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One of the aspects of my undergraduate education that I found most disappointing was the orientation toward philosophy of my fellow truth-seekers. Often, as their mouths would have it, they had a deep and abiding love for the pursuit of wisdom. It was their actions that demonstrated evidence to the contrary. You would often hear chatter before class about how little, how briefly, or how shallowly they had read. Sometimes this would be with the tone of boastfulness and sometimes it would be with the tone of pleading (i.e., please contribute to the discussion so I am not called on). Some would have earnest conversations before signing up for a class about how little work you could ‘get away with’ doing under the auspices of some particular professor. In short, many of my fellow undergraduates did not live up to the dedication to philosophy that they professed.
This is only to be expected, I suppose, when the class fulfills some university-level
requirement and the reasons many are there are brutely instrumental. What I was not expecting, and what troubled me, was the preservation of some simulacrum of that attitude even at upper levels. That is, some ghost of it was there in courses where the students were supposedly there out of a genuine and abiding interest in the content of the course. It was no longer pride, or so it seemed to me, with which they declared their unpreparedness for contributing to a truth-seeking dialogue—but it was a kind of languid acceptance, like they knew no other way to be. One just did not read something they did not ‘have to.’
I have been told by many people from a wide variety of universities that this is fairly
typical—I expect you will find so, too. Myself, I found this rather demoralizing, and it did not, in my view, beget the kind of rigorous dialectic I had always hoped I would find in the inner sanctum of philosophy departments. I felt, by and large, on my own. I was quite excited, then, to go to graduate school. I was once again sure that this, this would be the time when everyone would be deeply and intrinsically motivated in the way I had been seeking. That I would finally be surrounded by others with whom I could share a journey toward the True and the Good. In a way, I was right. I am thrilled with my department, and I am surrounded by people willing to go intrepidly beyond what we ‘have to’ do. The effortful and tireless engagement in dialogue is exactly what I had always hoped.
So much for the positive. There is something else I have noticed, though, at graduate
conferences and in private conversation with my peers that troubles me nearly as much. I think we have something of the reverse of the problem I encountered in my undergraduate education. The effort is all there, the engagement is clear and manifest, it is now the words which betray something different. Many graduate students, it seems to me, have adopted a kind of ironic distance from the material. They will defend (quite fervently) views that, they later say flatly, they do not take all that seriously. They will say, moreover, that they do not think philosophy is after truth, that there is no such goal to be found (except maybe in some empirical sciences, depending on their particular bent) and that philosophy is only a sort of self-contained language game which they play according to accepted rules as though it were chess. Fun, sure, but nothing worth taking all that seriously.
If you are anything like me, you are deeply troubled by this ironic distance, by this thinly
veiled melancholy. It amounts, as far as I can tell, to an unconditional surrender in our attempt to live an examined life and to understand the world around us insofar as we can. I do not think that such skepticism is warranted—or at least, and I am quite sure of this, those who view it in such a defeatist light have not dedicated the requisite time to ensuring that all the pathways which exist really are dead-ends. They could not have. A lifetime may not be enough time, never mind less than a decade. I will not speculate too much about the causes of this philosophic malady. Doubtless, it is more commonly associated with certain philosophical schools or doctrines, but the question of causative priority rears its head if I think to attribute it to those.
I implore those who have been caught up in that ironic detachment to give it up. I know
that it offers some degree of perceived safety. They can afford to feel an intellectual defeat as one feels a loss in chess, potentially embarrassing or humbling, but not worth getting seriously upset over. It’s just a game, after all, even if it happens to be one you take quite seriously (meaning you spend a lot of time working at it). On the other hand, when you hold earnest beliefs about how you ought to live your life and what renders things worth doing, a serious intellectual defeat can threaten to upturn a solemn and important part of how you view yourself and the goodness or badness of your life. As an easy example: if I have sacrificed some great pleasure on Kantian grounds, and now face an objection to Kant’s ethics that strikes me as persuasive, my view of myself as a good man who has overcome a great temptation is transformed to a view of myself as a rube.
This, though, points the way to why we should prefer to take philosophy seriously. Say
that there is truth, right and wrong ways to be, and so on. This is not so great a concession, since if the contrary is true we might as well give up arguing about it anyway. Now, if you have landed upon the right (or, if you prefer, most defensible) view and yet hold it at an ironic distance, it is a shallow kind of victory. You do not, I suppose, live your life according to such doctrines. You do not seriously believe the conclusions it issues in, and so it shapes your view of the world only superficially. If I have found the Good and the True and hold each at arms length, I may as well not have found them at all—indeed, it might be better to say I haven’t really found them, though I may mouth the doctrines like a drunk man quoting verse without understanding the meaning contained therein. Take the views and arguments seriously and you may win all—or come close enough to win some. Keep them at arms length and you ensure you will lose. Only this time, it will not merely be a game that you have lost.
What’s more, you’ll join an intellectual community who will earnestly support your
efforts. I am always happy to talk to someone if I think we are both aiming at the truth, no matter how we disagree, but someone who takes none of it on board and holds positions to see how far they can take them is only playing at what I take quite seriously. In playing at it, they do something entirely different, and our attempt at dialogue will inevitably sputter.
Not so incidentally, and perhaps you will have guessed it by now, I once counted myself
among the ironically distant. Philosophy felt more like a fun game, then, and less like every issue was a fight for the very soul of humanity. However, I am now convinced that I was deluding myself when I thought it was mere fun and games. If our souls are all at stake, we had better fight like they are and not like we stand only to lose face.
Zac Odermatt
Zac Odermatt is an incoming philosophy PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received an MA in philosophy from Florida State University. His research mainly considers virtue and the normativity of ethics through a synthesis of historical and contemporary approaches. He also maintains research interests in transcendental idealism, Arabic philosophy, and metaphilosophy.
