| General |
There's an old joke about the man who polished the cannon
in front of city hall. Tired of working for a plodding
bureaucracy, the enterprising employee bought a cannon with
his savings and went into business for himself.
Every would-be philosopher has to figure out how you
can make a living doing philosophy, and philosophizing is
a little like cannon polishing: there's not much of a market
for it. For as long as it has existed, philosophers have
faced the problem of finding perches in the economies and societies
in which they have lived.
Philosophers have been college teachers for long
enough that, if you say you're a philosopher,
most people just assume that you're a professor, or trying
to become one. But in historical perspective that's
a recent development, and the business of being paid
to teach college students is becoming a less hospitable
and less suitable perch. And it is likely to become a
much less available one shortly. Philosophers may
soon have to look for a new way to get by.
Let me explain that "less suitable". Once upon a time,
taking on the role of a college teacher wasn't too bad for
someone who was really a philosopher in disguise.
Teaching took, oh, fifteen or so hours
a week, and administrative overhead was low. So if one
didn't mind living in genteel poverty, one could have the
remainder of one's waking hours to do whatever it is that
philosophers do.
However, it's next to impossible for our institutions
to say no to the next piece
of procedure (another committee, another kind of report to
be written and filed away...), and so, over time,
the administrative load has grown; it now takes up all the
time that teaching leaves over, and then some. A reasonably
responsible professor no longer lives in genteel poverty,
but he or she works 60 hour weeks, and that's before
getting to actual research.
That's bad enough, but there's worse. The institutions that
employ college teachers have incentives to require ever
greater professionalization of their faculty. They track
'productivity': rates of publication, conferences attended,
national and international recognition -- and, now in the
humanities, they're starting to track grantsmanship.
The problem is that philosophy is not a profession, but rather,
its very opposite. A profession takes the rules and standards
and aims of a guild for granted; the defining moment of philosophy
was Socrates buttonholing guild members on the street and insisting
that they account for themselves.
'Professional philosophy' is an oxymoron: when you're being
professional, you're not being a philosopher; when you're busy
publishing, you're not being a philosopher; when you're out at
conferences, drumming up recognition, you're not being a philosopher.
(Not sure what I mean?
Just imagine what Wittgenstein's 'productivity' would have
looked like to a contemporary tenure committee.
--In fact, this is a tricky point, because in many ways philosophy
itself feels like a techne, but one in which the rules are
themselves up for grabs, and thus one in which an argument
assembled, say, solely to occupy an unoccupied spot in the space of
positions, and thus to get tenure, counts as a finger exercise,
but not as a genuine product of the craft.)
Some people do negotiate the tension, and somehow
manage to fold together the conflicting forms of activity into
a single life. But most philosophy professors eventually
give up the aspiration to philosophy, and end up settling
for professional.
Still worse, the activities are incompatible in a further
way, which I will mention only briefly. Philosophy requires
honesty; that's one of the reasons it's so very hard.
Administration and professionalism require dishonesty.
(Not sure what I mean? Think about letters of recommendation,
or more generally about the sort of optimism in assessment
that one learns to adopt in administrative records, or
about the ways one treats professionally accepted performance
metrics as reference points, whether one thinks they're any
good or not.)
The second tends to corrupt and undercut the first.
Proceeding now to "less available":
The perch, suitable or not, is in any case liable to vanish of
its own accord. Higher education today is unsustainably
hypertrophied. Partly because the general public
treats education as a positional good
(i.e., you win by having more of it than the next person over,
which gets you arms races), and partly because it's hard to measure
(you can measure years in school, but it's very hard to measure
education), there's been ever-increasing demand for
schooling, and governments have been unable to say no. As
each certification is devalued in its turn, people stay longer
in school to get the next certification.
Once a high school diploma was enough to get you a decent job, but
it's now worth almost nothing. So everyone has to go to college.
But letting everyone into college devalued college degrees, too,
and now more and more people go on to some form of graduate school.
At this point it's routine for people to spend sixteen to twenty
years of their lives in school, with very little to show for it.
This enormous waste of social resources is unlikely to be supportable
over the long term.
So it's time for philosophers to look around and think about
what other perches they might move to. It's worth remembering
that philosophers haven't always been schoolteachers. They've
taken day jobs; for most of his adult life, John Stuart Mill
was a colonial administrator. They've been independently
wealthy (alright, not necessarily an option for many of us).
They've been independently not-so-wealthy; Nietzsche did his
most important work living on a meagre disability pension.
They've been employed by churches, both as clergy and as
theoreticians. On occasion, they've supported themselves
as popular authors (Bertrand Russell). And sometimes, nowadays,
they set up a practice.
If Martha Nussbaum's The Therapy of Desire is to be
believed (but I don't know the history for myself), back
in Hellenistic times, philosophers used to work in
the self-help industry. Philosophers weren't academics
as we now know them; instead, they ran institutions that
had much more of the look and feel of Esalen. If you were
bent out of shape about something, you could go to a Stoic,
who would try to convince you that nothing was worth being
bent out of shape over; or you could go to a skeptic, who
would try to teach you how to suspend belief in whatever was
bending you out of shape; or to an Epicurean, who would teach
you how to be happy on bread, water, and a little cheese...
Looking over the shelves in a chain bookstore,
it's tempting to think that if philosophers reentered the
self-help business, it would be to everybody's benefit.
At least they might make it more intellectually respectable than
it now is.
I don't know that any of the options I've surveyed are going to
make a satisfactory perch for the next, or the next-but-one,
generation of philosophers. But I'm pretty sure it's time to
take a thoughtful and inventive look at these and other options.
The current perch won't do for much longer.
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