When I was in college, I saw dysfunctional academic philosophy first hand, the height of irony. In my junior year, two full professors in their prime left the Philosophy Department, and the department went into receivership. To my limited perspective, what I saw was a group of people who did not know how to listen to each other and work together constructively. Of course, there were exceptions, but the ethos was tense. I then went to graduate school where I encountered a different sort of problem: academic snobbery and what struck me in hindsight as abusive academic conditions. Students often existed in fear in an environment where communication about issues of basic existence for a graduate student often lacked transparency. As I saw it and experienced it, the sense of self of students was often disfigured, harmed, or a vice was developed in protection.
I admired the professors around me in graduate school (and there were some) who clearly were responsible to the wider public or who were decent human beings to everyone. But the complete idiocy of much of the ethos of graduate school, built on a prior experience of an entitled, dysfunctional department, led me to resent the university as an institution. I turned to research I found at an institute for advanced studies in early childhood education where I was contributing to a book on a Head Start pre-school and family center system. There, not in graduate school, I discovered what education ought to mean and involve.
I was in search of a different way of doing philosophy. The vestigial analytic / continental divide – itself a poorly reasoned distinction – wasn’t the problem. The problem was deeper in the learning form of institutions of higher education around so-called “philosophy.” The problem was the manner of seeking wisdom.
To be people with each other involves interpersonal relations. We are not in the first place practical or theoretical objects. You are not there for me to manipulate or to use. And I am not here for you to try to fix in a set of things you know about me, as if all I were is an object to be studied. We have to relate developing the form of knowing that is knowing a person, neither know-how nor knowledge-that. Such a manner changes what seeking wisdom involves and is. It demands interpersonal connection and maturity in a way that is uncommon to any philosophy program or department I’ve experienced – and which may be uncommon to research and pre-professional academia in general. The problem with the form runs deep into structural conditions.
The Greek philosophical tradition didn’t have a space for a knowing that was neither theoretical nor practical. That is a discovery of the last several hundred years in the tradition that uses the word “philosophy” to describe itself, and it is a discovery that is still being developed today. To seek wisdom within relational, not theoretical or practical, reason, primarily, is to engage in the multi-wise relation of knowing each other as persons. The value governing it is neither truth nor goodness, primarily, but is a kind of beauty that is found in the harmony of people being in touch with each other. That isn’t sentimental ease, either, but takes work, such as the work of working through disagreement in accountability to each other. What is realized in a process of reasoning relationally is neither a deed done, as it is in practical reason, nor a belief determined, as it is in theoretical reason, but is an event of meeting. From relational reasoning comes trustworthiness and a kind of eye-to-eye friendship that is accountable to the autonomy of people, rather than being an indulgent and possibly immoral fusion. You cannot have the abusive objectification of others found in academic snobbery or competitive abuse and reason relationally. You have to be people with each other and try to have real conversations born out of respect, the farthest thing from an academic game.
Public philosophy, if it is true to its name, has to be led by relational reason, with theoretical and practical reason in pursuit. But for the academics I was unfortunate to encounter along my way in training who still lorded it over others with their intelligence or engaged in cut throat competition and in-fighting, who looked at the world through gradations of status arrayed around them in their will to power, or who had the character of big infants suppressing a perpetual tantrum, there is only flawed relational reason at best. What they think is a person is rather a complicated object that they learn to move around, and thus they must see themselves and their lives, too. Only when academic philosophers start to lose their shells of theory and of practice and be led by the interpersonal will they be in any place to do public philosophy truly.
On APA Connect, Perry Zurn, who works on public issues such as critique of the carceral system, asked the forum:
What are your current strategies for public philosophy, community engagement, and social media outreach?
I replied:
For a variety of reasons, I prefer evolving, community-based discussion groups whose content and form are themselves subjects of community deliberation or, sometimes, whim. For my chair, there is a regular forum on campus, open to the public, that does this. It is called The Ethics Table and interacts with other programs on campus, including a higher profile biennial and occasional lecture series, The Beamer-Schneider Lectures in Ethics, Morals, and Civics, to create criss-crossing community points of contact. [The lectures] ha[ve] historically involved public workshops as well as the main lecture as part of the lecturer visit.
Four years ago, we began a community based discussion group called The Moral Inquiries ~ A Heights Gathering in the basement of a historic used and new books store that is a site of much activity in the Cleveland area. That group has [over] 200 members but actual discussion usually involves 10-12 rotating members floating in and out on discussion topics, readings, and sometimes activities that evolve out of the group's interests and issues of the moment. ...
[B]oth The Moral Inquiries and The Ethics Table and two iterations of the Lectures gave rise to community groups, the one Native Cleveland came out of Kyle Powys Whyte's workshop on decolonization, hosted also by locals Bruce Kafer and Susan Dominguez. The other became a socially engaged art project in conjunction with the family of Tamir Rice during the Cleveland Triennial.
The point is to use community-based discussion – discussion that is deep in its slow moving form -- to generate an "emerging curriculum," if you will -- rather than to try to simply push philosophical content outward onto people. Social media are used for all of these things, but they draw back to the actual in-time discussion of the groups where people can talk face to face with each other -- or they report on those talks to the wider community. The social media are secondary. Slow time is important to all of this -- and community accountability. When the Cleveland Triennial project became a symbolic gesture and left out community processing, it became problematic. But it was a strong idea to begin with.
Last July, I wrote up my experience with some of the things I've just mentioned in Nathan Eckstrand’s Blog of the APA series.
What do you do? Or what are you hoping to do?
This reply reflects the way public philosophy can carry on dialogue across informal spaces in a back and forth between people. The reply to Professor Zurn also contains the core of my approach to public philosophy, that is, to seeking wisdom in a public way and involving public practices:
- I try to integrate academic practices with community relationships, going both ways. E.g., Academic precision can help community reflection, and community pressure for intelligible speech and relevant questions can orient academic practice.
- I think of the academy as part of the city and as having responsibilities to its city in the manner of the responsibilities of being a good neighbor. To me, this is a way of life. When I am out away from my university and in my community, I am to bring my academic training to be helpful and I am to conduct myself with the same norms of intellectual integrity I developed in the academy. Inversely, when I am at the university, I am to have my city in mind and to consider my institution in light of the effects it has on my community.
- I emphasize slow time and human connection over virtuality and the dynamics of marketing and targeted messages which are part of my capitalist and spectacular society.This means I would rather focus my time on a community group that becomes familiar over years than on a soundbyte or a 15 second surge of fame. Those are strange, practical objectifications – not relationships.
- Following on what I learned working with the Chicago Commons Reggio Emilia Head Start Family Centers, I take community concerns to generate the course of inquiry, what more formally is called the curriculum. The name for this is an emergent curriculum, and the idea is basic to independent studies, romanticized views of Oxford tutorials, and some colleges, such as Sarah Lawrence, in which students develop their own majors. I also try when possible to develop my own classes and then the content of my classes emergently. This approach, once again, checks academic inertia when it becomes careerist or aloof from community, and it also helps defeat the instrumentalization of others found in marketing and targeting culture. In fact, it contradicts the very idea of a strategy – from stratēgos, leadership in war.
- I understand the justification of such an approach as flowing from the ordinary meaning of philosophy – a once-neologism for a practice that implies friendship around the search for wisdom, including care and minding of wisdom together with others.There are times when it is justifiable to resist the system, to engage even in legitimate self-defensive strategy in the precise sense. But then the time of friendship is over. If we are engaging in philosophy, we have to abandon strategy. This has implications for the entire structure of education, not simply for public philosophy.
The question of public philosophy is the question of philosophy by and for people – not simply by and for scholars. But this does not mean that scholars cannot act as people and do public philosophy, of course. I’ve suggested some of what is helpful to change – the manner of learning together. When we are not teacher-student or scholar-learner to each other, but are people with each other first, the way in which we create a discussion ought to change. It ought to emerge out of our lives together, rather than being set in a curriculum. And it ought to be moral – interpersonally accountable – first, and only then practical or theoretical as fits where people relate.
Edited on 12.19.21 to remove expired links. For more on the approach, see "Engaged Philosophy."
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
Thank you for this.
You’re welcome, Prof. Rawls. Thanks for reading.
Dear Jeremy:
In the “more of the same” version of my original comment, on the need to fix the lack of UNITY in their Philosophy Department, rather than the lack of diversity, as written by the authors of the article https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/09/tell-us-how-to-fix-the-lack-of-diversity-in-philosophy-department/, I wrote :
Unless you made a mistake, the very post sign of your article is not calling for diverse specialists but reads: WE WELCOME PEOPLE.
Academic diversity, even if necessary, in a Scientific Environment, is a curse and not a blessing, when present in a Philosophic Community.
The reason is simple: a philosopher is searching for wisdom, beyond knowledge and specialization, and well beyond power and leadership.
1. Such as Power relates, among many other things, to Respect, Desires, Temperance, Faith, Equality, Beauty and Collectives of dependent Individuals.
2. Knowledge relates to Coordination, Projects, Prudence, Hope, Liberty, Truth, and Environments of independent Individuals.
3. Wisdom relates to Welcome, Vocation, Fortitude, Charity, Unity (the same Unity that the ideologists of the French revolution despised), Good, and Communities of interdependent Persons.
4. Sanctity, the unrelentless next step forward of the wise, relates to Surrender, Yearning, Justice, Love, Fraternity, “Oneness” (that the Greek Philosophers being polytheistic couldn’t possibly include in the 3D Human Equations of their time, and we can formulate as 4D today), and Environments of transcendent Persons.
As a natural step forward, this professional engineer (half technician and half scientist), relentlessly came to be an amateur philosopher bursting with questions to ask and things to say. Somewhere along the way, and many years ago, I discovered that I was really trying to “listen-admire-meditate-talk-listen-admire-meditate-talk….” mostly with either dead or virtual people, and this of course proved to be impossible.
Thus, besides “listening-talking-listening…” to myself I started commenting and replying to most of the “personal letters” that I received disguised as essays, papers and articles, that even if not addressed to me, appealed to me. Unfortunately, very few of the people, whose letters I commented and replied to, were interested or had the time to engage in “our epistolary game.”
I also found out that instead of “listening-admiring-meditating-talking-listening-admiring-meditating-talking….” to others and “listening-talking-listening….” to myself, I was “reading-interpreting-understanding-meditating-writting-reading-interpreting-understanding-meditating-writting….” to others, and also to myself.
Therefore, I had also given up on the spoken word, and replaced it all together by the written letter.
Then I decided that I came to be more of a “thinking scientist in search of knowledge”, than a “meditating philosopher in search of wisdom”, thus I was back to square one, and, also that I had the right to state that the whole of human philosophy, for the very same reason, have never gone beyond square one either.
However, the engineer and model maker in me, didn’t give up and decided to start from scratch, and after searching for and finding a coherent model of humanity, propose scientists and philosophers in particular to switch all together from theory to model thinking, not to think anything new, but only to think all over again, and this way go beyond the deadly trap of the perceiving and acting of the leader and the understanding and thinking of the specialist, into the admiring and meditating of the wise and eventually the contemplating and praying of the saint.
The 4D model that I chose, I never considered my own, since was already part of my own culture, and even if I could try and explain it in a saga of books, it is simple enough to be formulated in a set of analogous phrases, such as:
I am a selfish individual, inhabited by an altruistic person.
I am Sancho Panza, inhabited by Don Quijote.
….
I am meant to become a body driven by a mind, inhabited by a spirit driven by a heart.
I am meant to become a substance driven by its rationality, inhabited by a subsistent driven her relationality.
I am meant to become a leader driven by a specialist, inhabited by a wise driven by a saint.
I am meant to become power driven by knowledge, inhabited by wisdom driven by sanctity.
I am meant to become a technician driven by a scientist, inhabited by a philosopher driven by a religious person.
I am meant to become action driven by thought, inhabited by meditation driven by prayer.
You certainly are the same.
……..
Since I am a rather lazy person, I decided to base my comment to your beautiful article http://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/23/how-do-you-approach-public-philosophy/, on the same comment above because this way I only need to add a few lines:
I propose to say that, while the driver of the individual is its dynamic rational reasoning, the driver of the person is her relational reasoning. This means to me that the Philosopher’s vocation is to be wise, the Philosopher’s yearning is to become saint and transcend her own Philosophy and even her Philosophic Community.
Extrapolating the above phrase, we can say that the same way some Technicians transcend Technology and become Scientists, some Scientists transcend Science and become Philosophers, the “natural fate” of some Philosophers is to transcend Philosophy and become Religious Persons and eventually saints.
I believe that the most important values of a Philosophic Community are Friendship, Unity, Interdependence, and an ever-increasing taste for Beauty, Truth, Good and “Oneness”.
Intuitively I believe that while Power/Technology/Economy and Sanctity/Religion are Private, Knowledge/Science/Politics and Wisdom/Philosophy are Public.
In our case, if a Public Philosophic Community of interdependent Wise Persons, decides to hide away from us mortals in their mean olympus, such a former Community will decay first into a public pseudo philosophic environment of independent scholar individuals, and inevitably, will decay all the way into a private collective of dependent authoritarian individuals.
Enough of Public Communitarian Philosophy v/s private collective pseudo philosophy.
Since my Chile is a Land of Poets, I wanted to share with you the Manifest of Nicanor Parra, one of the greatest Poets, if not the greatest.:
https://www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/antologia/otros/manifiesto.html
If our poets, indeed, descended from their olympus, to tread this long and narrow strip of land of all and today wander contemplatively through our landscapes, roads and streets, I wonder what are our philosophers, scientists and technicians waiting to follow and descend from their own and meditatively, thoughtfully and actively wander through those same landscapes, roads and streets?
Since my Chile is a Land of Poets, I wanted to share with you the Manifest of Nicanor Parra, one of the greatest Poets, if not the greatest.:
https://www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/antologia/otros/manifiesto.html
If our poets, indeed, descended from their olympus, to tread this long and narrow strip of land of all and today wander contemplatively through our landscapes, roads and streets, I wonder what are our philosophers, scientists and technicians waiting to follow and descend from their own and meditatively, thoughtfully and actively wander through those same landscapes, roads and streets?
I loved your personal and family story, and the pride you show of your Slovak origin. We spent two happy and memorable years in the beautiful Slovakia, in the C.S.S.R times (1980-82). At the time, I worked for a H.A. Simons, a Canadian based company that supplied a turn key expansion of a state-owned pulp mill in Ruzomberok (at the time everything was stated owned, except the People´s relational reasoning as you would probably say).
Even if I want to establish a conversation with you, I am already starting to write you a paper, so, it’s about time to invite you to talk about model thinking and trying and resurrecting the spoken word, now that the same technology that out fashioned her, is ready to bring her back in full glory.
Dear Mr. Perez,
Thank you for your email and especially the long poem by Parra. I’m glad to learn of his work! And I am sorry that I am not writing you in Spanish. I can read it to some extent, but not put together words.
It is hard for me to respond to very long, involved new theories when I have not contextualized them through plain conversation.
But thank you for your genuine response. My initial comment about diversity and unity is simple — I hope it is not seen as trying to be simplifying to you! Both diversity and sameness, unity and multiplicity, are abstractions used to understand how people relate. The main issue in philosophy that both you and the folks of the diversity blog post concern is how to have good relations in philosophy. In a nutshell, I’d say that the diversity folks are pointing to the historical effects of coloniality in philosophy: the ways that patriarchy, racism, and class have deformed relationships in philosophy. And maybe your wish for unity is a different version of a similar concern — that people learn to think together from out of the obstacles that divide us?
As to sainthood and the like, I am initially not inclined to agree. But I also wouldn’t want to quibble. The thing that strikes me as interesting is how you keep noting transcendence of disciplinary roles when one works through the norms involved in them. I think that is true of knowledge for instance, if one is a dedicated scientist. And I think it is true of philosophy, too — in learning its practice of being critical and of seeking wisdom, it makes sense to end up contextualizing philosophy itself as simply a tradition of practices that are not exclusive of ways of seeking wisdom.
Dear Mr Bendik-Keymer:
Thanks for taking your time to try and make sense out of my rather long comment to your appealing (to me) article, without a previous plain conversation, and also for leaving ajar the door of personal communication by just saying Hi¡. For a street amateur Philosopher this is very important.
I also prefer plain conversation before or instead of writing, however, I use writing to some extent to summarize the main topics of our previous conversation.
I try and start any note, comment, email and letter with the magic words: “According to already talked …”
It is also very hard for me to respond to very long texts, when I have not contextualized them through plain conversation.
However, what you rightfully perceived as a “long and involved new theory” is just a straightforward proposition to abandon the dangerous theoretical thinking, that has brought our humanity back to its most primitive form of being, when we were still not capable of talking to each other using words.
Along the way, we have forgotten that is the spoken word and not the written letter our most human characteristic.
Before reading your article I was proposing to convert from theoretical thinking to “model thinking our humanity based on a coherent model of her”.
Today I have reformulated my very proposition to “model relationing and reasoning our …”
After all, I am a “rational substance inhabited by a relational subsistent”, and while my “person driving heart” relations, my “individual driving” mind reasons.
Therefore, I have no further use for the noun thought , and the verb to think.
As you can see in the document “perspectives and view points”, that I ha linked below, today I use the nouns relationing and reasoning, and the verbs to relation and to reason.
https://1drv.ms/x/s!AvAajOJPEFszjrlhZEr6lytoWhfXOg
P.S. Pardon my English, I noticed that I will have to change sanctity for sainthood.
Dear Mr. Perez Krumenacker,
That’s interesting. To my mind, the first time the modern, rationalist tradition of conceptualizing our situation as one of rational substance begins to fray is in Rousseau’s repeated acknowledgement of our constitutive openness to each other as sentient beings (“pitié”). But Rousseau is not systematic with his positions, and it is unclear how he views this basic trans-species sociality he acknowledges interacts with (a) self-consciousness (“amour propre”) and with (b) reason (“raison”).
What strikes me as important, phenomenologically, is that how we reason does not really allow us to cleanly distinguish the two domains (the “relational” and the “rational”). Rather, being socially open to other people is part of being rational, and when one engages in trying to connect with others, one uses a discrete ontology of reasoning (“relational reasoning”). When one tries to know things about the world, one uses a different ontological process of reasoning (“theoretical reasoning”). Yet these processes — which include also a third, “practical reasoning” — are different potentials of reasoning as a general human practice and capacity. And one can see this by the way in which it is possible – by virtue of even making the distinction between the three processes – to discriminate between each in the case and to understand, too, how they cooperate to lead us in living with what or whomever we are considering.
I think of it this way: I come to know someone. In the process, I may think a lot about them and I may try to understand where they come from and so on. I may also develop practices to collaborate with them or even just to hang out. Being with them involves all three forms of reasoning, led by relational reasoning first, because moral accountability to them as a person (relating) anchors and delimits my other ways of trying to know things about them (“theorizing”) and to figure out how to interact with them (“practicing”).
Dear Jeremy:
In that case, you can say that I belong to the postmodern “relationist-and-only-then-rationalist” tradition that seems to be emerging.
After all, Monsieur Rousseau was born in June 28, 1712 and died at 66 in July 2, 1778, and with due respect to his memory and legacy, that we still seem to be trying to read, interpret and understand, he was an encyclopedist but not a wise man, because, he was in fact one of the ideologists, behind the failed and short lived French revolution that started with the overthrowing and later decapitation of king Luis XVI and ended by the taken over by Napoleon as a self-appointed emperor.
The best proof of their “ideologism” was that their partial and misarranged scream: “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”, didn’t even help them to change their little part of the world, however, until today still resonates in the corridors and corners of history.
If they would have been postmodern “relationists-and-only-then-rationalists”, like we are becoming, their scream would have been complete and the words would have been arranged in the right sequence: “Egalité, (and only then) Liberté, (and only then) Unité (the mysteriously forgotten or despised word and Vital for Philosophers, Communities and Peoples), (and only then) Fraternité.
As we “seem to be” a “selfish, individual, and rational substance” inhabited by an “altruistic, personal and relational subsistent”, we can say that our rationality is selfish, individualistic and eventually collectivistic, and therefore, in order not to harm others, needs to be subordinated to our altruistic relationality that is altruistic, communitarian and eventually personal.
A few quick thoughts which are hopefully relevant…
First, I recall seeing a documentary about savants who all had remarkable abilities for processing abstract data. Each of them also had a substantial social disability of one kind or another.
A similar phenomena exists to a less exaggerated degree among programmers and perhaps philosophers as well, an advanced ability to process abstraction married to limited social skills. On the street this is often called “nerd syndrome”.
The point here is that to some degree social tensions in philosophy departments may be built in at a fundamental level, and thus largely beyond the reach of moral sermons. A sense of humor may be the most rational response to that which is unlikely to change.
Second, it seems helpful to make a clear distinction between philosophy, and the philosophy business. Philosophy requires us to follow reason ever it may lead, and the philosophy business requires one to color fairly carefully within the lines of an academic group consensus. These conflicting agendas probably generate pressures on some folks which they experience a difficulty in managing, leading perhaps to less than ideal social interactions.
Hi Mr. Tanny,
Please take a look at the sources I mentioned. They answer the questions you raised to me.
The sources, again:
Stephen Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint (Harvard, 2006)
R. Burnor and Y. Raley, Ethical Choices, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 2018) — esp. the chapter on personal autonomy and moral agency.
They should be possible to order through an interlibrary loan at a local public library.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer,
I enjoyed your piece, but I was puzzled at the end.
I’m interested to know more about what you mean when you say,
“If we are engaging in philosophy, we have to abandon strategy.”
And for you to say something about the implications “for the entire structure of education, not simply for public philosophy.”
I think of Public Philosophy as inherently strategic, so I would really like to know what you mean.
Sincerely,
Mark Sanders
Dear Professor Sanders,
Thanks for reading closely and for your question. I was struck by the use of “strategy” in Prof. Zurn’s initial question. Since 2016, I’ve found myself arguing with theorists who use practical strategy centrally in their political thinking. A good example of this was around an essay in Hyperallergic called “Reconsidering the Aesthetics of Protest.” The film critic and artist John Hulsey objected to it in e-Flux with an essay called “Reconsidering the Aesthetics of Liberalism,” and I replied with an essay in e-Flux called “The Neoliberal Radicals.” He replied in e-Flux with a piece called “Civil Disobedience and its Discontents,” and I ended my end of the dialogue with an essay in e-Flux called “Democracy as Relationship.” That exchange gets at the question you asked in a specified way, emergently.
This past year, I published The Wind ~ An Unruly Living, a short book, that builds to a letter in which the question of political strategy is addressed by a fictional character then in his 70s who urges radicals to think about what civic friendship means and implies. That book is open access in e-version.
I can’t post any of the links to the aforementioned writing here or they will activate the spam filter on this blog. But if you search for the titles with my name or the name of Hulsey, you will find the exchange and then the book. The book, I think, presents the most elaborated answer.
That said, the basic answer is that strategy is a term of warfare. As such, it projects others as objects that must be handled practically, even obliterated or conquered. It thus is closed to relational reason. To think about politics from relational reason implies beginning with thinking of politics from relationship — from basic moral accountability to others and within moral relations. I think here both of Darwall and of Powys Whyte, but also of Pettit. There is a much broader tradition here. I write about it briefly, naming a number of names, in a forthcoming post on this blog about two books I wrote with relational reason leading their formal construction. I will link to it back here when it is posted.
As to the structure of education, I am thinking broadly of the role of strategic planning in higher education and the implications it has for how it binds together other elements of neoliberalism, including the ways in which students and parents increasingly approach education. To contrast education as a practice of warfare – a war machine – with education as relationship is to point away from neoliberal educational forms and toward the kind of emergent curricula and environment that I referred to in discussing the early childhood educational approach in this essay here.
Is there something in particular I can speak to more? The question you raise gets at a fundamental issue and I am obviously just sketching broad areas in reply.
Also, I should say that one thing I love about philosophy is the way in which it can find a conclusion that then demands revisionist or even revolutionary implications down the line. One often doesn’t know what it would be to live with these implications or what would become of society. One then has to use the conclusions as principles of construction and see what emerges. I think this is true of the conclusion about rejecting strategy. There may be times for legitimate warfare, but they should not set the default logic of education or of philosophy.
What were you considering with your view that public philosophy is essentially strategic? I want to understand your idea.
Sincerely,