seemed stable and reliable are shaky and flaky. We need to innovate in our loosely connected community for the most valuable parts of our knowledge and training are not lost without those supports.
So I wondered if my old discipline of philosophy could drive that innovation. Probably the most important fuel of my passion for philosophy as a knowledge discipline was its capacity for breadth and focus at the same time, and the intensity of the conceptual creativity you could see in the works good enough to make the canon.
I brought that energy forward into the rest of my career in the form of strategic thinking. Whether I was a business trainer, teaching ethics or economics, developing plans and projects as a consultant or entrepreneur, I was thinking systematically, with targeted, insightful research backing me up, about the difficult problems the world could throw at us. Here is where the value of philosophical thinking lies!
Actually, no. The short answer to that question is, “No, it isn’t.” The slightly longer answer to that question is, “Yes, it is, but very few people who’ve studied and worked extensively in philosophy actually do that.” For the rather longer answer to that question, which actually explains the answer, keep reading.
Sometimes, I think the reason I had a hard time finding work in humanities departments was that my work, and the kind of work I wanted to do, didn’t fit this model. Think of this as an inverse of the way I’ve always approached research and practice.
Probably the most important fuel of my passion for philosophy as a knowledge discipline was its capacity for breadth and focus at the same time, and the intensity of the conceptual creativity you could see in the works good enough to make the canon.
Rigid, Disciplinary, and Insular
If the actual core works of the field of philosophy offer the kind of creative, strategically guided, critical, original thinking that higher education needs to escape its predicament as an institution, what makes so many of its actual practitioners so poorly suited to it? The problem is not so much with the field of knowledge and approach to thinking itself, but with the institution that has become philosophy’s only home: academic university institutions.
Here are the incentives that not only encourage ways of thinking which produce philosophical work that gets increasingly worse over time, but also discourage university-based philosophers from thinking with the creativity of their own discipline at its best.
The first incentive I want to discuss is a function of how academic institutions encourage their members to develop their personal research and publishing programs. This is just as much a researcher’s brand as it is their work, especially in the humanities, where success lies in having your work widely read (at least by other research professionals) and having your ideas adapted into the research and publishing of others. But working in university institutions structures every knowledge discipline into sub-disciplines.
The best way to establish your reputation as a researcher in the humanities, philosophy included, is to establish your own sub-discipline. Once this happens for a few generations, what was once a fairly unified set of related fields becomes a mess of smaller and narrower fragments. Each fragment tends to develop its own professional vocabulary to set itself apart from the other disciplines and the field as a whole. So developing expertise in one of these fields makes you less able to explain your research and your ideas to those in different fields. Little chance for any productive communication across different domains of knowledge.
Turning Away From Everyone As a Virtue
Now all this sounds pretty abstract. Certainly not a great situation, but they can still hold it together. Philosophy’s real problem set in when you set this against a culture of dispute and disagreement baked into the tradition going back literally thousands of years. Philosophy has always been knowledge tradition that develops through argument and the back-and-forth of intellectual debate. More intensely than the other humanities because most philosophical writing and publishing has the form of argument, and the science of argument is part of philosophy as a discipline.
That focus on argument as the main form of professional discussion in the field is what makes philosophy such an unsuitable academic discipline to defend and reform the institutions. Think about what happens when you take a field of professionals who mainly discuss their discipline by arguing with each other, and put them in an institution where you establish your reputation by staking a particular expertise or viewpoint to produce a sort of field within a field. Any concession to someone arguing against your point risks the integrity of that reputational territory.
So everyone now has an incentive to attack the legitimacy of everyone else’s field, expertise, and perspective. You stop reading other people’s work to learn something from it, and instead research your colleagues only to attack them and find flaws. Common project, working together, collaboration all become impossible.
Four Examples of How an Entire Tradition of Knowledge Self-Destructs
I’ve had and continue to have plenty of pleasant relationships in the world of professional philosophy and the other humanities and social science specialists I’ve worked with and collaborated with over the years. It’s not that there’s no collegiality at all. It’s just that so many of the professional incentives to survive in the academy for humanities specialists encourage you not to seek out and figure out what’s right, but simply to be right, and make sure you end every professional interaction with everyone thinking that you’re right. Here are a few examples of that conflict-seeking behaviour among humanities researchers that blocks collaboration, solidarity, and the capacity to work together to deal with common problems.
For two years, I was the Digital Editor at the research journal Social Epistemology curating their open-access publications. It was generally a good experience, but after a while, a lot of the ongoing publications and exchanges among members and outside participants that were in progress when I began were winding down. I started emailing other professors and researchers at different universities who had never contributed before with some very professional introductory invitations. One professor from University of Toronto sent me the most unprofessional, withering, filthy string of insults mocking me as an imbecile for even suggesting he would want anything to do with such trash and nonsense.
At the Canadian Philosophical Association conference of 2012 at University of Waterloo, I delivered a commentary on a paper about philosophy of mind and colour perception. These commentaries are ten-minute rejoinders to someone else’s paper that I typically wrote to provide different perspectives on the problem, though a lot of people use them as counter-arguments and attacks. Because I wasn’t very aggressive with mine, they tended to go over well with the main presenters. But this time, I made a few points from a different sub-discipline, called phenomenology. The main presenter was so insulted that had commented with this on his paper that he refused to acknowledge me when I thanked him at the end of the session, and stormed past me enraged.
The entire post-2016 career of Jordan Bernt Peterson and the Soviet art he hangs all over his house to remind him constantly that the left must be destroyed.
My own much too aggressive review of a 2021 book You Are Here by Canadian researchers Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner. This was a quite interesting book about how the style of discourse that developed in internet culture over the 2000s encourages polarization and dehumanization of people who are different from you. I thought it made some good points in its first couple of chapters, but petered out into some weaker analyses in its second half. I was much too harsh on this book, and I now think that review would have hurt their wanting to participate in Social Epistemology or join up with any of my own ventures.
This gets gendered too, because of course it does. I believe this happened at the Canadian Philosophical Association conference of 2011 in Fredericton. A doctoral student from Western University who I knew from previous conferences gave a really interesting talk on how to use the moral theory that G. E. Moore developed in political philosophy contexts. The first voice in question period was an older professor from the philosophy department at University of Toronto. He was very condescending toward her, essentially saying that she didn’t understand how to do philosophy research properly because Moore never wrote political philosophy and was only interested in moral theory. Her paper was worthless because it put Moore’s ideas in a place where Moore himself never did. I defended her as a very creative use of the history of philosophy, as her presentation was never supposed to be simply doing the history of philosophy. She said so in her first sentences. But what mattered to that old professor, despite his quite progressive actual publications and ideas, was that she was young and doing things differently, therefore wrong.
Finally, a colleague of mine at McMaster University during my doctoral studies. Around four months before I completed my PhD, this professor was denied tenure (after his third attempt!) and let go. He suffered from three main problems, each of which embodied every issue I’ve explained here about academic philosophy. First, he barely published anything for the entire seven years he was tenure-track: he was so aggressively self-critical that he whittled his articles down to the smallest, easiest to prove claims, and they kept getting rejected from publication because he made his own work so unremarkable that no one could argue against what he said. Second, no one in the philosophy department wanted him around anymore because he was so elitist and condescending. He laughed at the notion that teaching assistants should be paid decently (despite his personal socialist politics) and openly mocked his colleagues in legal and political theory because he said they weren’t real philosophy, since they didn’t deal with the traditional questions of why we exist and what is the good. Finally, he was so aggressive in how he argued against anyone that he would regularly give students panic attacks. No female graduate student ever left a meeting with this man without crying.
And no matter how much his colleagues tried to convince him, he never believed he was doing or saying anything wrong, because “That’s what philosophy is.”
Unfortunately, and this applies to the humanities academy, that’s what it is.
Until next time, when I share with you some more insights about the professional worlds I’ve experienced and the wrong decisions I’ve made.
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