This lecture, linked from xenogothic, has been vindicating for me, having just graduated from an American university’s undergraduate program in philosophy.
Loving philosophy, as I’ve experienced it in movements of thought my entire life, is much like loving artistic production. It sort of sucks. It’s incredibly demanding and inspires the darkest of reflexive criticisms. Both require a cultivation of inquietude and then eventual vomit of the cycles of thought said inquietude took you through.
In working my way through the program, steeped in analytic philosophy (which is the primary focus of most American institutions and is marked by increasing specialization and technical methodology), I realized the way the academy thinks of philosophy is much different than any standard definitions emergent in the “real” world. Students are asked to engage with the history of philosophy not by considering those perennial questions associated with pop philosophy (“What’s the meaning of life? How should I behave?”) in broad sweeps, but by narrowing essay topics down to sharp critiques of a specific argument. As a method of training, I think it’s quite effective in passing on the ability to coherently elucidate complex ideas or paraphrase arguments — certainly moreso than a program teaching 18 to 22 year olds how to write like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard would.
It is also effective in draining the enervating and terrifying from philosophy. For the undergraduate, philosophy becomes a slog of reading essays to suss out access points for a 1200-word argumentative response.
It also makes me feel stupid. Binders filled with printed essays built out of meticulous arguments, numbered and indented, make my own fragmented thoughts feel worthless. And, admittedly, I lack a hardcore analytic faculty that permits me to consider minutiae and seal it airtight in nuanced argument. I’d rather write gestating ideas in the moment they’re happening, inspiring further thought or revealing something of the way thought itself is working in me. It’s all vomit anyway.
Schiller wrote to Goethe saying: “the poetic mind generally got the better of me when I ought to have philosophized, and my philosophical spirit when I wanted to be a poet. Even now it happens frequently enough that imagination interferes with my abstractions, and cold intellect with my poetry.”
The poetic mind certainly was quelled in the philosophy classroom. But that’s okay. I didn’t take comparative literature. Nonetheless, I still like philosophy and would like to continue doing it, whether I’m writing on a blog or journaling for myself.
But what does that look like? Here’s what Robin Mackay says in the lecture:
How can a fascination with philosophy and a conviction of its importance cohabit with a revulsion for that insular academic game of philosophy that’s happy, content or even proud to have no contact with the living room and is comfortable with its status as a specialized discipline.
The living room refers to the space people like me developed in; that is, immersed in pop culture products as they come through internet memes, fantasy novels, Steam games, etc. These things, I think, are important to philosophy, even if they are not formalized as such. They provide access points of their own into understanding what we enjoy, how we think, what we can create, and why we do — questions that certainly belong in a philosophy classroom.
I guess my kind of philosophy looks like blogs (or maybe tweeted aphorisms). Blogs that intellectually scrutinize the things I love. Blogs that occasionally cite the works of philosophers and theorists I read and, more importantly, link to people I find doing the same sort of thing.