What Is Our Legacy?

A couple of days after the fact, I discovered that my doctoral thesis advisor, and a central mentor in how I think, guide my research, and approach any professional project at all, died the weekend before Remembrance Day. 

It was quite a shock, because Barry Allen was only 68, and I discovered through old friends still connected to the department that it was a very sudden onset of a very aggressive illness. No one was expecting it, and he was gone quite quickly. Some old friends reached out to me and I reached out to them, and we shared our own disorientations. 

The top reason that I chose McMaster University as the place to do my doctorate was to work with Barry Allen. He embodied all the values and methods in the field of philosophy that made for the best work: developing your arguments so that you earned everything you claimed, and thinking with the kind of ambition that led you to original ideas that could progress the field or bring new insights to readers. 

That could make Barry a tough person to work with for some people. If you thought of a project that was more straightforwardly academic – Philosopher X on Concept Y that was well-known in their work and field – he could have trouble working with you because such an academician’s topic didn’t really have much to say. He concentrated on writing about ideas, exploring concepts and seeing what they could do for your thinking, and working out what practical purposes and uses a concept could have. It made him a perfect fit for my own goals: using research throughout many disciplines and traditions to make philosophical points and arguments that were relevant for our own world. For me, that’s the highest and best purpose of philosophical thinking, research, and writing. 

He was also a very supportive mentor and guide in thinking, research, and writing. He always treated you as an equal, and there was no sense of an academician’s hierarchy or will to rank about him. Maybe that was rooted in his own relatively humble beginnings. He grew up as (quite likely) a pretty nerdy kid in Lethbridge, a town in southern Alberta that has barely over 100,000 people today. 

He was impressive enough in his undergraduate studies (including a published paper in a top journal before even going to grad school) that he jumped straight into the PhD program at Princeton, studying under Richard Rorty. In my view, Barry’s work eventually surpassed Rorty’s in overall quality and creativity. Few people would realize it because Barry never pursued a public profile or media prominence as his old supervisor did. I find Rorty’s work overrated and a little problematic today, but that’s for reasons I’ll talk about another time. 

What I found most impressive about Barry is that his mind was so open to new ideas, new approaches, and to revising his old conclusions. This was a sanctuary in a field of humanities research where disciplinary and methodological divisions quickly ossify and are enforced with a bizarrely disproportionate aggression. 

Here’s my story. I went in to my doctoral studies with the general idea of developing an approach to the philosophy of the environment based on concepts of the world’s integration with our minds, personalities, and perception. Originally, I had thought to build it on the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a primary foundation, but discovering the works of Gilles Deleuze shortly before leaving for McMaster, I found his ideas even more fruitful and detailed to build upon. 

For a long time, Barry had never really understood the works and style of Deleuze, especially his collaborative works with Felix Guattari that were the most famous. But shortly before I arrived, he was developing a new appreciation for Deleuze, after digging into his historical works. It was a rare decision for someone working in university philosophy departments to say that their longtime dismissal of a figure in the field was mistaken and that there was actually a lot worth thinking about in them. 

It’s a sign of humility, open-mindedness, and remarkable integrity that is rare in the philosophical community that exists in university departments under that name. 

When someone who’s written books has left us, we can still hang out with them when we read their work. I’ve read some of Barry’s books, but not all of them. Here’s a list of his major works not behind a research journal’s paywall. Where I’ve read them, I’ll tell you what I think. Where I haven’t I’ll say what seems cool about them. 

Truth in Philosophy (1993). Barry’s first book, which I haven’t read, that explores the different conceptions of truth throughout the history of the Western tradition. The hook is that his inquiry questions the value of caring about truth itself in the first place, which most thinkers in the Western tradition take for granted and never question. 

Knowledge and Civilization (2003). I have read this book, and the vectors in this show a great conceptual convergence with where my own thinking was in the early 2010s. That he could write this is why he was such a good doctoral supervisor for me. He describes an approach to knowledge as being about success in practice and practical goals, rather than the popular concept in Western philosophy of learning truths and memorizing facts. 

Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008). I haven’t read this, but what’s really interesting about it is how it carries forward the ideas in Knowledge and Civilization into a more focussed look at technology and engineering. I’m not sure that anyone else has really built a philosophy of engineering in this way. 

Vanishing Into Things: Knowledge in the Chinese Tradition (2015). While I was working with him on my own work, Barry was also studying the Chinese philosophical traditions, and this was the eventual result. It explores the conceptions of knowledge in Chinese and wider Asian philosophies, as it first developed from its fertile beginning in Shandong 2500 years ago. That concept of knowledge focusses on ethics and practice, and can be an important corrective and alternative voice to the Western tradition that still focusses too exclusively on correspondence and truth. 

Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts (2015). Probably the book that was closest to Barry’s own life, which he never revealed to anyone except for a very narrow circle of people. He was quite advanced in hapkido, and applied much of his research in East Asian philosophy to the aesthetics and ethics of martial arts practice. 

Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene (2020). Barry’s longest title and most sweeping historical study, exploring what empiricism means as a philosophical approach to knowledge and existence. 

Living In Time: The Philosophy of Henri Bergson (2023). Exploring Deleuze led Barry to a fascinating figure in the history of philosophy, Henri Bergson. I sat in on a seminar he taught late in my time at McMaster on Bergson’s works and philosophy, and this book explores what Barry found most interesting about those ideas, particularly the ontology of time as the experience of change itself. I haven’t read this yet, but it’s another instance of Barry’s open mind to reconsider thinkers that he may once have dismissed.

It’s something of a truism that a good teacher makes a unique impact on a lot of the people they taught. And that’s true, but it’s kind of abstract. It’s difficult to know what your legacy was through those impacts. Students appear in a teacher’s life, may be a significant presence for a couple or a few years, then disappear in a blink. I’ve felt that with many of my students over the years, especially at my last teaching job where I was working for several years. 

I’d meet students at the beginning of the program, and they’d seek out my courses again. Even though I was teaching the same course as several of my colleagues, they’d come to me because they thought my perspective and my style delivered that content better than anyone else. It was definitely the same with Barry, who always brought a unique perspective and a focussed dedication to his courses, even when he taught the introductory courses that all his colleagues found dull and tried to avoid.

In graduate school in the humanities, no one expects you to have a career other than becoming a professor. Quite a few of Barry’s graduate students did go on to that route, and they’re very good at it. Others, who were just as talented, happened not to be so fortunate. 

I didn’t contact Barry much after I left McMaster because my career was so rocky. It took me several years to find consistent teaching work, and when I did, it was in a sector of higher education that had many institutional and cultural problems of its own, in a position that was far removed from the prestigious world of the university humanities. I felt awkward and embarrassed that my career in higher education never lived up to the promise that my colleagues and professors saw, or the ambitions that I had for myself when I finished my doctorate 13 years ago. 

Literally. My PhD defence session happened 13 years ago the same week we lost Barry. I left feeling proud of my accomplishment, but also deflated, because I had no teaching position, no research grants, nothing to support the next phase of a career in humanities or social science research, collaboration, and publishing. Now, I’m starting my next step in my career into the business sector, turning to learning/development and instructional design, while I continue trying to build a public profile as a fiction and philosophical author. I’ll likely never teach in a university at all. 

I know, rationally, that it wouldn’t have mattered to him. He would have been most concerned about whether I was happy with my life, which I generally am. But I haven’t achieved what I wanted to achieve, and I haven’t achieved much that has lasted in a lot of my career. I feel embarrassed about that, and it makes me feel awkward about stepping back into those worlds and returning to those relationships. 

Yet there isn’t very much time to wait, is there?