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Gulping Down the Truth

Günter Grass’s 2006 revelation that he had served in the SS as a 17 year old draftee caused a firestorm. To be sure, Grass had always acknowledged some degree of service to Nazi Germany. He had even admitted that “I belonged to the Hitler Youth, and I believed in its aims up to the end of the war.” But the SS? That seriously heightened his involvement with the Nazis, which of course is why he had kept it secret for so many decades.

My sense of the firestorm, however, was that most of Grass’s critics were conservatives who had attacked him for many ears, on many different grounds. Most people who didn’t already hate Grass understood that a 17 year old draftee was more manipulable than a grownup, knowledgeable Nazi—such as Heidegger, who freely joined the Nazi Party at the age of 43.

Still, firestorm it was. And something seemed strange to me about it. Where was Habermas? Though he was one of Grass’s old comrades in arms, fighting many good fights with him (such as their struggle against precipitous German reunification after the fall of the Wall), Habermas was conspicuously absent from Grass’s defense team. No op-eds  could I find; no feuilleton contributions, not even a letter to the editor on behalf of Grass.

Having been Habermas’s colleague for a couple of years, l knew only too well how much he likes to weigh in even on matters that don’t concern him. And these attacks on an old comrade certainly did. Where was he? Was he ill? Had he turned on Grass? What was going on?

The November 2006 edition of the German cultural magazine Cicero told me.

It had long been known that Habermas, like Grass, had been in the Hitler Youth. But according to Cicero he, too, had a higher level of involvement than he had acknowledged, though hardly as high as the SS. He had been a squad leader. And towards the end of the war, one member of his squad—one Hans-Ulrich Wehler---had been blowing off meetings. This could have been mere adolescent busyness—but it also might have signaled a loss of faith in the Führer and his Reich. After all, one did not openly resign from any Nazi organization. (What reason would you give? “I don’t like you guys any more?“)

So, the Cicero article continues, Squad Leader Habermas wrote a letter to Recalcitrant Member Wehler, urging him to get more active in the Youth. And there was, apparently, more: Habermas urged Wehler not to give up faith in the Endsieg, the ultimate victory of the Fatherland, etc., etc., yada-yada.

The story continues that many years later, Wehler—who had become a history professor at the University of Bielefeld—and Habermas were having a friendly dinner. Wehler cheerily reminded Habermas of that long ago letter, which he had recently found again in his papers—and which, just for old times’s sake, had brought with him to the dinner. What fun!

Habermas asked to see it; read it quickly; wadded it up.

And swallowed it.

Philosophers claim to seek the truth; some of them (far too many) claim to find it. But none, to my knowledge, has ever simply gulped it down. “A truth cannot lose anything by being written down,” Hegel wrote (in the Phenomenology). But the Truth can—for if the only evidence for a truth is its written testimony, he who destroys the testimony has diminished the Truth by subtracting something from it.

Just about the time Grass’s revelations hit the media, Habermas was thus involved in a scandal of his own—a ridiculous one, to be sure, but still scandalous enough to require him to lie a bit low when his old comrade came under for more serious attack. So Habermas didn’t come to the aid of Grass.

But he did come to the aid of himself. Unfortunately his defenses—most credibly from the mouth of Wehler—didn’t really do the job. According to Wehler (summarized at http://www.ksta.de/html/artikel/1161673298988.shtml), Habermas was never a squad leader in the Hitler Youth, just a member; the letter merely contained boilerplate about the Endsieg, not genuine enthusiasm; and the whole thing happened when Habermas was only 13 or 14.

But this defense of Habermas doesn’t go through, because the real scandal was not in 1943, or whenever, but during that dinner with Wehler many years later—when Habermas destroyed the evidence. And that he did so is not in dispute (though according to Habermasians, it was not by swallowing it; Habermas simply threw the letter in a waste can).

It ain’t the crime, Jürgen—it’s the coverup. Even if you can swallow the truth, your gulping just becomes another thing that needs to be hidden. Cover-ups must be invented to cover cover-ups, and so on forever.

Yada-yada.

2007 National Humanities Awards

President Bush today awarded the national humanities medals.(see here)

Most of them were awarded for efforts of behalf of "liberty." I am pleased to report that no philosopher got one.

Philosophy's Crazy Thing

A few years ago, I published a book on the history of American philosophy after World War II called Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era. It was a history of social pressures placed on philosophers by political forces. Since philosophers like to think that philosophy is independent of low things like politics, my book was not very popular in some parts of the profession. This I expected; some of these philosophers actually believe what they think.

Other aspects of its reception I did not expect, however. One of these is that six years after its appearance, my small book would be part of a growing literature. There are now three other histories which deal with political pressures which were placed on philosophers during the Twentieth Century, and which may have affected the subsequent development of philosophy itself:

Michael Friedman A Parting of the Ways (Open Court, 2000)

Aaron Preston Analytic Philosophy: the History of an Illusion (Continuum 2007)

George Reisch How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, 2005)

Not that any of the other authors copied me, or even followed me. Friedman’s book came out before mine. As far as I know, the other two books were already underway when my book appeared.

This is a classic case of convergent research. All four books, begun independently, use similar methodology to arrive at their answers: namely, that who wins and who loses in philosophy is determined not solely by who has the better arguments. Also in play are political forces which have nothing to do with phiulosophical merit.

They have to do with Crazy Things.

These books apply historical methodologies first developed in the philosophy of science to philosophy itself. Basically, what you do is: you go back to some watershed turning point in the history of science—say, Einstein’s rejection of the Quantum Theory. Then you try to figure out what was really going on among scientists at that time. What you find at these turning points, as Arthur Fine once put it to me, is not merely disinterested argument, but “all sorts of crazy things.” The next part of the job, after several decades, is to sort through everything, subtract what we can now recognize as crazy, and reevaluate the merits of the case.

It was inevitable that this style of historiography would come to be applied to philosophy itself. That is what Friedman, Reisch, I, and to a degree Preston have done. We took major turning points—say, Carnap’s break with Heidegger, or analytical philosophy’s rise to dominance in the United States. We tried to figure out what was really going on. And we discovered all sorts of Crazy Things.

The others may not agree, but it seems to me that our research converges around the notions that:

(a) The blanket rejection of what became Continental philosophy by what became Analytical philosophy was a Crazy Thing (i.e., politically motivated);

(b). Therefore, Analytical philosophy’s rise to dominance in the United States was a Crazy Thing;

(c). Therefore, Analytical philosophy’s present dominance in the United States just may be a Crazy Thing. 

Given that no one even seems to know what Analytical philosophy is these days, it is hard to tell just what its dominance consists in, and how much of it could survive critical scrutiny. But if philosophers want to be critically rational beings—if they want to be philosophers—they had better accept that a Crazy Thing happened in philosophy just at the time that Analytical philosophy was coming to dominance, and they need to get started thinking about it.

These four books are a good place to make that start.

At LAX

Philosophers are getting to be rare birds, but I once actually  met one. It was at a place called LAX, which is best described as a huge insight factory on the very edge of the Pacific Rim. People were landing from London and Chicago and Singapore and Rome and Atlanta and Beijing. I myself had been traveling in the East, someplace ancient and fustian--New York, New Hampshire, New Bedford, one of those. I hadn't seen a palm tree in weeks, and at this time of year that always makes me nervous.

Anyway,  this guy was accosting me and everyone else as we headed for the baggage claim, standing in the main concourse with a badge and can.

I put some change in his can and he responded cheerily, ”Rawls you very much.” I pulled up short at that, and asked him what he meant.

“Nobody usually notices when I say that,” he said, “It’s about your contribution to equality of result.”

We chatted for a few minutes about Rawls and philosophy in America. All the while, he was stretching and twisting to place his can in front of people coming down the concourse, on their way to baggage claim.

“Don’t you think that Rawls’s use of the ‘veil of ignorance’ device is a bit counterfactual?” I asked. “The idea that we will choose a fair society if we don’t know anything about where we will fit into that society seems strange to me, maybe even irrational. Wouldn’t most human beings try to look beneath the veil, to pierce it somehow, find out what social percentile they are going to be in, and then design a society which treats everyone well down to that percentile and devil take the rest?"

His eyebrows twitched, and he darted left to stick his can under the gut of a hugely fat man who was waddling down the concourse.

“Obese help me,” he said piteously, and the man gave him some coins.

“And why,” I pressed him, "is a social philosophy which amounts to an arcane thought experiment a good thing? Maybe we should turn our energies to the kind of social philosophy advocated by Raymond Geuss? To careful reflection on the actual givens?" (Geuss was recently quoted by Brian Leiter on his blog  at http://leiterreports.typepad.com/, October 14, 2007.)

The philosopher almost genuflected to get his can under the noses of two very short ladies wearing nun‘s habits.

“Saints besmit you,” he said. Imprisoned and fortified by their vows of poverty, they appeared not to see him at all.

“Well, I’m not really a Rawlsian,” he confessed. “I’m more of a Carthusianite.”

A Carthusianite?

“Yes, I’m hardly a Carthusian—they’re the strictest monastic order in the Catholic Church. Me, I’m drunk much of the time. So I must be a Carthusianite. I don’t deal with the Veil of Ignorance, but I practice the Carthusian spirituality of the 13th Century, which is its source.”

“I thought Kant was Rawls’s source.”

“Not at all. Or not only. Rawls is very close to those Carthusians who believe in the Cloud of Forgetting, behind which you put everything you know about the world—everything but God.”

This was getting interesting, or perhaps weird. I pressed him. “So when Rawls puts everything behind the Veil of Ignorance, that’s like the Cloud of Forgetting—except that while the Carthusians have only the Cloud of Forgetting, Rawls goes behind the veil, or the cloud, and yet retains his conceptual rigor—his own capacity to argue and choose. That’s why he can identify the Veil of Ignorance as a veil of ignorance. Carthusians just call it forgetting, but sometimes forgetting is good.”

“You’re telling me,” he said. “But there’s really nothing rigorous about Rawls, at least in comparison to the Carthusians.” My interlocutor had abandoned his cup wielding and was now standing directly, a little belligerently, in front of me. “The Cloud of Forgetting, which you control, is so to speak behind you. Ahead of you is the Cloud of Unknowing; God is there but behind that cloud, and you can never penetrate it. You have to live with that: that you are between two clouds.

“So it's a little like deconstruction. Logical argumentation and conceptual rigor, to the Carthusians, are just two more idols. And John Rawls,who could not forget them, is just as much a metaphysical fool as Scotus the Dunce!”

I had never heard John Rawls called a dunce before, and I didn’t much like it. If Rawls was a dunce, what was I? After all, Rawls was at Harvard, and I was at LAX. Worse: at LAX talking to this guy. I grew rather indignant.

“But if Rawls were to reject logic and clarity, how could he even be an analytical philosopher?” And the beggar, the weird guy, came right back:

“Is that a good thing to be?” he asked. "I’m not entirely sure. What is analytical philosophy, anyway? If analytical philosophy means careful devotion to clarity and rigor in argumentation, then I am a proud analyst. But if, as I suspect, it means caring only about those things, then I am a proud Continental!

“So beware of me, for I am both Skylla and Charybdis.”

He doffed his cap. The lineaments of his face collected differently around his huge mustache, and I said a quick farewell.

Beethoven's score

In the Northwestern University philosophy department, where I taught for 15 years, were two old pieces of furniture: an armoire and a banquette or settee. The armoire stood behind the secretary’s desk, giving a bit of privacy to David Hull—the world famous endowed professor who had given his own office to the graduate students as their lounge, and whose desk was now behind it. The banquette nestled inconspicuously to the right of his desk, at the very rear of the office. They had both belonged to Franz Brentano (1838-1917), a philosopher and forerunner of phenomenology. His early support for the philosophy department was a reminder of Chicago’s German heritage—still strong to this day, but now publicly, even carefully, forgotten. Like so many things in the United States.

The armoire and the banquette had been together long, and had traveled far. But there was, as I discovered, more to their story than that. Like so many other things, it has to do with Beethoven.

Among the personal papers found after Beethoven’s death was an extraordinary letter. Bearing neither address nor date, it is a passionate outpouring to someone identified, then and since, as the “Immortal Beloved” (unsterbliche Geliebte). In places, it is exalted: “My angel, my all, my very self…I can live only wholly with you or not at all.” In places, mundane: “I have learned that letters must be posted very early in the morning on Mondays.” It expresses not only Beethoven's love but his fear of it, in the symbolic form of the tale of a horrifying night journey through a stormy forest.

The letter is the factual basis of the movie “Immortal Beloved.” Because of its mundanity, it was clearly written to a real person--not one of Beethoven's many fantasy lovers. It proves that, if only once, this paranoid, drunken lout was capable of genuine love--and even more surprisingly, that someone else could love him. But who? The question echoed and reechoed through Vienna, but it was not answered for 150 years.

In his 1977 biography of Beethoven, Maynard Solomon probably solved the riddle. In a tour de force of scholarship, he first exposed previous theories as unfounded. He then reconstructed, from the letter itself, a series of requirements for the identity of its intended recipient. Slowly, as he worked through these, a figure emerged--one woman, and one alone, who met every one of his requirements. It is not the person identified in the movie, but the wife of a well known businessman—a woman considered by contemporaries to be beautiful and melancholy, married to a man she esteemed but could not love. Her name was Antonie Brentano.

She was the sister in law of the poet Clemens Brentano and the novelist Bettina Brentano (who introduced her to Beethoven). She was also, then, the aunt of Franz. For according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Franz was the nephew of Clemens and Bettina. Too young to be Antonie's son, he must have been her nephew as well.

The Immortal Beloved lived for more than forty years after her affair with Beethoven, and during that time presumably visited her nephew. Did she hang her coat in that armoire? Did she sit on that banquette?

There are further possibilities, for Franz Brentano was a renegade Catholic priest. At least early on in his career, he was probably without the resources to buy furniture. Could some of it have come from his well-to-do aunt? Were these perhaps her own personal possessions? Did Beethoven score on our settee?

Of course we will never know. These reflections provide, not facts, but a luster of immortality to two old pieces of furniture with several fascinating messages.

One of those messages is for philosophers,though not only for them: History is where you find it, and you will find it everywhere--if you don't forget to look.

Academic Freedom at University of Chicago

**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

October 10, 2007

Media Contact: Daniel Klimek

T: (773) 817-1291 E: Dpk24g@gmail.com

Web: http://www.academicfreedomchicago.org

Press arrangements please contact:

University of Chicago News Office

T: (773) 702-8356. E: w-harms@uchicago.edu

“IN DEFENSE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM”

PROMINENT SCHOLARS TO SPEAK OUT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

12 October 2007 - 2:00pm - 7:00 pm

Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago

October 12 2007 lecture featuring: Tariq Ali, Akeel Bilgrami, Noam Chomsky, Neve Gordon, Tony Judt and John Mearsheimer

CHICAGO, IL – In light of the controversial tenure denials of eminent Middle East scholar Dr. Norman G. Finkelstein and Dr. Mehrene Larudee earlier this year at DePaul University, the most prominent scholars from across the world will come together this Friday, October 12, 2007, at a conference at the University of Chicago to speak lecturing about the threats to academic freedom at universities.

Professors Finkelstein and Larudee were both denied tenure at DePaul last June for political purposes. After not being allowed to teach his terminal year at DePaul, Finkelstein and the university settled on an agreement in September, when Finkelstein resigned and DePaul acknowledged him to be “a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher.” Professor Larudee, who was a strong supporter of both Finkelstein and Palestinian rights, is currently appealing her case at DePaul. Both scholars will also appear as panelists at the October 12 conference.

The event is to be held at the Rockefeller Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave. Chicago, IL 60637. Scheduled speakers include:

- Dr. Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Heyman Center, Columbia University

- Dr. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

- Dr. Norman Finkelstein, (formerly) Department of Political Science, DePaul University

- Dr. John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

- Dr. Neve Gordon, Professor, Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University

- Dr. Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, New York University

- Dr. Mehrene Larudee, International Studies Program, DePaul University

• Hosted by Tariq Ali, Editor of the New Left Review and Verso Books

The Event is Sponsored By:

Primary Sponsors

Diskord Magazine (University of Chicago, RSO), Verso Books (London), and Academic Freedom Committee (DePaul)

Co-Sponsors

University of Chicago: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for International Studies, and International House Global Voices Program*

DePaul University: International Studies Program, Islamic World Studies Program, and Department of Philosophy*

Community Sponsors

Jewish Voice for Peace - Chicago, American Friends Service Committee – Chicago, and Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (CJPIP)

*The University of Chicago and DePaul University are not sponsoring the event, only the listed departments and centers at these Universities.

# # #

www.academicfreedomchicago.org

"The Lives of Others:" a Parable of a Philosopher

This afternoon, my Department sponsored a showing of the remarkable German movie “The Lives of Others.” The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, was there. The movie is about a secret police officer in the unlamented German Democratic Republic—East Germany—who is assigned to spy in an artistic couple—he a playwright, she an actress.

The critical response to this movie in Germany was pretty intense, but as far as I followed it centered largely on just how accurate was its portrayal of life back in the “DDR.” Von Donnersmark’s comments also had a lot to do with that. But I think the movie has other ramifications and goals, and can be read on many levels. One way is as the parable of a philosopher.

The philosopher in question is Immanuel Kant. In his astonishing fore-telling of the Cold War, which I touched on in a long-ago book, Hegel conjures up the picture of a society in which everything is rational, but rationality is located exclusively in the state. In this society, individuals who do not conform to state planning are irrational, and so evil; they are to be crushed, except when they stamp themselves into servants of the state down to the tiniest detail. Since reality is merely something to be crushed when it does not conform to reason, reason is not enriched by experience (as happens in Hegel's own philosophy), and remains abstract.

Somebody has to do the crushing, and in the DDR that job fell to the Stasi, the secret police, whose motto was “know everything” (Alles wissen!). The protagonist of the movie, a man without emotions, is thus an enforcer of abstract state rationality.

Hegel develops his picture of such rationality in explicit connection with Fichte, but it can also hold for Kant. True, Fichte's detailed social "blueprint" was hypertrophic compared to Kant's relatively empty view of civil society. But in Kantian terms, as in Fichte’s, the only force beyond that of reason in human affairs is coercion; Humean sympathy, love in general, or even friendship, has no place. In order to make itself felt in human affairs, then, reason itself must coerce. It does this for Kant by constituting itself as the legal system. It did it in the DDR by constituting itself as the Stasi.

When the law goes beyond the mere categorical imperative and undertakes to flesh out the nature of the Good Life, as it does for Fichte, we get abstract rationality reposing upon sheer force and directed against the individual—the model, von Donnersmark seems to think, for East Germany.

Fichte claimed to develop his philosophy out of the Critique of Judgment, but his blunt opposition of rationality and coercion actually comes from the second Critique, that of Practical Reason. In that book, as Fichte rightly saw, the causality of reason is direct: reason gives us a plan, and reality must—as far as we are able—be made to conform to that plan. So, East Germany.

In the Critique of Judgment, such subsumption is mediated by the imagination, which must sum up or recapitulate the actual given state of affairs before a concept (or plan) is applied to it. Reason thus cannot move directly from formulating the Good to prescribing changes in reality; instead of forcing, it must hesitate, to allow for that intermediate summing-up. The name of the experience of this hesitation is “beauty,” and art is its strongest vehicle.

So when Gerd Wiesler, the Stasi officer, is ordered to spy on a couple of artists, we know from the start that a crisis is building. This gathering crisis (though not the movie as a whole) reaches its climax in a stunning, wordless, scene in which the officer, sitting in the attic of the artists’ apartment building, listens through his earphones to the playwright playing a sonata. I won’t go into further detail, but let us say that after that, Wiesler’s whole life as an agent of the state is over—and his redemption begins. Abstract and coercive rationality is, in true "Third Critique" fashion, undone by beauty.

The undoing of Reason by beauty was also experienced by Kant himself, as he worked on the Critique of Judgment. Intended to save his system from the inner contradiction eating away at its core—the fact that our Reason tells us to think of ourselves as free, while our Understanding tells us that we are determined—the Critique outruns that assignment and begins to supply norms of its own. In the end, as Friedrich Schiller recognized in his Letters on Aesthetic Education, if you have the right account of what beauty means to the soul you don’t need any of Kant’s transcendental apparatus. You don’t need the transcendental Idea of freedom, or the Categorical Imperative, or the Kingdom of Ends to live a good life. All you need is the experience of beauty and the lessons it teaches.

Wiesler gives in to this aesthetic liberation, but Kant—whose own life was even more abstract than Wiesler's—fights it every step of the way; coercion, I guess, was truly dear to him.

Wiesler lives through the Fall of the Wall to a relatively happy ending. Kant's final tragedy is that the scars and missteps of his greatest struggle—the fallacies and confusions that dog the Third Critique— should be seen by today’s philosophical hoi polloi not as the honorable wounds of a gallant but losing battle, but as evidence of senility.

Putting philosophy in its place

Putting philosophers into a setting where they speak, first and primarily, to each other is a disservice to them. It is also a disservice to philosophy. And that means it is, finally, a disservice to the rest of the university, for locating philosophy in one department discourages it in others. Almost every—no, every!—academic subject matter has its philosophical side, and I am enough of a believer in philosophy to hold that any practitioner of any field will be a better practitioner if she engages with the philosophical side of her field. Economists ought to have philosophers of economics around to remind them of, say, the moral implications and epistemological dilemmas of their field; physicists increasingly need philosophers around to save them from some of their metaphysical excesses (just how are we going to verify string theory, anyway? And why doesn’t it matter?) And literary theorists…let’s just say that while Derrida is a fascinating guide to the history of philosophy, he is not a dependable one.

Everyone in the university needs philosophers around. Of course, a lot depends on what “around” means here. There are economists and physicists and literary theorists who have close relationships with philosophers, at their home institution and elsewhere. But if they are in different departments, they do not see those philosophers on a day-to-day basis. They have the option to avoid them. And that they should not have. They should be forcibly reminded of philosophy, and of the philosophical side of their own disciplines, whenever they collect their mail or walk down the corridor. Freedom from philosophy is all too often seen as a virtue by workers in other fields—and it shouldn’t be.

There is not an academic anywhere in the world who should think of herself as safe from philosophy!

So what we need is to free philosophy from its enclosure within philosophy departments, without cutting it free from the university altogether. And here is my proposal:

What if the title “Professor of Philosophy” were an honorific for people who, after having achieved significantly in their original fields, decide they want to think more broadly about things? Such people could then make application to the philosophy department—actually, a philosophy program, since it would not have faculty of its own—and upon being accepted could call themselves e.g. “Professor of English and Philosophy,” or “Professor of Physics and Philosophy.” Bringing their own disciplinary viewpoints and expertise to bear within what would obviously be an extremely diverse intellectual community, they would help hammer out a sense of “how things, in the widest sense, hang together, in the widest sense,” which is one way—though not, I think the best—to define philosophy.

“Philosophy” would then have a chance to be what it needs to be, both for its own sake and for that of the wider university to which it belongs: the crossing of all disciplinary boundaries at once (a second definition of philosophy, a bit better than the previous one).

Is that all? Is there no other place for philosophy within the university? —Or, to put it differently: is there really no honest job that a philosophy department can do?

I think there is. Let's just say that philosophy is whatever philosophers do (this is the best, because most minimal, definition of all). Who, then, are the “philosophers?” On the above proposal, they are people who have applied to, and been accepted by, a philosophy program. The acceptance is based on (a) serious achievement within their field of origin, and (b) their interest in foundational issues that arise within those fields but extend beyond them.

So philosophers are intellectual achievers with unusually broad interests. Sounds familiar. But does it leave out anyone whom we might want to call a “philosopher?"

Yes, because it restricts the set of “philosophers’ to our contemporaries. It is just another case of the American Fallacy: assuming that how things are around here right now is the way they are, or should be (or should have been), everywhere.

In particular,this definition omits the entire group of people I appealed to in one of my previous posts—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, etc. And any definition of philosophy which tosses these people out is not a definition of "philosophy" at all, but of something else. Philosophy has a uniquely long history—only those of poetry and religion are longer, in the West.

The history of philosophy,moreover, is a single sweep, in the sense that later members of it consciously and critically build upon the work of earlier members. That single critical sweep is important because, together with poetry and a few other disciplines, it has created the fundamental components of the Western vocabulary: we would not have words like “freedom,” “justice,” “beauty,” and “truth” if it were not for the labors of philosophers over millennia.

So the history of philosophy needs to be taught somewhere. In addition to the Philosophy Program, there should also be a Department of the History of Philosophy. A department whose members, once they fulfill the criteria, could become members of the Philosophy Program, just like anyone else. Such a person would then be a “Professor of the History of Philosophy and Philosophy.”

(And philosophy, and philosophy, and philosophy/ creeps in its petty place from day to day/ until the last syllable of recorded time....)

Pretty exciting. Will it ever happen? Probably not. Part of the rationale for the very existence of the modern university is to instill more or less explicit rules and standards into every field. Which makes it  doubtful that philosophy will ever sit comfortably within the university. Philosophy in the university sometimes reminds me of that old description of Wittgenstein at Cambridge: an eagle trying to live in a cuckoo clock

The Like Mindedness Problem in Philosophy

There are several reasons why philosophy departments are not particularly good places to do philosophy. As I argued in my previous posting, in order to be a really good philosopher you must traditinally achieve, or have achieved, significantly in some other discipline. The departmental walls which modern universities place around philosophers from the moment they arrive on campus are prison walls.

Why would universities do that? Don't they have at heart the best interests of their resident philosophers, as of other disciplines?

The short answer is No, but I will get into that eventually.

For the moment I want to talk about another, and wider, problem with the recent policy of encasing philosophers in departmental structures. This is that philosophers have a pull to the abstract (don’t try to deny it!). The more you talk to other philosophers, the higher you tend to rise into the empty heights, until you are talking about such vacuitates fictae as logical form, the Categorical Imperative, and Différance.

Having colleagues who are not philosophers counteracts this. When I became a “Germanist,” if only of a sort, I discovered that it was not only more fun but better for me as a philosopher to attend a paper on the oddly intense, but wholly Platonic, friendships which sprang up in 19th Century Berlin between certain Reform rabbis and married women in their congregations than. It was much better, philosophically, than hearing from someone who had devised yet another way to index indexicals—or to differentiate Différance.

This common pull to the abstract is one case of a still wider problem with which all philosophy departments must wrestle, the problem of excessive like-mindedness. This has been brilliantly dissected by Daniel Dennet in his already famous posting, “Higher Order Truths About Chmess” (http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chmess.htm ).

Dennett's post shows that behind the often intense fights philosophers have about the various topics they discuss is a common, but sometimes unfounded, agreement that the issue in question is important enough to fight about. The result of this kind of thing is, all too often, small groups of people scoring points off one another in controversies nobody outside those groups cares about. Sound familiar?

Another way the Like Mindedness Problem shows up is that most philosophy departments are pretty much exclusively Analytic or Continental. Both Analytical and Continental philosophy are burdened, in turn, with numerous unspoken rules and practices. These tacit rubrics are constitutive for both kinds of philosophy in the sense that violating them gets you kicked out of the approach. But they are only rarely, if ever, openly discussed—partly for innocent reasons, such as that we simply don’t have time; partly, less innocently but all-too-humanly, because discussion of them is strenuous and often painful. And partly,I daresay, because they are so rarely challenged.

Continental philosophy, for example, has a strong predisposition to the discussion of philosophers rather than issues. This is not really up for debate in Continental circles; it is just taken to be how things are. If I, as a Continental thinker, want to write a paper on “Derrida on the Impossibility of Reference, well and good. People need to know what he thought about that; misinterpretations abound. But if I wanted to think and write about whether reference really is possible (and about how, if it isn’t, I could say so), I would no longer be a “real” Continental. Not because I am thinking about reference, but because I am thinking about an issue at all.

The same is true on the Analytical side. When Richard Rorty openly formulated one of the unspoken rubrics of Analytical philosophy—its discursive roots, not merely in foundationalist epistemology but in  foundationalist metaphysics—he wound up in Comp Lit.

The Like Mindedness Problem, then, is this: in order to function within a department in the modern university, I have to adhere to some of  the same rules as the other members of that department. To be sure, this result of departmental structure is innocuous for most fields, because they have fixed rules.

But philosophy doesn't--or shouidn't. As Plato argued, there has to be a place where fundamental rules are not simply followed, but made and critically revised. There must be one discourse that is not rule bound--and if a discourse is defined by its rules or lack thereof, there can be only one such discourse. The name of that single, unique non-discourse discourse is, traditionally, “philosophy;” and philosophy is therefore the one area from which like-mindedness--also called "conformity--"  must be excluded.

Please note that I am describing pulls and tendencies; I am aware of the many honorable exceptions to my generalizations. I just don’t think they should be exceptions.