Philosophy in the 21 st Century: A Plea for Generalism This is a slightly revised version of an essay presented at the conference Philosophy in the 21 st Century at the University of Pittsburgh, 19 May 2012. In this presentation I want to offer some broad observations about the current state of academic philosophy in the Western world, and to argue that work on both sides of the continental/ analytic divide could benefit from a renewed emphasis on generalism in philosophy. This is not intended as a polemic, but as an honest assessment by one philosopher admittedly young and new to professional academic philosophy of the status of the discipline, and as a first rallying cry for a fairly simple change in the way we think of our work. In the hopes of fostering a lively and inclusive discussion, my talk will be informal in tone and assume no specialized philosophical knowledge. What follows is an attempt to address the geography of the discipline as a whole. I. I use the term generalism in contrast to what seem to me to be some problematic but all-too-commonlyheld notions of pluralism in the profession today. I do not mean to imply that all conceptions of pluralism are suspect, or that there is not merit to pluralist conceptions of philosophy or of any other discipline. For my purposes here, however, to advocate mere pluralism in philosophy means to advocate for a wide diversity of stylistic, topical, and methodological approaches to studying philosophy, for the sake of that diversity itself, and without further concern for the meaning or coherence of the discipline as a whole. While pluralism rightly insists on the need for a variety of philosophical interests, methods and approaches, the mere pluralist all too often sees her own role exclusively in terms of providing usually in admirable depth, complexity, and detail the answers to a small subset of philosophical problems germane to her own area of inquiry and her inherited conception of philosophical practice. The pluralist's great faith in the diversity of philosophical thought too often leads her to assume that all other philosophers undertake a parallel enterprise within their own narrow specializations, and that 1
the sum total of these different individual enterprises represents an acceptably diverse if internally incoherent definition of philosophy. Generalism, by contrast, while not neglecting the specific foci of one's philosophical training and field(s) of specialization, is marked by its insistence that the question of the relation between different approaches to philosophical methods or problems, the question of the interrelation between the different sorts of problems philosophers address, and the question of what does or should constitute a philosophical problem, should themselves be considered important motivations in the background of all philosophical research, and valuable goals for education and dialogue in the profession. In this sense, while generalism also promotes valuing and appreciating diverse forms of inquiry in the profession, it refuses to advocate diversity in philosophical approaches simply for its own sake. It does not support a variety of viewpoints simply because more is always better, but because of a genuine desire to contribute to the project of understanding the status and role of the discipline as a whole, a whole which, it is hoped, can be more than the sum of its ill-fitting and highly argumentative parts. Advocating a renewal of generalism in philosophy does not entail the insistence that philosophers working in different sub-fields and traditions need agree on the status of the field as a whole, or on the question of progress in philosophy, or about philosophy's relation to other disciplines in the academy or to more general social, scientific and cultural concerns. But it does mean that philosophers must incorporate into their own philosophical practice the question of its relation to other ways of philosophizing. This will involve approaching alien conceptions of philosophy and philosophical practice with a principle of charity, treating them first and foremost as different and potentially informative perspectives on the same amorphous set of issues, and not as wrongheaded approaches to be dismissed on the grounds of one's own presuppositions about the discipline or as competing theories of philosophy to simply be disproved. This plea for generalism is a response to what I take to be the less-than-desirable current state of the discipline. The notion of coherence within academic philosophy has become humorous at best. Even the so-called main branches of Western philosophy in the 20 th century, the continental and the 2
analytic, have little or no internal coherence, and one is hard pressed to find a line of demarcation between them acceptable to all involved. But the problem is not that our inquiries, methods, and styles have become too diverse; the problem is that for too long that diversity has been pursued with a wanton lack of concern for the general whole. The story of continental and analytic philosophy in at least the second half of the 20 th century has been one of assumed increasing distance, on the basis of increasingly inaccurate characterizations of the other type of philosophy, such that the standard characterizations of analytic philosophy tacitly accepted by and often actively inculcated into students and young faculty at cutting edge continental philosophy departments bears almost no resemblance to the characterizations of analytic philosophy from those who consider themselves analytic philosophers. And the story is no different in the other direction. So long has the discipline been dominated by the mantra that philosophers from different traditions cannot talk to each other, few now bother even to try. The notion that there may be common ground, and even insight, from those working in a different tradition, has been ignored by a culture of intellectual isolation that prefers to ignore what it does not understand in the name of an accepting pluralism rather than accept the challenge of speaking, writing, and thinking about philosophical topics in ways that may expose us to ideas outside our comfort zones and expose our own ideas to less sympathetic critics. II. One common and obvious objection to this sort of meta-philosophical approach is that, in painting the contemporary philosophical landscape in such broad brush strokes, we so abstract from the intricacies of actual philosophical research that there is nothing interesting or important left to be said. As Scott Soames has noted, in defense of the specialization of analytic philosophers: The value of specialization is that it increases the chances of getting things right in each of the areas to be synthesized something that great philosophers from Plato to Descartes, Hume, and Kant have always recognized. Then there is the matter of quantity. In earlier eras, when it was not obvious that the scope of 3
human knowledge far exceeded what could be encompassed by a single mind, the challenge of explaining how everything hung together was not transparently unmanageable. Today when single minds cannot encompass substantial sub areas of any established discipline it is. The solution is not to do badly what cannot be done, but to do well what can to construct a series of limited, but accurate and overlapping, syntheses that together illuminate reality as we know it. This, I argue, is what we should ask of analytic philosophy. 1 There is great insight in Soames' remark: There is value in the specialization of philosophy, and this is a fact that has been recognized both in the history of philosophy and in the present day. And it seems plausible to say that the challenge of explaining how everything hangs together is probably transparently unmanageable in the contemporary philosophical environment. Generalism, as I am using the term here, is not a doctrine opposed to specialization, or to the insight underlying Soames' claim. But if all of our emphases lie on the side of specialization and accuracies, and none on the side of the overlap Soames mentions, then it is unclear what broader purpose such specialization can serve. It is probably true that the goal of explaining how everything hangs together is not possible although Soames may overstate his case in claiming that there were once philosophers who straightforwardly thought it was. But this does not mean that seeking some general insight into the question of how things might hang together, or continuing to be concerned with the status of philosophy as a whole, are objectives to be abandoned. To consider the impossibility of a complete view of the whole of the discipline to be a valid objection to one's work taking account of any generalist concerns whatsoever is to manifest a symptom of the problem: if nothing interesting or important can be gleaned from even attempting to understand the practice and interrelation of different strands of contemporary philosophical inquiry, then the state of the discipline as a whole is a sorry one indeed. A specialist is only a specialist, and the knowledge she purports to have is only of value, when her specialization is a specialization of something: when she understand her inquiry in relation to at least a basic conception of the larger-and more general-whole. This insight is what separates the generalism from mere pluralism as we have used these terms above. 1 Scott Soames, Letter to London Review of Books, Vol. 27 No. 5, 3 March 2005. In reply to Richard Rorty, How many grains make a heap?, London Review of Books, Vol. 27 No. 2, 20 January 2005. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n02/richard-rorty/how-many-grains-make-a-heap 4
And this also speaks to another obvious objection: That such a focus on generalism in the profession would detract from the highly specialized inquiry through which progress if there is such a thing in philosophy is made. As I suggested above, it seems to me that a renewed focus on generalism in the sense advocated here would not detract from our detailed and often highly specialized research, but rather strengthen it by helping us to situate our own immediate concerns within some notion of the shape of the discipline as a whole, and thereby to recognize possible paths of fruitful cross-pollination that may not be immediately obvious when we categorically refuse to consider the forest because of our ignorance of anything other than the immediately surrounding and most familiar trees. This does not mean that the specialist in contemporary metaphysics needs to pick up a secondary specialization in feminist social thought in her spare time, or that the Derridean should begin submitting highly specialized articles on deconstruction to Synthese and Analysis, but it does mean that each of these areas of inquiry could benefit from a better sense of its relation to the larger whole; that it would be beneficial to all parties if each of us had some map of the conceptual geography of the discipline as a whole and our own location within it, even if those maps do not exactly agree in their center or on all the cartographic details. For in the present state of the discipline philosophers are all too often navigating according to a pre-columbian cartography, according to which we needn't be concerned with the mysterious tales of other types of philosophical practice because they occur in a far off lands which don't concern us and are, according to our own highly limited geographical knowledge of the discipline, somewhere beyond the edges of the philosophical world. If it is indeed the case that some of the most elevated and remote inquiries of the specialist must suffer slightly in order for the expeditious researcher to maintain some view of the larger whole, I say so be it. But I am skeptical that the level of specialization in philosophical research would decrease in significant ways from the taking up of generalist concerns; it seems more likely that islands which once seemed to be the furthest points of the empire, accessible only via one specific and arduous path, will begin to be recognized as points of intersection, serving a variety of philosophical trade routes from a variety of directions in a global not two-dimensional and bounded 5
philosophical environment. It is unlikely that sailing into unfamiliar waters will result in falling off the edge of the world. III. The impediments to this more exploratory and generalist conception of philosophy are myriad, but I want to point to a few specific problems which seem to me to be the foremost obstacles in each of the current major continents of Western philosophical discourse: Among continental philosophers, the obsessive focus on historical figures and movements and on textual exegesis often leads us to mistake what is a legitimate and important scholarly concern for the telos of philosophical inquiry, and leads to an unwarranted rejection of figures, methods and issues not perceived to be part of one's favored tradition. Because of the focus on history, much of contemporary continental philosophy has begun to foster an unwarranted suspicion of systematic issues, such that graduate students often go on the job market as disciples of a single figure or historical school, and are not taken seriously by potential employers as philosophers with a legitimate systematic area of specialization. The rejection of systematic considerations may be easy for tenured professors in continental departments who can dismiss such concerns as remnants of the days they still had to worry about pleasing their more analytic teachers and colleagues, but it is still a major concern for graduate students in a difficult academic job market. In analytic philosophy, our focus on methodology and the modeling of philosophical inquiry on that of the sciences likewise legitimate ideals for scholarly activity too often falls into an instrumentalism in which we assume the specialized technical terms and concepts which have come to dominate a given debate to be the only adequate ones, and in which we presume our own contemporary research to function in independence from other areas of philosophy and the broader history of philosophy. In the context of a specialized literature that seems to become outdated every 20 years or so, young analytic philosophers often go on the job market with little detailed knowledge or understanding of 6
the broader history of the discipline except perhaps the history of their own specific area of specialization, and even then there is little effort made to understand historical figures or schools in terms other than those currently favored in the philosopher's specialized discourse. This is highly problematic in a job market in which the majority of entry-level positions are still at teaching colleges, most of which wish to maintain a focus on the history of philosophy, and it leads to the self-reinforcing practice of only working among those who share relatively narrow systematic specializations, resulting in further distancing from other aspects of the discipline and from philosophy's history. IV. Finally, I want to conclude by suggesting some more specific ways in which a focus on generalism could be beneficial for philosophy in the 21 st century, both theoretically and practically: At a theoretical level, it would help to foster communication between continental and analytic philosophers, and to address the current problematic situation in which the brightest young minds in the discipline have very little opportunity for (and often disturbingly little interest in) serious philosophical interaction with those of their peers working at institutions presumed to do an entirely different type of philosophy. The problem of not being able to talk to peers at institutions of different philosophical character is self-perpetuating. But in order to encourage such an increase in communication, we will first need to acknowledge that the time such real communication takes might lead to a decrease in publications and other quantifiable measures of academic productivity. Given the current rather extreme environment of publish or perish in many departments, this would probably need to be an approach taken by all, not just by some subset of the philosophical community, since a few individuals taking such steps unaccompanied by the rest of their peers would effectively be punished for their decrease in productivity for specialized outlets of research, in comparison to the work of their colleagues producing more work in isolation. But this is only speculation. At a more practical level, renewed focus on generalism would also be beneficial for the teaching 7
of philosophy at the undergraduate level, where students are too often taught philosophy from a perspective which reinforces rather than questions inherited presuppositions about what counts as good philosophy. In the long term, a greater emphasis on generalist concerns in philosophy might also help to promote positive changes in the structure of the academic job market, where narrow department interests and too-simple commitments to mere pluralism effectively limit the pool of potential candidates for a job to those trained at some small subset of graduate programs, and in which the hiring process is increasingly becoming a mechanism by which universities seek out specializations or research agendas rather than widely-trained and deep-thinking philosophers. V. As undergraduates first coming to philosophy, many of us were taught that one of the unique characteristics of the discipline was that it took its own coherence and identity seriously, as questions falling within its own domain of inquiry, in a way that, say, geology or art history did not. This conference is a proof of the continuing importance of that concern. What I am arguing for in this plea for generalism is that, in a sense, the focus of this conference should be a focus reflected in all our philosophical work. As philosophers, we must continue our specialized work but we would do well to do so with an eye and and ear to other developments in the discipline and to our place within it as a whole. In place of a mere pluralism which tolerates but fails to engage other ways of philosophizing, we need a generalism that actively engages them. In this sense the question of the status of philosophy in the 21 st century is not simple, but nor is it a specialized question: It is a very broad, complicated and irreducibly general one, and one that deserves to be asked and asked again for precisely that reason. The future of the discipline may just depend on it. Jacob Rump Emory University 8