The Failure That Is Academic Philosophy

And exactly where it all went wrong

By MARTIN REZNY

Do you know what’s the easiest way to identify that someone is doing philosophy wrong? Ask them what their philosophy is (as in, their approach to living a life), and if their work that they call “philosophy” cannot serve as a proper answer to this question, then, well, they’re doing it wrong.

Of course, there can be an endless debate about this, and there is one, but it is inarguable that the way in which philosophy started was as an attempt to figure out how to best live a life. Especially the ancient Greek thinkers focused on figuring out personal virtues and just social orders, and the eastern philosophies have arguably never abandoned this approach.

If you’re wondering when and how that changed, according to Wes Cecil, we can all blame Immanuel Kant and his interminable, overcomplicated, and borderline ungrammatical writing style, which actually reads much better in translation. Consider this example from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which is one of the top 5 philosophy’s longest sentences:

“Just as for the cognition of an object distinct from me I also need an intuition in addition to the thinking of an object in general (in the category), through which I determine that general concepts, so for the cognition of myself I also need an addition to the consciousness, or in addition to that which I think myself, an intuition of the manifold in me, through which I determine this thought; and I exist as an intelligence that is merely conscious of its faculty for combination but which, in regard to the manifold that is to combine, is subject to a limiting condition that it calls inner sense, which can make that combination intuitable only in accordance with temporal relations that lie entirely outside of the concepts of the understanding proper, and that can therefore still cognize itself merely as it appears to itself with regard to an intuition (which is not intellectual and capable of being given through the understanding itself), not as it would cognize itself if its intuitions were intellectual.”

That’s 174 words. Now imagine you’re reading a whole book of this in the original German. Longer sentences can be found in the works of other authors, including Aristotle (188) and Locke (309), but what for others is an exception, for Kant is the rule. Not to mention that even at the longer length, these two examples are infinitely more readable than Kant because the other authors employ (gasp) lyrical devices and logical sequences.

This is likely the origin of the persistent academic delusion that the harder it is to understand one’s writing, the more genius it’s got to be. And if you’re already writing in a way that’s nearly impossible to read, as a tenured academician entirely removed from anything a normal person would call life, why focus on actual life as a subject matter? How plebeian would that be.

Compare this snobbish idea of who a philosopher is and how they live and communicate to, say, Diogenes, who lived semi-naked in a barrel, pulling stunts to troll reputable philosophers while publicly masturbating. Admittedly, Diogenes does represent an extreme, but what’s important is that he not only made his life’s work about criticizing the tendency of philosophers to elevate themselves above the unwashed masses, he lived it.

That’s what made it powerful and last throughout the ages. How does one live metametaphysics? As in every other field, there is a place for theory, a great deal more in philosophy compared to other fields, but in the service of what is it being explored? If the answer is in the service of more theoretical concerns, then again, you’re doing philosophy wrong.

To be fair, there are modern philosophers who decided to communicate their philosophy in an approachable way to anyone willing to listen. At their own peril. A good example of that is Walter Kaufman, according to Wes Cecil, who essentially rehabilitated and popularized the work of Friedrich Nietzsche after WW2, but who have done so at the cost of further academic recognition and career advancement. Back then, it was essentially a cardinal sin to attempt to speak plainly as a professional philosopher.

I consider myself fortunate that the academic education in philosophy that I got was specifically in political philosophy, which cannot avoid the issue of how a philosophy is being applied to affect people’s lives. But even so, the wrongness of modern academic philosophy starts with how it’s being taught — read and memorize what a list of preferred authors from the past had said and discuss that. As opposed to engaging with your peers in a live debate, which is how the whole thing only started, so why bother with that.

Consequently, the best education I ever got in philosophy was already in high school, where I’ve spent five years participating at debating competitions. Sure, not everyone actually learns the necessary mental tools or ethical precepts from such an activity, just look at the great debater Ted Cruz. However, debating taught me that people are allowed to have original thoughts and that the best ideas can come from absolutely anyone’s mind.

At the risk of sounding disrespectful, arrogant, and audacious, who cares what Kant said? Or what Plato said? Or Nietzsche? Modern academic philosophers often say that all of philosophy are only footnotes to Plato, as if it was funny rather than depressing, but who’s fault is that? Why must every philosopher start from what those people believed and debated?

It seems innocuous and sensible to start from the basics, but we’re not talking about elements or forces which exist regardless of what we think of them, we’re talking about speculations of a bunch of dudes. Education like this primes thinking, narrows it down to a preconceived set of problems and potential solutions. Anything that those people didn’t care about or consider is therefore progressively harder to care about and consider.

This is why philosophy is such a man’s world — it started with a few men. Possibly pretty great men, but on balance pretty misogynistic ones, too. What if the one who originally considered how a society should be governed was a woman? What would we be debating two thousand years later, then? What if you started from a person who lived his whole life in a computerized world and knows not what came before? After all, Socrates didn’t need a precedent or permission. The truth is, we can all be Socrates.

Let’s be Socrates.