“This project of re-envisaging, looking at past ideas, and developing new ones to deal with our difficult situation will take the work of many people…”

The following is a guest post by Helen De Cruz, professor of philosophy and Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University.

The post was written last year (a version of it appeared at Professor De Cruz’s blog, Wondering Freely). At the time, she was suffering from a protracted illness, and since then her health has continued to worsen.

“Peng/kun”, illustration by Helen de Cruz

A Manifesto for a Future Philosophy
by Helen De Cruz

I want to survive for many reasons: to experience friendship, love, and connectedness, to be with family, care for them, enjoy their company, to mentor students, to play and enjoy music, to delight in art and in natural beauty.

But I also have reasons for survival tied up with my work as a philosopher and a scholar. Therefore, I wish to articulate a vision of what I want to do with the hopefully remaining decades, if I can have them. In any case, I hope that this manifesto might inspire others as this is a work for many people, not isolated individuals.

I feel we are at a precipice, at a momentous time. We are struggling societally, morally, spiritually. We need a new beginning. We need a new spiritual anchoring. Everyone is browbeaten into apathy, and there seems to be a joyless sameness all around. Also, everyone is perpetually overworked, even in jobs formerly considered luxury positions (such as academia). People have lost hope, limping from unresolved crisis to crisis: the financial crash, covid, the climate crisis, Gaza, the rise of authoritarian regimes…

What can philosophers do in all of this? We are central to finding a way out of our present unsustainable and soul-crushing trajectory.

We must attend to the old philosophical plumbing, as British philosopher Mary Midgley calls it.

We tend to think of philosophy as extra—the cream of the crop, the idle speculation we can only indulge in once all our basic needs are met. Midgley’s humble plumbing metaphor challenges this. Rather than the ornate wallpaper of the house, philosophy is its rumbling unglamorous heart. It is what creates the conditions of our fulfillment of basic needs. It is, like plumbing, an invisible but crucially important infrastructure that underlies all our doings in society: how we relate to each other, how we relate to animals, plants and the natural world. As with actual plumbing, we usually only begin to notice it when it goes wrong.

Our plumbing is no longer fit for our purposes. Perhaps it never was. The prevailing ideas with political currency have shown themselves to be morally, spiritually, and otherwise bankrupt. Christofascism, for instance, has won many recent victories in electoral terms but it’s clear that Christianity’s decline in the US is rapid (more rapid than polling agencies like Pew predicted), and the successes such as total bans of abortion have been secured by stacking the courts (including but not only the Supreme Court), creating policies that go against the will of the people. The Christ of this nationalist and white supremacist visions is riddled with internal contradictions, and cannot be a good guide or a beacon.

Old and established robust political views that worked well in the past do not seem to be working anymore. The liberal consensus has been shattered, there is a plethora of postliberal ideas fomenting in different corners of society. Political parties are by and large devoid of vision. Hovering up the bigoted anti-immigrant vote seems to be the main game. There’s no ambition whatsoever to be clear-eyed about what a future could look like other than more of the same Manichean posturing. Zombie ideas, which were never good to guide policy, continue to reign, while good ideas fail to be adopted. There is no solace to be found in the billionaire ideologies du jour, either, such as longtermism/TESCREAL and related eugenicist and utilitarian visions of the future, or putting our hopes in AGI, which may prove our salvation, or may spell our doom. This constellation of religious-like ideas based on pseudoscience will not help us to flourish.

American pragmatists such as Jane Addams and John Dewey have argued that we should examine our present situation and see if our philosophical ideas are still fit for their purposes. There are situations where our everyday routines break down, where, as John Dewey (1939, 33) put it, “there is something the matter”; this is a situation where “there is something lacking, wanting, in the existing situation as it stands, an absence which produces conflict in the elements that do exist.” In Jane Addams’s view, each generation, and the problems it faces, is confronted with a fresh test to “judge its own moral achievements” (Addams 1902, 2).

As Addams points out, behavior that used to be sufficient to lead a good life can fall short at later times. She pointed at wealthy ladies of her own milieu (Republican upper-class women) who thought you were morally fine if you did not steal your dinner. But the inhumane conditions under which immigrant families in Chicago lived in the early 1900s were clearly somehow related to how these fine ladies lived. Simply not stealing your dinner isn’t going to cut it, in moral terms. Similarly, we are under severe threat of catastrophic climate events (some of which already happening) and it is clear that just living normally, as a society, will not suffice to ward this off.

At this very crucial juncture where the long-term stability and existence of our structures is under threat, we will need philosophers (inside and outside the academy) to envisage alternative ideas for us. This is to engage in what Eric Schliesser calls “philosophic prophecy.” Borrowing from Quine, who echoes Midgley, philosophical concepts are, he says “devices for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” To engage in philosophical prophecy is to “create a shared horizon for our philosophical future.”

This does not mean that we can just wipe the slate clean and forget all the previous philosophy. Far from it. One beautiful aspect of philosophy is that Plato, Mengzi, or Nagarjuna can be just as relevant for us today as they were in their time. But we cannot do it without translation: we need philosophers who can help “disclose the near or distant past,” (as Schliesser puts it), that is, to help to show us how these older philosophical ideas are relevant and can help us address current problems. We can flexibly reinterpret, reimagine, add our own ideas, subtract.

Philosophic prophecy is not so much about predicting the future (always a perilous business) but about creating possible futures: by envisaging these futures, by showing that they are among our possibilities, we can help to create them. In this respect, they can be sometimes self-fulfilling. But they can also fail.

And so we can imagine different conceptions of work, play, how we govern ourselves, how we approach the climate crisis, how we deal with communicable diseases, how we treat housing shortages and unhoused people. Even if you fire every philosopher on the planet, philosophy will stick around, and there will be ideas in the background (on fairness, benevolence, the relationship between economy and people) that will have a huge impact on how we approach these things.

In the time I have left, I hope to outline a vision of our interconnectedness and mutual vulnerability, about what it means to live on this planet which is in a precarious state (in some respects) due to our unbridled impact on it.

I don’t just mean to do environmental philosophy (though also that) but to develop a broader vision of what it means to be a human being—a radical philosophical anthropology, if you will. What is a human person in all of this? For me, spirituality and religion (which are topics we often tend to shy away from) are an integral part of human experiences, and so we need to think about what place these (ought) to have in our lives, how they can help us to flourish. I think humans should be more useless (in Zhuangzi’s use of this term), but I think that human culture should serve our needs, which are also the broader needs of the spirit. I take inspiration from William James and Leslie White that our biological needs also include play, rest, and recreation (see a 4-minute video where I explain this).

I’ve been developing a philosophy in which wonder, delight, joy and interdependence are at the heart of humanity—where, to borrow from Lorde and Spinoza, you have to realize yourself. You should realize yourself fully, and not see yourself as this instrument for a further end (even a further end you find good, such as some noble cause). That is, I want for all of us Lordean survival, not the mere safety of having only your material needs (barely) met while you spiritually whither. In Wonderstruck, I hoped to get people out of their rut and to bring them into a hopeful, philosophical state by which they become more open to the world and not just what we are fed through the various channels of outrage politics and the like. It’s basically a kind of philosophical therapy based on Descartes’s Passions of the Soul.

In later works, I hope to show how spiritual, philosophical frameworks are needed to deal with this crisis and how we cannot replace these with science. Science and philosophy (and other humanities) are partners in helping us, they’re not interchangeable, but do different things and accomplish different goals even as they are in dialogue. An empirical paper is soon forthcoming (much delayed because of illness) on scientists and their spiritual, religious, and other views on oneness (based on many hours of interviews with 35 natural scientists), which I think will clarify what I am talking about. And I have more works I hope to develop when I feel better.

As philosophers we should not, I strongly feel, waste our time with writing stuff that is not worthwhile but that we think will be mainly good for CVs or for grants—especially if we can afford to do so (via tenure, to the extent it still exists, for example). There is more important and more urgent work to do.

This project of re-envisaging, looking at past ideas, and developing new ones to deal with our difficult situation will take the work of many people. It will not only require philosophers but also anyone else who is drawn to prophetic visions of futures that are grounded in our understanding of the past and how the world works. Many people have begun this, and I hope more will do so.