Philosophy and Practical Interests
What role should academic philosophers have in changing the world?
Many academics seem to feel strongly that it is good for the field that it remain decoupled from the sort of āground-levelā concerns of practical life. I suspect itās rooted in some kind of Platonic idealism (not in the metaphysical sense, though pun intended) about Socrates and paying attention to universal capital-T truth. This is a pretty boring provenance hypothesis, as far as it goes, but I think itās basically the explanation for why this idea continues to reproduce itself in academic philosophy.
I also think itās false. Consider the following two views:
Intellectualism: Philosophers ought to avoid engaging in political or social activism unless absolutely necessary.
Activism: Philosophers ought to pursue engagement with political or social activism whenever possible.
Ignoring for the moment both pluralism (both views can be endorsed by different parties) and centrism (philosophers ought to engage in a moderate amount of activism), I want to try and understand why someone might endorse intellectualism and then argue my case for activism.
I think the most obvious reason in favor of intellectualism is that activism takes time away from distinctly philosophical pursuits. In short, it wastes valuable time. This position seems to assume that philosophical pursuits and activist pursuits are both distinct and unassociated (both of which I think are false), but I think principally itās the unassociated part that is most important. If philosophy can get done without interference from the kinds of issues activists care about, then philosophers should get on doing philosophy and stop wasting time on activism.
It seems clear to me that philosophy canāt get done without interference from the kinds of issues activists care about. People do philosophy in institutions. People and institutions are both effected to an enormous degree by civil rights, climate change, public distrust in science and medicine, and so on.
Another argument is that philosophers arenāt equipped to do activism well, and so they should leave it to the experts. A related argument is that social and political norms being defended by activists change rapidly and philosophers should avoid being wrong in public. To the first, I think the conditional premise is false. Even if philosophers arenāt the best at activism it doesnāt follow that they should avoid it. Plenty of people ought to do things they arenāt very good at and, taken to its full generalization, this kind of premise prohibits all of us from doing anything we arenāt immediately preternaturally great at. To the second, I think the atomic premise is false. Philosophers should try to be wrong in public as much as possible. One of the things that weāre best equipped for and yet do very seldom is try to be wrong very often.
Again, the model of Socrates via Plato here I think is partly to blame. Socrates says he knows nothing and yet spends his time demonstrating to others that they donāt know anything. Even if this is just his peculiar rhetorical strategy, it wouldāve been better had our paragon philosopher had spent more of his time being wrong himself.
So, why should philosophers spend their time as activists? I think thereās a straightforward pragmatic reason; namely, academic philosophy as itās currently practiced depends on a great deal of institutional support to persist. Itās in our material interests to defend many of the ways society is organized against attacks. (Of course, I think that much of the institution of academic philosophy is worth abandoning as a part of large scale revolutionary change.) The moral reason, as I see it, for philosophers in particular to engage in activism is that the training philosophers receive makes them particularly suited to conceptual and inferential organizing. We are supposed to be good at seeing our way through to the structures of things. Being able to see general structures is an extremely valuable tool in identifying oppressive social hierarchies, power relations, and the ways that language shapes our thoughts. Itās unfortunate that for the most part philosophers are taught to apply these skills to neoliberal capitalism, or heteronormative patriarchy, or to colonialism, and so on. Why arenāt they? I think this has a pretty clear answer, but Iāll leave that open for another discussion.
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