The long version:

Coming back to my research about philosophy departments in France, I was recently reading an institutional document describing the (highly-rated) research laboratory for philosophers at the University of Paris-8. Apparently it was a bureaucratic requirement to write a section describing the “infrastructures” available to the laboratory. But since Paris-8 is a typically underfunded public university, operating in cramped quarters on a small campus in the Parisian banlieue, the sad reality is that their infrastructure was quite limited. To the point of comedy.

I quote:

Infrastructures

L’unité dispose d’une salle de 35 m2, équipée d’un téléphone, de deux ordinateurs fixes et d’une connexion par WIFI. Elle est meublée de tables, chaises, et bibliothèques. Elle est située dans un bâtiment neuf de moins de deux ans. La surface disponible par chercheur membre de l’équipe à titre principal est de 1,5 m2.

The unit possesses a room of 35 m², equipped with a telephone, two desktop computers and WiFi access. It is furnished with tables, chairs and bookshelves. It is situated in a new building less than two years old. The available surface per principle laboratory researcher is 1.5 m².

One and a half square meters per researcher is just about enough to cram a chair into, and clearly not enough for any sort of individual workspace. Accordingly, there were none; the room in question was purely used to hold small seminars. The whole laboratory staff would never have fit inside it, and when they did have meetings, they took place elsewhere.

There is, of course, something charming about the plaintive note that at least the tiny room is “situated in a new building less than two years old” (the building pictured above). It’s as if the author felt obliged to put only the most positive spin on a clearly inadequate situation. Nevertheless, there is something to learn here about what counts as infrastructure for philosophers at Parisian public universities: in short, all the productive infrastructure (the books, the libraries, the computers, the desks) is elsewhere, generally at home, and the campus becomes purely a place of knowledge exchange, not of knowledge production. Which is why it it is possible to have a philosophy lab with practically no facilities.

Philosopher: But I don’t know — you aren’t interested in the solutions to problems?

Ethnographer: The solutions to philosophical problems for example?

Philosopher: Problems! Real ones! For example do you consider that the word “being” has several senses? Or not? Fundamental ontological question. Do you accept that there are several senses or one? It changes everything. And what are your arguments one way or the other?

Ethnographer: Well me personally I’m not an expert—

Philosopher: But it’s a really important question. Do you accept a category like for instance the possible?

Ethnographer: Yes OK—

Philosopher: Between non-being and being? Do you grant an ontological existence to the notion of the possible? Me, no. Others, yes. And one tries to say why and why not. If you grant something like human dispositions, do you grant a distinction between for instance what one calls the faculties— understanding, imagining, dreaming, are these the same things or not? Do you grant something like freedom? Do you not know how to answer these questions? And do you say yes or no or something else? The response to these questions isn’t of the order of metanarratives. It’s of the order of the truth, pure and simple.

Ethnographer: Sure, I can agree.

Philosopher: But it’s really important. This is what philosophy is!

Ethnographer: Well I’d say that what interests me as an ethnographer is that, being able to ask these sorts of questions, not everyone asks them in the same way, and what interests me as an ethnographer is the different ways of situating these questions, of raising them.

Philosopher: You’re not interested in the truth of the answer?

This was a relatively traditional philosopher who was invested, as you can see, in a fairly standard view of philosophy as “solving problems.” Here, he pressed me quite hard to express interest in that project. But I felt obliged to insist that adjudicating local truths is not what ethnographers are usually interested in!

It’s interesting to me that he found my refusal baffling. It’s as if at heart it was hard to imagine that other disciplines worked on profoundly different questions from those of the traditional philosophical canon.

But what goes unsaid in this interview is that I, the ethnographer, was not the only person who wasn’t trying to “solve problems.” In fact, many of the radical philosophers I studied in Saint-Denis were also quite uninterested in this problem-solving approach to philosophy. More often than not, they sought to produce new concepts, to re-reading classic texts, to reflect on the present, to “intervene” critically in debates — and all of this could happen without necessarily solving any of the classic philosophical questions.

I expect my interlocutor here would have dismissed some of his colleagues, as well, as not being interested in real philosophy.

But if I learned anything in my research on philosophers, it’s that there can be interesting disputes over what philosophy is. (Every orthodoxy involves heterodoxy, after all.) To claim that philosophy is a well-defined field would seem, in that light, somewhat fraught.

A Frenchman, an Englishman and a German were assigned to study the camel.

The Frenchman went to the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, spent half an hour there, talked to the keeper, threw bread to the camel, teased it with the tip of his umbrella, and, when he got home, wrote a column, for his newspaper, full of keen and spiritual observations.

The Englishman, along with his tea-box and comfortable camping supplies, went and set up his tent in the Oriental countries, and after a stay of two or three years, produced a thick volume overflowing with facts, without order or conclusion, but with real documentary value.

As for the German, full of disdain for the Frenchman’s frivolousness and the Englishman’s absence of general ideas, he closed himself up in his room to write a work of several volumes, entitled: Idea of the camel drawn from the conception of the self.

Un Français, un Anglais, un Allemand furent chargés d’une étude sur le chameau.

Le Français alla au jardin des Plantes, y passa une demi-heure, interrogea le gardien, jeta du pain au chameau, le taquina avec le bout de son parapluie, et, rentré chez lui, écrivit, pour son journal, un feuilleton plein d’aperçus piquants et spirituels.

L’Anglais, emportant son panier à thé et un confortable matériel de campement, alla planter sa tente dans les pays d’Orient, et en rapporta, après un séjour de deux ou trois ans, un gros volume bourré de faits sans ordre ni conclusion, mais d’une réelle valeur documentaire.

Quant à l’Allemand, plein de mépris pour la frivolité du Français et l’absence d’idées générales de l’Anglais, il s’enferma dans sa chambre pour y rédiger un ouvrage en plusieurs volumes, intitulé : Idée du chameau tiré de la conception du moi.

I’m not sure I find it a extremely funny joke, but academic humor is always worth documenting as a cultural artifact, if nothing else.

Philosophizing in senior year???

1) The 2003 “official instructions” for the philosophy teaching program in senior year say: “Philosophy teaching in senior year… contributes to forming autonomous minds, warned of reality’s complexities and capable of putting to work a critical consciousness of the contemporary world.” What do you think of this?

These formulations pose two major problems.

First, it strikes me as shocking that a philosophy textbook should begin with a series of “official instructions.” An instruction, in the sense of a directive, is entirely contrary to the “autonomous minds” that we are told to “form.” Are we told to “force our students to be free”? Moreover, in the context of schools, “instruction” has a second dimension: we still talk about “public, obligatory, civic instruction” [in connection with public education]. But instructing is not educating. Instructing basically means shaping someone’s mind to fit the competences that the institution judges socially useful. Educating on the other hand means communicating a potential to a mind which, one day, will allow it to help define what is or isn’t valuable for its society. Yet according to the “official” declarations, we’re still on the model of instructing, in both senses of the term.

Second, the goal proclaimed for high school philosophy teaching is completely exorbitant. I know that many people subscribe to it. But we should be astonished by the excessive disproportion between the end and the means: they have groups of thirty pupils, a very limited range of practical exercises, lecture courses, etc. And above all, it’s impossible for philosophy teachers to “form autonomous and critical minds” if the pupils haven’t been invited to be autonomous or critical since the day they arrived in the schoolhouse. Not to mention that the art of thinking isn’t reserved for philosophy. Would one be exempted from “thinking for oneself” in history, literature or physics? It must be said that the goal [of our philosophy teaching] is, in our present circumstances, pretty disconnected from these realities; and we might therefore give up on grading students’ homework against an ideal that very few people can claim to have attained. We could, at least for starters, propose simpler exercises that would be better adapted to our students’ competences (the ones “formed” by our instruction) and to our own. At the university we do all this readily enough.

2) What should be at stake in philosophy teaching? What should be its goals?

Well, I don’t want to say that there’s nothing special to expect from philosophy teaching. To my eyes, philosophy is in essence a critique of our values and an effort to demonstrate, by one method or another, the legitimacy or pertinence of the values we hold. The philosophers who we’ve read and reread over the centuries have all undertaken an examination of the values of their times. That said, these philosophers don’t play the moral purity card [la carte de bonne conscience]. They direct their critical examination at themselves, working with their own keen perceptions of the possibilities and blockages of their epoch. Today, as in the past, many people, including our official instructors, defend some values without examination and try to impose them on others. Wondering where our values come from, going over them with a fine-toothed comb and sorting them out, creating new ones, scrutinizing the motives for our adherence to them and the mechanisms that inculcate them — that’s what a reading of the philosophers can invite us to do. And that’s a truly priceless service.

Like Zask, I’ve been struck by the official rhetoric in France about teaching people to have free and critical minds, which always seems to entail, as Zask points out, the contradictory project of “making” people free, and to presuppose the unlikely premise that educational institutions know what freedom or criticality are. But I’m most interested, here, in the part of the interview that proposes a definition of what’s essential about philosophy: a critique of values.

It’s not an easy exercise, at present, to come up with a well-defined area of inquiry that’s essentially philosophical. Many areas of inquiry that formerly “belonged” to philosophy — physics, society, politics, the nature of “man” or of language, the structure of thinking — have over time (and not without struggle) developed autonomous disciplines of their own, which contest and quite often dominate the intellectual terrain formerly occupied by philosophers. There are plenty of philosophers who still write about all this stuff, of course, but these objects are no longer exclusively philosophical, and as André Pessel has put it, “if this link with constituted knowledges [in other domains] disappears, philosophy sees its field extraordinarily limited and reduced to an exclusive study of subjectivity.”

Without going into great detail about competing conceptions of philosophy (see some American examples), it seems to me that some of the more obvious options aren’t terribly thrilling. Consider some of the most well-known: there’s philosophy as the conceptual foundation of all the other sciences, or (in an alternative version) philosophy as the conceptual handmaiden of the sciences (ie, the philosophers show up to help scientists “clarify” their theoretical ideas); there’s philosophy as a specialized conceptual inquiry into fairly narrow but autonomously philosophical domains; there’s philosophy as the history of ideas; in a more instrumental version, there’s philosophy as a place for building “skills” in critical thinking (as in the lycées).

It seems to me that there’s something to be said for most of these fairly academic projects, though I’m especially skeptical of the first one. But most of them (leaving aside the first and last) don’t afford a particularly exciting public role to the field. Of course, in France we also see more politicized conceptions of philosophy: philosophy as (in effect) the training ground for public intellectuals (always a small group), philosophy as “class struggle at the level of ideas” (via Althusser), philosophy as an emancipatory project (often cited at Paris-8). Here again, however, the latter two are extremely marginal and the first, ultimately, is fairly elitist.

Zask’s proposal for philosophy as a critique of values, in this light, has the advantage of being potentially open to all, sociopolitically interesting, and not necessarily a buttress of the status quo — without, however, necessarily becoming self-marginalizing (as so much marxist philosophy tends to). As an ethnographer of philosophers, obviously my relationship to philosophy is a bit strange, but let me just say that while I’m ambivalent about some of the field’s more grandiose claims, the idea of a field that does critique of values seems pretty compelling. A lot of anthropologists want to do work like this, but disciplinary norms of empiricism and relativism tend to prevent us from producing very well-theorized normative work.

Part of the answer involves this poem I came across today, by Jean Herold Paul, a Haitian doctoral student in philosophy at Paris-8 (a department that turns out to have long-standing links with Port-au-Prince). I’ve translated it with his permission for you all.

The night that we are
(in memory of Jésula and Wilmichel)

bric-a-brac of apocalypses
bric-a-break of our utopias

and if…
and then…
but are we still?

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
a horrible night
where only our dead appear dimly
without name or register
without farewell or burial

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
what’s left of us?

bric-a-brac of apocalypses
bric-a-break of our utopias

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
it’s still night
at least our presence is reflected there
a simple sensation of being somewhere
without knowing who we are
where we are
without knowing with what or with who we are

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
when will we be able to mourn
for ourselves?

“The task of the university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue.”

This strikes me as an interesting take on the way the university finds its place in history. There are so many other ways of imagining the university’s historical trajectory: It’s the proud offspring of Western Europe, spreading around the globe to bring enlightenment. (This sounds like Whitehead, but is oriented towards transmitting a prior civilization rather than creating a new one.) Or it’s the ruin of an elitist institution, bereft of its mission of teaching reason or national culture, a degraded victim of neoliberal processes of corporatization, privatization, and auditing. Or it’s a cyborg composed of part medieval tradition, part incoherent consumerism, part mega-scientific research, a patchwork of past and present struggling to stay in motion.

Whitehead’s future-oriented vision of academic work seems so completely different from the academic life I experience, so laden with tradition, so self-consciously burdened with the past. But it’s not only an interesting historical vision; it’s also an interesting political vision. To say that the university’s task is the creation of the future is also to argue that universities should have a vast amount of political power, since it amounts to making them responsible for the fate of the world. Or at the very least, it amounts to a claim that the university is a very, very important institution.

To whom does this claim appeal? I looked up the quote on Google, hoping to find a link to some book by Whitehead. Instead I found a fascinating and peculiar list. It became obvious that the quote from Whitehead appeals to presidents, commentators, and fundraisers who hope to make the university seem noble. Or, at least, very, very important. The quote is mentioned in these places:

• The University of Wyoming’s strategic plan.
• A speech about universities to Australian journalists.
• A 2005 commencement speech at the University of Buffalo.
• A fundraising appeal from the University of Georgia which suggests that “a deferred gift is the best way to help the University create the future.”
• A speech on environmental quality at the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation. The speech quotes Whitehead in order to praise universities as engines of economic development.
• An announcement for a speech by Stanley Katz, along with a link to the Chronicle article I started with.
• A couple of engineering journals that also mention Katz.
• Finally, the transcript of a speech by Frank Rhodes (ex-president of Cornell University) to the 1998 Commission on the Future at Florida State University. He quotes Whitehead as a way of making the Commission’s task seem more noble, describing Whitehead as “a kind of text that preachers offer at the beginning of sermons.”

What’s especially interesting about this speech by Rhodes is that, after his speech, he answered questions from the floor. One of them was about “what criteria could be suggested for making choices between graduate programs.” That is, what criteria should be used for deciding which programs to fund – or, perhaps, which to kill off. Rhodes acknowledges that the question is painful and wishes that he didn’t have to answer. But he goes on to suggest some criteria for these choices:

• The current ranking of a program (and how far it would have to go to be highly-rated).
• The ‘linkage’ to other campus programs or the ‘added value to the rest of campus.’
• The benefit for the people of the state.
• The contribution of the program to the intellectual life of the campus community.

I could go on about these criteria, in which the highly contradictory values of administrators are on display, in which the values of the businessman, the legislator, the national ranking agencies, and the traditional campus community are all juxtaposed. But for now perhaps it’s enough to observe that we’re back where we started, with the closure of a philosophy department in Florida. The creation of the future requires killing off the past, perhaps? Let’s remember that philosophy was once alleged – by Kant, for instance – to be the master discipline that was more fundamental than all the others. It’s interesting that this erstwhile master discipline doesn’t seem necessary to the university anymore. It will be interesting to see what kind of resistance is offered to the department’s closure. A departmental petition has garnered 1500 signatures, along with some super-interesting justifications and rationalizations in the comments. My favorite:

How can any university call itself great without a Doctorate in Philosophy? Philosophy, it is “the love of knowledge.” Is the University of Florida’s love of knowledge diminishing? Have the courage to uphold the love of knowledge for its own sake, without regard for the potential of financial return. Remain a great university. (#1525)

And indeed, the administrators have lately changed their decision, according to this page: they now plan to suspend ph.d admissions for three years, rather than to close the program entirely. Incidentally, an article in the Independent Florida Alligator indicates that undergrad philosophy enrollments have risen 10% in the past three years.

So in other words, the justification for philosophy is partly “fun” and intrinsic interest (the metaphysics of the Matrix figure in a photograph), but largely and perhaps predominantly economic necessity and marketable skills. Insofar as philosophy is, well, sold this way, it’s suggestive of Bonnie Urciuoli‘s work on the empty terms of liberal arts marketing rhetoric, of what Don Brenneis calls “the consequentiality of the semantically vacuous.” Certainly in this article, it’s unclear that philosophy really teaches skills; and if it does, it’s also unclear that they are particularly vocationally useful.

Careerism in philosophy, incidentally, has been condemned at least since Francis Bacon, who argued in the Advancement of Learning that the urge for “lustre and profession” was exemplary of the error of “the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge.” This article, as far as one can judge from the journalist’s choice of quotes and interview topics, takes precisely the opposite position. Here, philosophy is all about its instrumental value for individual advancement. The journalist emphasizes, with an eye to her reader’s probable doubts about the discipline, that philosophy needn’t be “luxury,” be “frou-frou,” be “people sitting under trees and talking about stupid stuff” (said Onejame about her preconceptions of her major).

Unsurprisingly, the one person who does take a more traditional view of philosophy, as the master discipline that founds all others, is not a student but rather the Chancellor of CUNY, Matthew Goldstein. Goldstein comments that philosophy “is really at the core of just about everything we do. If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.”

Luckily, the journalist manages to discover a less academic function for philosophy: that of reproducing heteronormative sexuality.

Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.

“That whole deep existential torment,” she said. “It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

So even existential torment turns out to be yet another skill, ready to be put to use on the dating market. And the student in question seems quite aware of the fact: content with her instrumentalism.