“I am a professional philosopher of religion who specializes in existentialism and phenomenology.”
Annnnnnnnnnd, that, my friends is how you get people to leave you alone on airplanes, busses, coffee shops, and pretty much anywhere else that small talk often leads to longer conversations than you might otherwise be interested in having.
Ha!
I am being facetious, but there is a serious point buried in here that I actually want to think about a bit with you today.
Very few people are neuroscientists. Similarly, very few people hold strong views on brain chemistry and physiology.
Very few people are quantum physicists. Similarly, very few people hold strong views on subatomic particles and the paradoxical dynamics of black holes.
It might seem reasonable, then, to conclude that a narrow intellectual specialty would be proportional to the general number of people who hold strong beliefs about the content area of that specialty.
However, there are some important counter-examples to this trend.
For example, even though there are, relatively speaking, few musicians who can play at a professional level, almost everyone holds strong views about music and what counts as good or bad examples of it.
Although the example of music is fairly innocuous - there doesn’t seem to be much social harm that comes from disagreement about musical preferences (although I do think that trap music, most boy-bands, and all nationalist-leaning country music degrade our shared humanity!). I should note that a friend of mine, Thomas Moore, continues to try to get me to appreciate K-Pop, and many, many of my intellectual-too-cool-for-craft-beer-friends continue to think I am absolutely nuts for not liking Radiohead, I remain unconvinced on both fronts.
Sure, fan loyalty can run deep (have you ever tried to argue with a Slayer fan??!!!), but typically such disagreements do not lead to general social unrest or a degradation of democratic coherence.
Oh, and just because I can’t imagine any other time I will get to share this photo that I took of a bumper sticker on a Porsche in Snowshoe West Virginia, I offer you this (if there is some deeper meaning that I am missing, please let me know, but I just thought it was pretty fantastic at the very shallow level at which I am interpreting it, ha!):
That said, when it comes to other areas in which there are few professionals and yet almost everyone holds strong views about the content area such disagreements can have much, much more serious consequences for our social functioning and even personal wellbeing. And this is especially the case when we are so very bad at navigating disagreements in responsible ways.
The area I am thinking about is philosophy (though we could obviously add religious studies, political theory, public health, and epidemiology to the list but that would take us too far afield here).
Now look, my claim is NOT that academic study is required for thinking well about philosophy and philosophical topics. To borrow a bit from Indigo Montoya (from The Princess Bride), I have known too many academics to think that a Ph.D. guarantees wisdom (heck, it probably doesn’t even make it more likely!).
However, what long, patient, and in-depth study in a particular field does provide is an awareness of the non-obviousness of almost all the views found so vociferously held within social spaces. In other words, being a philosopher of religion doesn’t make me right about “religion” (or related concepts such as “God,” the “divine,” or “faith”), but it does make me deeply aware of the range of views that very, very smart people have substantively defended in the historical debates that have shaped the field. And, as a result, it makes me more likely to be receptive to objections and invested in good reasons for where I decide to stand (in light of the fact that there are other reasonable places I could stand).
For the sake of easy reference, let’s term this awareness “hermeneutic charity.”
The idea is that when we realize that precious little is obvious or necessary, then we are more likely to show hospitality to the arguments given for views that might initially strike us as problematic. Showing such charity to those views that one does not personally accept is an incredibly important facet of not just intellectual life, but also of democratic society - or so I want to suggest - because only if we care more about truth than our own status or sense of being right can we then rightly oppose those views that are genuinely socially harmful, those claims that are evidentially provable as false, and those people who position themselves as deserving of power when they do nothing but deploy power to minimize critical reflection.
Think of it this way, democracy is something of an ideal toward which we strive as a community. As the political philosopher, Robert Talisse, puts it, it is an ideal that is marked by the notion of self-governance. Here is a link to his book on the topic.
Notice, though, that such self-governance can quickly slide from a communal task to a dangerous form of power-loving egoism such that individualism and self-protective beliefs are allowed to go unchecked. It is for this reason, for what it is worth, that Plato was no fan of democracy. He contends that democracy will almost inevitably slide into tyranny due to the way in which self-governance will become self-interest and social responsibility will give way to the vulgar workings of power.
Well, Plato’s worries not withstanding, if we are sympathetic to Talisse’s account, which I am, then it is easy to see that one of the expectations we have to have of each other is not only moral equality, but epistemic conscientiousness. That is, we need to believe that for the most part folks are not only moral, but reasonable.
Although Descartes noted that common sense was far from being common, in contemporary society it is often the case that disagreement is sufficient evidence that someone is immoral or unreasonable. If they don’t agree with me/us, then they are clearly deficient in some important way such that they are no longer worthy of serious engagement.
But notice that this assumption and the conclusion that so quickly results from it, actually serve to just foster increased polarization, division, and animosity. Rather than being committed to reason-giving as part of our shared social task, we see engaging in argumentative discourse with those with whom we disagree as actually a corrupting influence that is better avoided.
It is here that I think understanding hermeneutic charity as a profoundly under-appreciated social virtue really begins to bite.
Nothing I have said should be understood as encouraging everyone to go to graduate school. That would actually probably be pretty awful as a social reality. But, I do think that a better social awareness of hermeneutic charity as a social good is something that we must find ways to highlight. And, it is in this task that I find philosophy to be so very helpful.
Philosophers put question marks where most people else puts periods. They take seriously what most people take for granted.
But, as Henry David Thoreau said long ago, “there are, nowadays, professors of philosophy, but no philosophers.”
His point is quite close to my own. He is not calling for more “academics.” He is calling for reflective awareness, hermeneutic charity, and evidential nuance to be more prominent in our society.
We often hear about the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship today (and colleges are doing all they can to run in that direction), but notice that innovation without reflective judgment can be disastrous (just watch the film Oppenheimer to see an example of how power and fear can quickly override responsible inquiry). Additionally, entrepreneurship without a sense of the plurality of value theories that might be deployed to guide such “entrepreneurial mindsets,” entrepreneurs can lose all mooring in social obligations.
So, with Thoreau’s lament in mind, and Plato’s warning about tyranny in clear view, how might we begin to foster such awareness? How might we pull back from the road to perdition that our society seems so intent on walking?
Well, even though I don’t want everyone to go get Ph.D.’s in philosophy (and that is not because I am an elitist about academic identity, but because I have such a high view of the social importance of so very many other areas of expertise and vocational identity), I do want to highlight the importance of finding ways to foster hermeneutic charity as a skill/value on display regardless of one’s career or social position. I think that professional philosophers are distinctively (though not uniquely - again I think the humanities, more broadly, could just as easily be discussed here) positioned to provide such training and to cultivate such habits of epistemically responsible people.
Given that a stable social and cultural context is crucial for business success and revenue projections, you might think that college administrators (and the corporate leaders who so often make up the boards of universities) would be the biggest advocates of humanistic education not just at the college level, but extending all the way down to primary school. As the Bible says somewhere, and Aristotle also understood so deeply, train kids right and they will become adults who are likely to remain committed to what matters.
But we are NOT seeing administrators and business leaders rallying behind philosophy (again, think humanities more broadly). Instead, they are far too often gutting humanities programs and eliminating philosophy departments. Doing so is anchored, I believe, in three errors:
An extremely short-sighted conception of revenue as the only guide for action.
A logic of scarcity that breeds a sense of false competition between those disciplines that perceived to “lead to jobs” and those disciplines that are perceived as “useless.”
A self-protective attempt to reflect broader culture, rather than a courageous commitment to shape that culture.
When these three errors become widespread among those people ostensibly charged with the responsible cultivation of hermeneutic charity as a social norm, then the only ones who benefit are those who are threatened by complexity and nuance.
Power seeks to breed complacency. In contrast, hermeneutic charity makes it exceptionally difficult to be complacent in one’s views, one’s beliefs, one’s actions, and one’s conception of those who see things differently.
Conspiracy theories require fear to motivate one’s beliefs, not reason.
Division needs it to be obvious that “they” are not only wrong, but dangerous.
The status quo is reinforced when those who encourage question marks are silenced.
These three facets are extremely common in our current world:
Interestingly, this is not a new story. Socrates was put to death by the power-structure of his own society, thankfully that is not what is being proposed by the administrators seeking to “increase revenue” by cutting philosophy departments. However, he was actively perceived as dangerous, which he was!
Thinking well is always dangerous to those who want to foster a fear-based slide to tyranny.
But today the narrative has shifted in a far more insidious direction. Philosophers are not seen as dangerous, but as irrelevant.
It is here that we should return to the point at the beginning. I think it is precisely due to the fact that everyone holds strong views about the content areas in which philosophers are interested that philosophers are seen as unnecessary. As I was recently told by someone on Facebook, “The Bible is clear, I don’t care what any professor says about it.”
Hmmmm.
So, I should note that my comment that motivated this response was simply to encourage people to be a bit more wary of claiming things to be obvious when those who had devoted their lives to studying those things were deeply divided on the best way to make sense of them.
Pay attention, though, to the fact that the person’s claim reflects a much broader social set of priorities: We don’t need philosophers (or humanists of whatever sort) because we already have things figured out.
Sure, the complacency of that person on Facebook is less rhetorically precise than that of so many college administrators and the well positioned alumni, politicians, and parents, but it is the same phenomenon nonetheless. If the only value is revenue, the only goal is success, the only logic is economic, and the only task is to remain in power, then yeah philosophers are dangerous if you allow them to have audiences (like classrooms). Not, it should be noted, because they are indoctrinating their students with their own views, but because they are encouraging their students to develop hermeneutic charity.
Reminding people that things could be otherwise is the first step, but the second is to develop in them the habits of hermeneutic charity so that their vision of how things should be can be weighed and considered by all those who participate in the self-governing ideal that is our democratic society.
Recently the Chancellor of UNC Asheville has proposed eliminating the philosophy department there. There is now a letter writing campaign going on to try to encourage the administration there to change its decision on this front. You can find out more here about that situation and also the article gives a link to the campaign (I encourage you to take five minutes and add your letter to the throng already doing so).
Yes, sometimes difficult financial decisions have to be made, but we must be very very careful that finances are not allowed to override our epistemic obligations to each other. What happens at UNCA is about much more than the future of those few faculty. It is a microcosm of a broader social tragedy.
But, things can be otherwise. Very little is obvious. We can listen to those we so readily dismiss and begin to lean into the value of philosophy as a life-giving resource to social flourishing.
Or, we can continue to think that the “Bible is clear” because we actively resist hearing objections to our interpretation of it, that the profit and loss sheet is the standard of meaning, and that the disciplines worth supporting are only those that foster complacency rather than challenging it.
Thoreau might be right that there are no philosophers today, but if there are no professors of philosophy tomorrow, then we all may realize (far too late) that Socrates was only dangerous to that which was actually truly deadly.
In what ways do you see the humanities (and philosophy specifically) to be socially relevant? How can we shift the cultural priorities that are threatening to move us further into division and closer to tyranny?
Please share this post with your friends (and even your enemies).