The Problem with Public Intellectuals

Public intellectuals have a habit of presenting a false consensus. This is not a dig at the kinds of people who become public intellectuals; it's a problem with the way public intellectualism works.

Allow me to incriminate myself...


If I was to lecture you on the topic of moral philosophy for an hour then you may very well come away with the impression that moral rights, both natural and constructivist, are ridiculous. If however, you put an equally skilled defender of moral rights next to me you might come away with a somewhat more nuanced opinion. At the very least you wouldn't be led to believe that only fools and An-Caps trust in moral rights.

Managed by an intermediatary, any relationship between information and the public is open to abuse. Sometimes it can manifest as overt abuses that result from the intermediary refusing to acknowledge an argument, position or fact or sometimes as the more casual failure to give due credence to one's opponents. Such a problem is endemic to our culture of public intellectualism and is a good reason for seeking alternative methods of public education.

In my perfect world, universities, schools and the media would work to make the term "public intellectual" obsolete . To that effect, the training of academics in press relations and making more journals accessible to more people would be great steps forwards (though the latter probably isn't going to happen anytime soon). Offering young people educations that properly prepare them for participating in an intellectual culture would also be a fantastic measure to take. While modern educators are pushing for more emphasis on self-reliant learning and critical thinking, we need to cover a more academically practical curriculum.

Teaching young people not just about the subject matter that they are studying but also about how our knowledge of that subject matter is created and disseminated is vital to building an independent academic culture. If one wants to build a society where everyone can benefit from research, watch new developments and foster interests of their own then schools need to teach students these kinds of skillsets. Our educators must provide young people with knowledge about things like journal articles, peer-reviewal and meta-studies; even if people are not at a level where they can comperehend the content they should at least understand how it is produced. We don't expect a child to understand agriculture but we do teach them about where the chicken drumsticks they love come from: why can't we doing the same for science, economics and philosophy?

In closing I will admit that we do already have a rich and varied culture of public intellectuals. There are academics of every stripe bringing the most exciting and important aspects of their respective fields directly to our coffee tables. There is nothing ignoble about that. Indeed there are so many public intellectuals that if you don't like whoever is in vogue then with a little bit of digging you can easily find someone else. The problem is that for the most part, in my experience at least, people don't go digging; people largely engage with academic subjects as passive receptacles and wait to be filled in by public intellectuals. The problem of popularity and its obstruction of the quest for knowledge is nothing new but its effects can be mitigated by encouraging others to take up a more active and intimate relationship with the subjects that interest them. Until we have a pedagogical revolution in the field of public education I suppose the best we can do is recommend books and articles that are not on the best sellers list and diversify our debates. Let's just try not to be too smug when we recommend authors that people have "probably never heard of".

"Why Grow Up?" by Susan Neiman: First Thoughts on Reading

Why Grow Up? touches on a broad range of philosophical issues surrounding adult-hood and argues that we should rethink our, often anxious, relationship with the aging process.

Neiman points to the way in which "growing up" has of late acquired a somewhat morose theme: being assosiated with a state of resignation and a lacking of vitality.

By contrast Neimen portrays maturity as a process of constant tribulation through which we learn not only how to co-exist with a morally flawed world but with how to hold on to the will to change it for the better and master our own failings.

Understanding maturity in this way is meant to push away from the cult of youth. A cult, which as Neimman observes, destroys the lived experience of youthfulness by placing too many expectations on young people and neglects the pleasures that arrive in later life as a result of hard earned self-mastery cultivated through ones accumulative life experiences.

Textually the book picks a refreshing choice of topic and its execution and exploration of it is pretty spectacular in places, although there are a number of rhetorical turns that leave me a little un-certain.

Her particular philosophical heritage, Neo-Kantianism with a dash of Rousseau and Leibniz, leads her to support the older Socratic belief  that rational and just actions are one and the same. This equivocality between the good and the reasonable helps Neiman argue her view of childhood and adolescance but leaves her particularly reliant on a certain form of metaphysics. Then again I suppose certain axiomatic truths must be left temporarily un-challenged in order to enjoy the book. Another argument for another day.

Neiman also has an unfortunate tendency to write in a similar manner to Theodor Zeldin (not a particular favourite of mine). Accordingly the book has a fairly scattergun approach to contextualising its themes, flipping between psychological, philosophical and historical discussions at a fairly disorientating rate. As a consequence the references are, though wielded competently, rather thematically disparate; the result is a book that in places has more literary than thematic flow making the work pleasurable in form and wide-ranging in scope but also bewildering.


Overall it's an interesting little piece drawing attention to various authors and ideas surrounding adult-hood which are often over-looked or easily taken for granted: much more philosophically nuanced and well researched than I was expecting.

Huxley's Brave New World: A Hedonist's Response

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
 
- John the Savage repudiating Mustapha Mond in Brave New World.


There is common comparison made between Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. One that remarks that while Orwell described the authoritarianism of his time, Huxley predicted the "soft-power" at work today. Read in this way the core theme of Brave New World is similar to that of emanicpatory writers like Rousseau: humans are frequently complicit in their own enslavement. This comparison suffers however from a certain level of western-centrism and misses some of the finer details of the dystopia which Huxley created.


Firstly, and a similar point is levelled by Nadya Tolokonnikova against Slavoj Zizek, the notion that modern capitalism controls its subjects through pleasure ignores the sweat-house labour and dictatorial right wing governments that have arguably played a big role in shaping modern global capitalism. Secondly, in Brave New World there is no evidence that humanity willingly gave up its Bibles or poetry; such things are banned and an inescapable system of social conditioning is required to force these artefacts of ancient pleasure into obsolescence. The depravity of the new world's citizens is artificial it is not an organic product of Huxley's subjects and their desires. As a hedonist of sorts,  while I could cry that Huxley's society is the product of authoritarianism and not pleasure seeking humans, that would do Brave New World a dis-service: the book did give me cause to reflect on hedonism and the relationship between pleasure and authenticity.


 The first thing that struck me as of particular philosophical interest was "Soma". Soma is the fictional drug taken by the new world's inhabitants and it functions as a very trenchant iteration of Nozick's experience machine. Unlike Nozick's original machine, soma requires very little in terms of metaphysical "jump": one could liken it to heroin without the side effects. Furthermore soma highlights the escapist tendencies of Brave New World's inhabitants. By taking soma the characters leave the reality which they ostensibly cannot deal with and submit themselves to a realm of pleasure inaccessible to more sober minds. This idea of "pleasure as escapism" may present some problems for a hedonistic outlook and raises questions about the dialectic between "fake pleasure" and "real pleasure".  Are there pleasures that fail to be valuable because they have no relation to objects outside of the subjects experience? Are mind altering substances providing fake happiness or real happiness?  Is a drunk happy to see you or do they merely think that they are in a welcoming mood?


Currently, I see little reason to make a hard distinction between the pleasures that are accrued through synthetic chemical manipulation, such as alcohol or soma based pleasures, and the organic chemical manipulations achieved through sugar, salt or a caressing touch. Furthermore if the thing that scares us about Soma is that it "merely creates pleasure" then what is that missing ingredient that allows us to be satisfied even if we are not enjoying ourselves? Pain? The outlook of John the Savage is rather reminiscent of Seneca: the roman philosopher who believed that suffering and tribulation should be cherished as a source of meaning in an otherwise empty life.

I can empathise with the Senecan position: life would become very boring if one was absolved of all tragedy. This I do not think is necessarily a problem for hedonists as the hedonic treadmill ensures that we will never run out of tribulations to give purpose to our growth. It may be that the reason we want struggle is that it gives context to our successes. We want struggle and heartbreak not because we don't value pleasure but because struggle and heartbreak make our pleasure worthwhile. 

My response to those who raise up Huxley's Brave New World as a warning against hedonism is that its citizens are not really committed hedonists. They are cattle who have been forcefully deprived of a range of pleasures, primarily intellectual ones, and conditioned to accept passivity as a state of enduring desirability.

When it comes to the relationship between pleasure and eudemonia what Brave New World articulates is a critique of lazy infantilization posing as the good life. As I have argued before, empty gluttonous carnality is not the same thing as an ethical and well-disciplined regime of hedonism.

The Trouble with the History of Philosophy

As with any sacred cow found to be defunct in the modern age, there are two extremist tendencies one can tend toward. You can either preserve its life forever as per sentimental faux-superstition or in a fit of capricious rebellion you can send it moo-ing and screeching towards the abattoir of obsolescence. Both are equally distasteful, especially when performed for show.

We will return to this point later.

 

The ancients of philosophy; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle et al have a peculiar relationship with their discipline. They are still considered, by some, relevant to the contemporary practise and study of philosophy.  Although, this is perhaps not as idiosyncratic as I have suggested. Plenty of young Artists and Musicians are required to study Titian and Mozart, despite the fact that almost no cultural pioneer in the 21st Century would dream of reproducing their style in order to "push culture forward". The greats are studied in these fields because they exemplify certain important principles or points in our cultural trajectory that are important for contextualising and understanding our practises today.


This stands in contrast with science which encompasses a range of disciplines few of which feel the need to force students to study ancient scientific literature uniformly rejected or superseded by contemporary scientists.

The key difference between science and philosophy then, which makes their treatment of their intellectual cannon so different, is in the scope of questioning. Science, as a method, in order to pay the meticulous attention to detail that it is known for keeps its set of questions narrow and measurable. This ensures precision, quantifiability and clear grounds of truthfulness and falsifiability for each and every statement made.

Philosophy keeps its remit wide. In fact its very draw to new students is that so long as the question is not empirical, philosophy considers that question to be valid and within the grounds of legitimate philosophical enquiry. This means that philosophy cannot guarantee the precision or prediction of concrete phenomena because it eschews such questioning in order to concern itself with the big picture. Philosophers are obsessed with how we fit concrete phenomenon's into systems of perception and rationalisation; we are not concerned with the shape of the game piece but rather with the form of the board it is being placed on and why.


Accordingly this bigger picture requires a wider grasp of history. While philosophers can and do work on problems that are being encountered and hashed out over the period of decades they also struggle with problems which encompass a huge portion of our mental schemas and accordingly are the product of debates raised raged over centuries. These large underlying mental schemas may be the product of a system of thought or categorisation of life that has been around for hundreds of years and so tracing the lineage of that system and understanding its root causes and relationships benefits from historical contextualisation.

This is why philosophy students sit down with Kant, who has been dead for over 200 years. It's why they recount the cantankerous blathering of Socrates and the musings of Descartes. Philosophy students need to understand that much of our intellectual strata is a product of our time. That does not mean it is relative or that it is wrong. It means that our current theoretical framework is merely one of the many ways in which humans have aimed to understand the world, it is not special... nor are the ways in which humans of the past understood the world.

In saying that...

Modern thinkers have some significant advantages over the philosophers of yore and especially over the ancients. First of all we have the advances of science and technology and this along with the invention of the social sciences has meant that today's theorists, which is really all philosophers are once you strip away their grandiose mystique, have more data to work on than ever before.


Ideas about society, gender or the constitutive parts of the world etc can be constructed with reference to actual data. Today, philosophers trying to make sense of how this world works have the benefit of our accumulated scientific knowledge when creating descriptive theories about concrete phenomena.


The second advantage that we have is that we have a huge head-start. Many of these questions have been discussed for a long time now and our philosophy has only gotten deeper, scientifically accurate and refined.

This is a fact that is often ignored and it often irks me when I see that so much of "pop-philosophy" is sold as an explication of ancient secrets. The problem with this marketing tactic is that it reinforces the public's perception of philosophy as something that hasn't progressed since Ancient Greece.

The truth is, depending on your audience, there is a mountain of modern research that is both thoroughly captivating and lucid enough for the layman to grasp. What's more an emphasis on contemporary philosophical research would work wonders in terms of public education. Both by introducing the public to modern philosophy as it is practised today but also by demonstrating philosophy's ever changing and fast paced nature.

To return to the theme of my opening paragraph, this is why I think the likes of Socrates and Kant provide a particularly difficult heritage to manage when it comes to PR.


On the one hand we need to avoid dwelling in the past. The likes of Alain de Botton do nothing but stultify the public's perception of philosophy while appealing only to those pompous and sycophantic fools who seem to think that every question asked in philosophy requires an obligatory homage to dead Greeks.


Alternatively our historical icons are worth acknowledging even if only for the pragmatics of delineating the roots of modern thought and contextualising contemporary debate. To cast the history of philosophy aside in the hope of acquiring some pretence to youthfulness by embracing an edgy irreverence towards anyone who doesn't or didn't own a smart phone would be simple un-cultured idiocy, even if it did work (and it probably wouldn't).