Entitled Opinions: Philosophy Outside Academia

The task of making the case for philosophy and the humanities has never been more urgent. Nevertheless, it has become the province of a shrinking coterie who prefer solitary insight to Snapchat, something with a metaphysical bite rather than bytes. Quo vadis? Some years ago, the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski outlined one option for the future during our interview: “We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish — and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.” It may come to that. I’ll opt for a less exclusive option: we may still learn to make a persuasive case for the humanities to a wider public.

I’ve made a few experiments to create a bigger public audience for books, literature, and human thought at Stanford and in the world beyond, all were supported by my social media efforts. The first, my high-traffic blog The Book Haven, is a solo effort. The second, a public event series called Another Look, for short works we do not feel have received the attention they merit, is a team effort. And in the third, the radio/podcast series Entitled Opinions, I am entirely in service to someone else’s legacy.

Fifteen years ago, Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, an acclaimed author and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, decided that the humanities were not making the best use of the mass media. So he took matters into his own hands: he trained to become a radio host for an hour-long talk show Entitled Opinions on the Stanford radio station KZSU. The episodes became podcasts, that now have devoted fans all over the world – from Australia to China, Mexico to Russia. One blogger called the intellectually powered interviews, broadcast from the Stanford radio station  KZSU (90.1 FM) and available for free download on iTunes, “one of the most fascinating, engaging podcasts in any possible universe.”

“I believe in it,” Harrison said. “And the reason I believe in it is that at Stanford we are dwelling in a garden of ideas. I know how much desire there is outside academia to have an ‘in’ on the kinds of conversations we have.” He said in a 2008 interview that he wants to “show people what exactly it means to devote your life to an author like Proust or the idea of mimetic desire, as René Girard has done. In other words, I wanted to turn to all the people I know and have come to know for 20 years and get them on the air for an hour. All of them, almost invariably, have been fascinating.”

He has recorded about 240 conversations since 2005, featuring some of our era’s leading figures in literature, philosophy, science, and cultural history, including Richard Rorty, René Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Shirley Hazzard, Orhan Pamuk, Colm Tóibin, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Ehrlich, Michel Serres, Hayden White, and Abraham Verghese. Yet Harrison had never received a penny to support more than a decade of programming, and he learned on his own the technical side of radio broadcasting.

For many around the world, Entitled Opinions is a lifeline to the bigger universe of intellectual thought. Perhaps most moving are the letters received from those who find the program a lifeline – a woman name Aqsa in Pakistan protested the intellectually stultifying effects of a brutal religious fundamentalism and that, with Entitled Opinions, said, “I am finally getting my oxygen.” Another listener emailed to say: “your show accompanied me through pretty stressful times of intense military and political conflicts in Israel, when heavy objects were falling from the sky on both sides of the border and people were saying pretty dreadful things about other people. … The shows certainly helped me remain sane.”

Clearly, Entitled Opinions, available on iTunes, was no secret. But I thought it should be better known – familiar to everyone who loves literature, philosophy, ideas. There were reasons that was not so. In 2017, the Entitled Opinion website still used the antiquated html format, with a long, unmemorable, alphabet-soup URL. Searching for past shows was clumsy and often impossible. Visitors had to scroll down through a seemingly endless chronological list of past episodes to find what they were looking for. Its future seemed at the mercy of technological advances.

I teamed with Harrison to plan for a bigger future for Entitled Opinions a few years ago. A generous donation from former Stanford President John Hennessy helped fund a website redesign, with easily searchable programming and a home of its own that was not in a hard-to-find corner of the French and Italian Department website.

I argued that there was nothing on either the new or old website to indicate what a listener would hear in the particular podcast – a powerful disincentive for anyone thinking to invest an hour. Not everyone will gamble an hour of their precious time that way. Jazz scholar Ted Gioia, a master of the social media, had counseled me that the missing component in our modern cyber-edifice is this: while there is much transferring text to visual images, tweets, audio, and so on, there is comparatively little transfer going in the opposite direction – that is, turning audio and visual content into text. A few synoptic paragraphs with quotations from the episode would entice as well as inform potential listeners.

We forged a partnership with the Los Angeles Review of Books, establishing a podcast channel for Entitled Opinions that would bring more visibility to the program and draw new audiences. We also struggled to get a presence on social media – no small thing either, as Harrison was at first resistant to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. He cherished the cult status of Entitled Opinion, and emphasized the whole message of Entitled Opinions was for long thoughts over short ones, through the medium of intensive hour-long conversations. I was sympathetic. But in today’s world, to get the word out without using social media is to try to get the word out without getting the word out.

Now we are taking the next step: we are creating lightly edited transcripts and pitching them to the international media to spread the word about Entitled Opinions. Harrison’s interview with German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk ran in translation in Die Welt. The original English transcript is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books. The first of a two-part interview with French thinker René Girard ran in England’s Standpoint; the second is scheduled for Zurich’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which has also run a translation of Harrison’s interview with American philosopher Richard Rorty. The Chronicle of Higher Education has published part of a transcript of a conversation with “metahistorian” Hayden White.  More are on the way. (Both the Girard interviews will be published in my forthcoming Conversations with René Girard, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2020.)

How long will we hold back time? The mp3 format is already a little passé, and I don’t know who will be around in the coming decades to transfer two or three hundred recorded interviews, some of them of historic importance, to the next media format. Far-fetched? It’s happening already in other media. Bits of our culture are disappearing, without fanfare or protest. For example, the renowned film A Month in the Country – Another Look featured J.L. Carr’s 1980 masterpiece in 2015 – may no longer exist in a high-quality original. It’s happened more locally with Stanford News Service videos that are lost or irretrievable. People trust the cloud to save us, but there’s nothing as impermanent as a cloud.

This project, more than the others, made me aware of how much the transient is in service to the enduring. It’s part and parcel with public scholarship in the modern era. So many of these castles-in-the-air will go poof – and as I write this retrospective of my work with literary public scholarship, I have retraced my steps and discovered so many broken links, so many websites that have disappeared, so much that has vanished behind a paywall or is otherwise irretrievable. It’s the nature of our evanescent cybersphere, our provisional time. That’s why, in the end, I’m mistrustful of anything that doesn’t have a print component – hence my recent effort with Entitled Opinions.

What would I advise philosophers trying to break into these new media? It is hard to develop recipes in a world where so much is changing so fast. I can only share my own story. In the end, there is no substitute for flexibility and vigilance. We have to keep an eye out for opportunities to reach new audiences.

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This article has been adapted from an essay that will appear in Literary Criticism as Public Scholarship (edited by Rachel Arteaga and Rosemary Johnsen), under contract with Amherst College Press.

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Cynthia Haven

Cynthia Haven is a 2018/19 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She writes regularly for The Times Literary Supplement, and has also contributed to The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, as well as a visiting writer and scholar at Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Her book, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, was published by Michigan State University Press in spring 2018. It was named one of the top books of 2018 by The San Francisco Chronicle.