‘…do not block inquiry…’!

I suspect Setiya is largely correct on the particulars of his critique (which makes me yearn for the Kitcher of yesteryear who penned brilliant stuff on science and democracy), but I am perhaps more perplexed than he is about the idea that philosophy is “valuable in itself,” much as I’ve been about the locution “art for art’s sake.” If Kitcher, however mistaken his characterization of contemporary philosophy, would like to see more philosophy with some relevance, however modest, to the myriad political, economic (in the sense of moral and political economy), technological/industrial, and environmental/ecological problems of our age (assuming most of us have some notion of what these are, for it would be too tedious to specify them), I’m in wholehearted agreement. And that of course does not rule out philosophers dealing with more existential and metaphysical issues, or work on more specialized topics that may in the first instance be of interest to only one’s colleagues in the profession (as long as we can—eventually—ascertain some relation or relevance to the big picture), for I’m in favor of both topical and methodological pluralism (although there should be more of the former than the latter) albeit within principled constraints: if we are capable of discerning or appreciating the motives and reasons that animate such philosophizing so as to reveal its value; its moral significance if not urgency; its possible contributions to the both the chronic and novel problems that afflict us; its warrant or justification in terms of the relief of human suffering or the pursuit of human welfare, well-being, or happiness; or its illumination of our individual and collective responsibilities or how best to pursue the both the common good and “the Good” (I’m inclined to think much of this requires utopian imagination and thought; at the link, see in particular William A. Galston’s characterization of same from his Justice and the Human Good (1980).

Some of the more conspicuous problems of professional philosophy (as I’ve noted here before) remain more or less those well identified some years ago in the edited volume by Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? (Open Court, 1989). Personally, like Kitcher (and the late Hilary Putnam), I’m attracted to Deweyan pragmatism (that may be a peculiarly American disposition) as well as what has been loosely characterized as “therapeutic philosophy”(which, apart from, say, contemplation, self-examination and meditation, often entails what John Cottingham aptly calls ‘spiritual exercises,’ which are found in both religious and non-religious philosophical traditions) in keeping with a quote from Epictetus that I first came across in Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994): “Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sickness of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.” The diminution or amelioration of the causes and effects of human suffering or even, as in Buddhism, the possibility for the elimination or transcendence suffering on the one hand, and the achievement of human joy, happiness, or flourishing (eudaimonia) on the other, are in effect two sides of the same coin. For the Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics, notes Nussbaum, “philosophy is above all the art of human life.” The medical analogy central to this conception of philosophy plays an intriguingly similar if not identical role to the very same analogy used in Buddhism (and this approach to ‘the emotions’ or the passions is what for the Buddhist falls under the larger rubric of ‘mental afflictions,’ is in many respects the same as well). “Empty and vain” is any philosophy, on this account, not conceived along the lines of an “art of human living.”

Three recent example of this sort of philosophy are Susan James’ Spinoza on Learning to Live Together (Oxford University Press, 2020), Amy Olberding’s The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (OUP, 2019), and Agnes Callard’s Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (OUP, 2018). (A wider sample of possible titles is found in my compilations on ‘The Emotions;’ ‘On Human Nature, Personhood and Personal Identity;’ ‘Beyond Inequality: Toward a Moral and Political Economy of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing;’ and ‘Individual and Shared (or ‘Collective’) Responsibility.’). I’ve also found some recent work on Hume’s philosophy that speak to questions of human character, virtues and vices, and collective co-existence in a “naturalist” vein to be eminently deserving of our attention. The idea the philosophy should be centrally concerned with ethically or even spiritually (normative) “ways of living” is of course likewise found in classical Chinese worldviews (Daoist, Confucian, Mohist…) and Indic philosophical schools that grew up within religious traditions (Nyāya, Vaiśesika, Sāmkhya, Yoga, Mīmāmsā, Vedānta, Jaina, and Buddhist). In Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton University Press, 2012) John M. Cooper (and after Pierre Hadot) characterizes all of classical Greek philosophy in much the same manner: “In antiquity, beginning with Socrates … philosophy was widely pursued as not just the best guide to life but as both the intellectual basis and the motivating force for the best human life….” Of course I cannot legislate—nor do I want to—what kinds of philosophy professionals do or might practice, but I will continue to argue if not agitate on behalf of those sorts of philosophizing I find intellectually availing, politically and morally responsible if not emancipatory (as in some species of Marxism), and “spiritually” wise or liberating (from psychoanalysis to Pātañjala Yoga and Buddhism).
 
 

Whenever I encounter the rhetoric of “purity,” I’m off the bus.