How We Think about the Life & Practice of Philosophy, part II. Part 1 can be found here.
About a quarter century ago, I was part of a community that took seriously the idea that anything can be philosophical. A dozen years ago, I began to recover how finding anything philosophical can be rigorous. Today, there seems to be a subculture in our discipline set to explore that rigor and to bring it into teaching and learning, if not writing and research. In this short essay, I’d like to explain the idea as my community understood it a quarter century ago, touch on my recovery of it over a decade ago, and point to the small-scale movement to approach how we might teach that anything can be philosophical.
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Certainly, ancient philosophical schools taught that anything can be philosophical, for philosophy was a way of life and anything we come upon in living could be filled with sense. But in late twentieth century, American academia inside a research university, the community in which I first studied came to the idea that anything can be philosophical through phenomenology and deconstruction.For all I found dissatisfying about phenomenology’s pretension to being a “rigorous science” and for all that I found objectionable about deconstruction’s indulgent vagaries, the way each differently charged the sense of everything with excessive meaning made the world alive with potential insight. Whereas the razor-sharp critical thinking we learned in analytic philosophy could find conceptual problems in anything someone said or wrote, it didn’t seem organized by an orientation to search into the world and our lives so as to grow. It wasn’t remotely vulnerable, and it was entirely discursive. Music, painting, dance, sports, even common craft (plumbing, carpentry, cleaning, cooking) were left out of it. Ordinary language philosophy, or least the Vienna Circle, might have linked analysis to demythologization and to recovering the plain sense Orwell praises rightly in his “The Politics of the English Language.” But that’s not how we experienced analytic philosophy. It seemed invested in its intellectual power to judge claims or implied arguments as bad or wrong.
In phenomenology opened up by deconstruction especially, the idea appeared that a good part of philosophical life is coming to appreciate, even to feel, the wide range of ways in which people make sense out of life by finding sense within it. This was moving back upstream behind arguments to intuitions coming through many different forms of life and their sensibilities. It was paradox (going against belief, back upstream, as Jean-Luc Marion once said in class). Paradox in this sense paradoxically made sense. It didn’t exclude analytical argument down the line. It began closer to our origins in practical, relational, and aesthetic life and in embodiment too. It wasn’t just in the head to start with.
Moving upstream to intuition was exciting, because it meant that philosophical work had to be much broader than analysis of arguments. Any “register of sense” could be life-guiding if we were faithful to its intuitions and then thought through them (including analyzing arguments involving them). The sense of our intuitions made our lives and arguments richer.
By a “register of sense,” I mean some way that we might see the sense of life. In a register of sense, intuitions about the sense of things are registered, able to enter reflection, conjecture, argument, even theory. Paintings are registers of sense. So are dance works. Or sports practices. Meditative arts. Religious rituals. Community traditions. Craft practices – even what some master plumber tells another they can learn from working adhesives and metals together, how doing so time and time again develops a habit when approaching the disconnection of things in life.
Registers of sense become philosophical when we make explicit the sense of life available through them and when we search our sense of life with their imaginative and practical aid. Anything can be philosophical once registers of sense open up around us in the world.
And so, a quarter century ago, we lived accordingly, not one of us just doing scholarship or hammering away at arguments. Rather, we had to be alive first. We had to be people in media res. The thing we fled was being dead to the world. The thing we sought was life’s complexity. We did this, not so that we could lord it over people intellectually, but so that we would not miss out on living.
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When I went to graduate school, a lot of this sensibility faded. I had to become narrowly professionalized. It sucked, although it was good to learn how rigorous and deep scholarship and systematic argument are. It was good to be in a community where not infrequently ego was checked at the door when it came to objectivity. All that was clean, even if it felt dead too often. I picked up rigor, but lost many registers of sense.
Not surprisingly, after graduate school, my soul needed to recover the sense it had lost. Like a plant once trampled underfoot, I began to spring back into shape with each tumultuous year after my formal studies ended. I wanted to figure out how to incorporate registers of sense into formal education in philosophy through a mode of rigor that would be simple, clean, and open to intensification when one focused on things through it.
I found my way to some approximate rigor through constructing assignments in my philosophy classes that combined registers of sense with analytic and scholarly demands. I developed a formula. I constructed every major written assignment for the semester by joining the personal with the analytical and the scholarly with the practical. When students at American University of Sharjah became focused on modern identity in our early evening conversation circles between students and faculty, I offered a class called “Modern Identity” in which students had to figure out who they were by analyzing their responses to canonical ideas about liberty, equality, and abstraction. This involved extensive journaling combined with scrapbooking, time spent soaking up abstract painting and listening to modernist music, but also close, detailed arguments analyzed in classic philosophical texts and the statement of their own position in argumentative form. The entire class had a practical and relational point: to emerge from the class more confident and reflective about who you are in relation to “modern identity” so that you can live more easily in the rapidly modernizing world of the United Arab Emirates.
Gradually, I came to boil down my formula to something simpler. I realized that what I must do whenever I construct a major assignment is to make sure that students have to articulate their “relation to life.” By our “relation to life,” it turns out I mean something similar to what Dewey meant by “relevance” in his Experience and Education. But my focus wasn’t retrospective – looking to what students bring to class. It was prospective – asking how we might use class to help us live well, starting with living more fully. I came to the view that when added to conventional academics, the relation to life makes for classes that must implicitly recognize registers of sense. After all, how we relate to living depends on the many registers of sense by which we actually live, and nothing short of these will satisfy us in our hearts and bodies.
Several years ago, I co-created a workshop that wanted to explore how to bring ancient philosophy as a way of life, contemporary social practice art, and the history of radical pedagogy together, for it seemed to me that there were useful analogies between each and the others. What I tried to convey at that workshop was my simple formula. I focused on the idea that the relation to life is the key to making social practice art actually philosophical. At the same time, I sought to affirm that social practice art and radical pedagogy (especially early childhood education) open up registers of sense.
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That workshop was a one-off event, and so I wasn’t sure where things would go with developing some kind of rigor in approaching how anything can be philosophical. But last year, I found that there is small movement afoot in our discipline to bring back philosophy as a way of life. It is rooted at the University of Notre Dame through an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. Last summer, the project gathered nearly a hundred people from our discipline in order to share and to experiment with bringing the ancient philosophical spirit of the art of living into our curricula. The idea is to create a network of people who design classes and curricula (such as common cores) in this vein and to strengthen philosophy as a relevant discipline against neoliberalism’s dismantling of the humanities.* Although this coming summer’s conference had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, a conference is planned for late June, 2021.
One of the issues emerging in the network is how to understand rigor when approaching philosophy as a way of life. To that end, I have been working on a simple combination when I think about how I can contribute. I think about how students can learn to develop rigor in working out any class’s relation to life. How can I construct assignments and discussions that bring texts, problems, arguments and the philosophical tradition in relation to our sense of life?
To that end, I often think about how a classroom community can become aware of the many different registers of sense in our lives. After all, photographs are registers of sense. So are postures we consciously or unconsciously adopt with our bodies. Or parties (and can they be more creative than a keg?). Martial arts. Mundane, private rituals of the morning, the week, the family. Informal friend traditions. And many labor practices worn into living – as when an arborist hawing a limb reflects on how a philosophy of cautious pruning relates to how we admonish each other.
* I encourage people who read this blog to see if their institution would be a good fit for this network. Members come from as far as Singapore (Yale-NUS) and South Africa (Rhodes University) and include community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research universities, universities with a religious mission, and non-profit community organizations that do public philosophy. The meetings last a week and are convivial. I’ve never felt the same spirit in another philosophy conference. It is collegial, open to trying new things, down to earth, and sincere.
Small changes to simplify the title and create the header were made June 2022.
