I often ask myself what I hope to accomplish when I engage in public philosophy. How is this mode of address distinct from the “ordinary” philosophy I pursue as an academic? As a co-host of a philosophy podcast called What’s Left of Philosophy, I approach philosophy as the attempt, following the suggestion of David Scott, to generate problem spaces for the public. Scott defines a problem space as a historically contingent “ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes … hangs.” Philosophy in a public mode, at least for me, does not resolve anything for the listener, but involves them in a set of problems that they may not have immediately noticed. Unlike my non-public philosophizing, I am not trying to defend my position on this or that issue by relating it to existing scholarship. What I hope to do is allow the listener to see why something that they may have taken for granted or immediately assumed to be silly can be seen as a problem that requires reflection.
However, I think public philosophy should be more than attempts to provoke the public with idle speculation. What makes public philosophy distinct is the struggle to help the reader make sense of their world. This is not reducible to telling the public how to think. Though this may sound controversial at first, I want to insist that the role of public philosophy is not best described as the pedagogical relationship between teacher and students. The public philosopher is neither an authority figure who has special access to the answers for our social problems nor are they a clever but disinterested observer who can discuss all sides to a given issue. Against these two alternatives, I will defend a vision of public philosophy that aims at making social problems intelligible for the public. The wager is that if the public philosopher makes problems intelligible, then the public will acquire new resources from which to act collectively.
To see a problem requires adopting not only a particular perspective but also set of assumptions and dispositions against which some issue is a source of frustration or a sign of a breakdown somewhere in our social life. Raising a problem is not an attempt to get someone to contemplate some curiosity as if it were a caged animal at a zoo. Problem spaces are not objects of wonder that we can gaze upon from a safe distance secure in the comfort that they will never jeopardize our world. Contrary to this perspective, however, problem spaces bring into relief matters of existential or social urgency. Problem spaces make the case for why this problem deserves the public’s attention rather than another one. Philosophers are known for their thought experiments. Our trolley problems and brains in vats are sources of ceaseless debates. However, it should not be forgotten these thought experiments only strike us as living problems because they are anchored in unresolved conflicts in our social life. It is these unresolved conflicts that public philosophy should make explicit to public life rather than the number of positions one could hypothetically adopt vis-à-vis a given thought experiment.
Much like when W.E.B. Du Bois famously reflected back to the reader the question “what is it like to be a problem?”, public philosophy should involve the listener in a world where there are real stakes to how we characterize and solve problems. What is paradigmatically public in the philosophical writing of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is his attempt at unveiling the world of his readers as an historically fragmented world where civic values are profaned, institutions rendered dysfunctional, and social consciousness made ignorant of itself.
Du Bois involves the public in the problem space of racism by alternating between the excavation of the “strange experience” of being a problem and providing rich sociological descriptions of how American life produces the problematic experience of racism. The text begins with his slightly amused reflections on how whites, who clearly take themselves to be non-racist, cannot help but constantly call attention to his race and assure him of their virtue. They tell him how they know an “excellent colored man” or perform their outrage at the racist policies of the South. Du Bois knows that most people take themselves to be virtuous. They flatter themselves with the reflection of who they wish they were. Souls takes this desire for virtue and turns a mirror on it to demonstrate how this performance of virtue evades confronting the dysfunctions of American society.
To make sense of Souls, the reader must ask themselves why Du Bois sees American society as not only alienating, but in need of reform. Confronting a problem is always an estranging experience, but Du Bois creates a problem space by getting the public to see that the society they take for granted, from another angle, is strange and, perhaps, unjustifiable. If it is unjustifiable, then the public will have to produce new answers for how we may live together. A problem space, unlike abstract thought experiments, draws together the objective and subjective facets of social problems and makes them intelligible.
Thus, public philosophy is always a response to one’s time. A particular public embedded in a specific historical context precedes and calls for a philosophical response. This historical context already presents problems that provoke the philosopher, but these problems may be obscure or inchoate. I think what makes public philosophy distinct for me is that it begins in crisis and not wonder. Philosophy must become public not because it already has the answers but because public thought has become blocked. Given the fractures of our time, we struggle to imagine a collectively coherent and livable future. Without this sense of a coherent and livable future, the present has become disorienting, exhibiting social pathologies that demand clarification. Ernst Bloch, when faced with the rise of fascism in Interwar Germany, observed, “The times are in decay and in labour at the same time. The situation is wretched or despicable, the way out of it crooked.”
The same can be said of our own moment. As we bear witness to increasingly unignorable signs of ecological crisis, we are seeing conflicts within the public between different potential responses to this problem. However, amid these debates there is the gnawing sense that time is not on our side. Indeed, these problems appear to metastasize and proliferate into higher order problems with such unpredictable velocity that it is understandable why so much of our social life feels like it is being torn asunder by rage, distrust, and despondency. At the same moment, when so much of public life seems mired in quicksand, there are contravening tendencies struggling to organize a shared and viable future.
The problem (or meta-problem if you will) is figuring out what relationship public philosophy should have to the discordant rhythms of our times. I find Marx’s famous declaration that we should endeavor to bring about the “self-clarification … of the wishes and struggles of our age” suggestive, but I want to be more precise on how such clarification can be secured. One possible answer would be that public philosophy should just tell the listener what the problems of our times are and give them an answer as if the world were nothing but the classroom writ large. Beyond the fact that there is no reason to think that the philosopher is better suited than non-philosophers for finding answers to world historic problems, we should assume the resolution of one problem will produce new problems that will require new answers.
Public philosophy is not made distinct by virtue of the technical answers it can give to this or that issue. After all, sociology, economics, and political science are also well-equipped to propose answers to the vital problems we face. Public philosophy, for its part, is an inescapably cultural practice whose aim is the cultivation of practical reason. What I mean by practical reason here is the development of our implicit yet shared sensibility for what is unreasonable in our social life. Public philosophy is a cumulative activity that can help habituate public sensibilities to detecting not only what is unfortunate in our world—as if poverty, violence, and ecological decay were mere signs that we live in an imperfect world with imperfect people. Instead, the task is to explicate how and why these misfortunes follow from the lives we are constrained to lead. The cumulative nature of public philosophy means that it is not found in a single essay or person but in our collective practices in a diverse number of fora. The model of teacher and student is inappropriate because it forgets that the public philosopher, a member of the public, is an educator who must also be educated.
Another potential answer would be to think that public philosophy should content itself with demonstrating the complexity of a given problem by taking the public through the varied intricacies and perspectives that one could have on a particular issue. Here the public philosopher would revel in the lack of answers they have to provide. Instead, they would indicate that the value of public philosophy is making it possible for the public to sigh in relief: “It truly is complicated after all.” I find this tack unsatisfying, as it comes too close to the observer at a zoo approach where problems become abstracted from the real urgencies of our moment. There is value in testing out the possible intuitions a hypothetical person may have on a given issue, but we already do that in our journal articles and in the classroom, so there would be nothing distinctively public about this approach to philosophy.
Abstraction, of course, is not a problem in and of itself. The issue is assuming a relationship to the public that advocates for an abstract neutrality towards the problems we face. The public philosopher can stimulate problem-solving precisely because they make clear their normative angle of vision. The normative disposition of the public philosopher can generate friction with the common sense that may obtain at a given time and through this friction contribute to public processes of problem-solving. Even if philosophy cannot solve problems on its own, it should be committed to the prospect of their resolution. This commitment requires more than the goal of presenting problems as interesting puzzles for thought.
I would endorse a third alternative. Public philosophy should strive to be untimely by constructing problem spaces that help the public grasp the sources of decay and possibility that afflict their moment. Unlike the first option, public philosophy should strive to generate a sensibility for the problems of social life without presuming to tell the public how to solve the problems. Rather, public philosophy should make it possible for the public to see how the possibilities for regression and progress are interwoven in our moment. Doing so would mean that public philosophy should not be immediately translatable into the existing common sense, but neither should it seek to radically disentangle itself from the messy contradictions of everyday life.
By posing problems, public philosophy can estrange the public from the debilitating contradictions of common sense and point in the direction of good sense. And so, unlike the second option, public philosophy does have a position on what a reasonable society would entail or, at the very least, why we should be able to describe our current society as unreasonable. Here public philosophy does not seek to validate our intuitions but to enable our collective capacities for criticizing them from the standpoint of a transformed society. Indeed, it is hard to envision a transformed society without simply projecting who we happen to be at this moment into it. But by revealing our disjointed practical reason, public philosophy not only indicts the present but demonstrates that we are not confined to it. Opening a path toward what is not yet conscious, as Bloch would say, picking out what is latent yet blocked in the present moment, requires both a shift in perspective and a change of assumptions and dispositions. This form of public philosophy is more than abstract theorizing, but less than concrete political practices. It lives within the space between common sense and good sense in the hopes that the public will build a bridge uniting the two in time.
William Paris
William Paris is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is also an Associate Editor for the journalCritical Philosophy of Race. His research focuses on History of African American Philosophy, 20th century continental philosophy, and Political Philosophy. He has published on Frantz Fanon and Gender, Sylvia Wynter's phenomenology of imagination, and C.L.R. James and Hannah Arendt. He is also at work on his book manuscriptRacial Justice and Forms of Life: Towards a Critical Theory of Utopia(under contract with Oxford University Press) that aims to provide a novel theory of racial justice that goes beyond the political freedom of the state and towards a broader social freedom of time.
