Ill-informed semi structured provocations

Joshua Elwood

Maybe public philosophy has been happening for a long time but the people who do it don’t call it that. Maybe they use none of the terminology associated with the practice that calls itself philosophy, but a close reader of those conversations would reveal the same conceptual struggles being engaged in different idioms. Maybe the attempt to do public philosophy is not thwarted by a lack of desire on everyone’s part but language barriers within official languages, and/or the manner in which people are separated from speaking meaningfully with each other through time and space. (In elaborating on these ideas, I’m thinking of the way Fred Moten/Stefano Harney talk, in “The Undercommons,” about “study,” as something that happens in many places, not just, or maybe not even primarily, in universities.)

It is technically impossible to have everyone speak and have everyone listen to what everyone else has said. Logistically, it would require the complete destruction and subsequent reorganization of life as we know it, much like the xkcd author’s carefully considered account of what would be required for everybody on the earth to join hands (or be in physical contact in some other way) and sing. Maybe Socrates’ behavior is a good example of public philosophy as an intellectual practice that occurs at the same pace and in the same spaces as the rest of life: he prods elites to define their terms or admit their ignorance, creating more accountability not only for elites, but for everyone who uses the terms that they do. Insofar as philosophically rigorous accountability is inimical to normal state operations, the state may not like public philosophy, and so the activity of philosophy, when supported by the state (as in some universities) may reflect institutional, rather than public, priorities. Or the activity of public philosophy will continue, as it has continued, before and outside of institutions; unsupported, unofficial. And perhaps this is what public philosophy is, the deliberate entangling of intellectual and social activity, disrupting and altering how each mode operates in relation to the other, recognizing how political conditions shape, and can be shaped by, these practices when they’re combined.  

What is a question? It seems like philosophy should be questioning every existing element, seeking new questions, and subsequently searching for their answers. But why does it seem that way? (What is the virtue, if there is any, of novelty, of new questions over old ones? Can philosophy question its own methods and purposes in questioning?) Why not assume the public is everyone? The logistical issues produced by this idea, this hope, are so immense that it’s tempting to redefine public. It might be better instead to constantly acknowledge the failure of any endeavor to be truly public, while striving just as constantly to enact the most expansive vision of a public. This implies that ‘public’ is a thing done, not some pre-existing group that some other group calls into being. Is it ever possible to speak to or for the public accurately? To speak before the public seems easy, the function of press secretaries and politicians, but this assumes a public that ‘we’ may only imagine. Who is watching, and who isn’t? If the public is something we imagine but don’t do, what happens? If philosophy is a kind of thinking unlike the thinking done in sciences and arts, does doing it with/for the public make what’s being done more or less like philosophy? Parents sometimes have trouble when children discover the question why, and the parental inability to fully satisfy the logical extension of early curiosity about life produces a willingness, not to dwell in aporia, but to ignore the lines of questioning that seem likely to produce it. It's childish to only ask questions and set the labor of thinking on someone else. Is it bad to be like a child in this way? Perhaps this implies that a truly public philosophy requires all who engage in it to be as devoted to asking questions of others as they are to seeking answers from others. If parents aren’t able to satisfy children’s curiosity, do they transfer the emotional/intellectual labor of living with non-answers to children, avoiding their parental responsibilities? But maybe it’s not fair to heap all this labor on parents—perhaps there ought to be a community of people on hand to induct the child into the world of questioning and ways of relating to it. Some children are not afraid to ask strange questions of strangers. This places their bodies at risk of well-imagined dangers. When we act socially without fear we risk our bodies. Is answering questions the best way to respond when they are asked? Are there other responses? 

I’m now thinking of grade school classrooms in which a quarrel breaks out over an object or someone’s personal space, disrupting the silence and ‘peace’ soon to be re-imposed. The teacher intervenes with directives, possibly light explanation: rapid, brief answers to the unasked question “how should we manage ourselves?” The incident is treated as a distraction from education rather than an opportunity for education, for serious questions about how to live in a world with conflicting desires and what constitutes appropriate punishment and where in us desires come from and why we act on them in the specific ways that we do. If a student attempts, however haltingly, to bring up these complexities, how likely is a discussion to follow, rather than discipline as silence, banishment? (Out of sight, out of mind. A behavioral problem from a teacher’s perspective is a thing that can be located within a specific body, and a reasonable solution is to remove that body from other bodies’ presence.) Early education both brackets and defers questions, mutes or relocates students who ask too many, turning questions of discipline and the problems of public philosophy into problem children and a lecture from the principal. The social and intellectual potential energies of the classroom become the occasion for managing bodies, as teachers attempt to reduce students’ tendency to interact with the physical and social world by moving and making noise, communicating through word and gesture in excess of the planned lesson. How likely are those who call themselves philosophers to be the ones who were, more often than most, still and silent? What philosophies of life did they fail to encounter and feel by doing more reading than talking, more talking than moving? What publics did they fail to recognize and join in the process of becoming philosophers, and what public philosophies did they fail to recognize and engage as such?

Philosophy seems like it could ask its practitioners to do a great deal. To pursue inquiry beyond the bounds of any tradition, way of speaking (or not speaking) or present understanding. To use all methods in the service of knowing, to question every question, and to question the value of questions, to consider whether the ethos implied by this muddled credo is worth pursuing, and to use what we know to learn more precisely what we don’t. To question what ‘we’ means, and what meaning means. Underlying all this seems to be a drive for certainty that is more likely to produce uncertainty. What happens to the kinds of people that, laboring for the sake of certainty, end up dwelling so often in uncertainty? What common human qualities and what peculiarities of mind are revealed under these conditions? What kind of person asks questions this often, this precisely, but does not rest content with precision either, satisfied neither by certainty nor uncertainty, or satisfied equally by both but willing to continue the process by other means, by any means necessary. Is it this itch for the pursuit of certainty, and comfort within the bounds of its antonym that makes one a philosopher? But where are philosophers made, or is that even the right question?

Universities have a variety of sociological functions. The philosophically inclined people they produce may be a by-product, but a philosophical orientation to the terms and problems of management does not seem to govern the official conduct of university staff and administrators, nor does it seem pervasive between academic departments. If the role of universities is something other than job training, something to do with making people good thinkers/citizens, this implies thinking and citizenship are actually elite functions, that there is a public that exists to govern another public of non-citizens, or a mass that is not a public, a set of second-class citizens consisting of all those who do not go to college. So even the most inspiring and ‘human’ accounts of the worth of college education reveal a betrayal of the vision of the common good, a single public that speaks with one voice and listens with one ear. I think of Gayatri Spivak speaking of those who are intergenerationally “denied the right to intellectual labor.”

A university is a vehicle of class mobility, or a way to produce people who feel justified in studying and governing others, having been granted the chance to labor to become more capable than others of doing so in a particular way. It is on the one hand disturbing to view the spectacle of intellectual labor seeming to occur only in a particular set of administered spaces, though it’s also encouraging to perceive that intellectual labor is granted a seemingly honorable space of its own. But insofar as that labor is sundered in time and space from the life it might be presumed to serve, do its ends change? Universities can seem like the best places to engage in public philosophy given the concentration of books, spaces, curious students, and experienced intellectuals. They can also seem like some of the worst places for doing public philosophy, given the divisions between academic departments, the administrated timetables imposed on thought, the economic pressures imposed on all who labor therein, and inequities between staff and faculty, manager and shift worker, professor and professor, campus and town, student and professor, student and student. But the sources and effects and experiences of these difficulties would be the raw material of a truly public philosophy, and so there would be no place unsuitable for philosophizing with, and simultaneously for, the public, only places more or less hostile to public philosophers once they get to work.

I used to think the university would be a place of philosophical truth-seeking in every class, in every café, on all the quads and streetcorners and hallways and dorms. But much of what the university is and does prevents this: the administrative/cultural imperative to grade impedes dwelling in the movement of thought on its own terms, and the general desire of overachievers clustered together to not feel shamed by expressing imperfect thoughts strangles most attempts at thinking out loud together. Syllabi structure assumes uniform initial student motivation and ability, rather than accounting for and working with differences, and treating these differences as not merely informal quirks or individual challenges or administrative complications, but substantial elements of the educative process in their own right. I imagined that everyone would be interested in everyone else’s homework and spend their free time exploring peers’ experiences of classes that couldn’t be taken. I imagined that we would be fed knowledge and wisdom and learn how the world really worked and be trained to step out into it effectively. We would know ourselves and each other and where we fit and what we could do and how to do it. But a world that needs universities as bubbles where homework is done, largely in isolation, at the tail end of an education system that separates people socially by temperament and trade, is not one that can serve or be served well by what universities are dreamed of as being. We, the students, were stuck together, united against teaching and assigning functions that were ultimately more administrative than pedagogical, so that even our teachers had to labor against their desire to do more than assign us letters and keep our curiosity within the bounds of the academic calendar. We were not given or shown clear purpose beyond somehow enduring the tasks that they set; some surviving by rebelling, some by finishing half-heartedly the work assigned, some by devoting themselves completely to the work. We were not thoughtful or selfless enough to demand that no one be graded, that even the most abysmal work and the causes thereof be taken seriously, that bad writing is as fruitful an opportunity for discussion and analysis as any famous, dense text, insofar as the minds at work considering what constitutes written quality treat each new evaluative utterance they make to each other as itself an object of study. “What are we doing here” becomes “what are we not doing elsewhere and why?” Who are we working with and what assumptions ground (or don’t) the divisions of intellectual labor we operate under and through? Perhaps our frustrations with the realities of the existing model of the university provide us with these questions that can generate a model entirely anewl. It seems unlikely that a thing can be ‘made public,’ logistically or metaphysically, given the scope of what public can mean. Something can be announced by an institution and people glancing at the tv in a restaurant might spare it some attention, but what would it actually mean for something to be public? It seems to me that public things aren’t announced. What the public does is mess with what’s official, circulate it and put it to a kind of use, and it is this public activity that then prompts further official responses.

So how might philosophy work in public? Philosophical reason seems to rely on the patience of its doers and to some extent its audience. Trying to practice philosophy in opposition to the mood of a crowd is nearly an attempt at prophecy, a kind of morally aggressive intellectual move- one can imagine such a philosopher telling their audience, ‘you should be listening to this, because it’s the truth, not as an aphorism you can paint on your doorframe but a practice of constantly working at the languages/practices/assumptions that surround and condition you, an attempt to make them objects perceptible enough to be evaluated, and then adopted with full consent or opposed, or further complicated.’ But this is constrained by the language common among the doers, and alien to the audiences, a language hard to learn and to  teach.

Public philosophy seems like it could ask much more of its practitioners than philosophy does. A given person may exhibit what could be called philosophical tendencies, but how often does this become a kind of local contagion, transmitted through many others? How often does the philosophical bug travel to the point at which it feels like a public phenomenon, like something that happens as a frequent preoccupation when new or old friends meet at the café, or strangers meet, and philosophy can be spoken of as casually as geographic origin, economic status, news, sports, fashion, weather, recent experiences as a worker, or consumer? But perhaps part of what philosophy is is inimical to casualness. Can wisdom be loved casually? Can anyone?

It might be good to solicit strangers for their thoughts on matters translated for the uninitiated. It might be good to make thinking and speaking and writing and reading philosophically within and beyond existing traditions of what calls itself philosophy—more commonly done among strangers with each other and with people who refused in the early stages of education to allow their bodies to be managed and contained. When public philosophers refuse to allow their questions to be contained by the boundaries of discipline and decorum, taste, convention and tradition, they risk becoming a different kind of problem for a different kind of person. Socrates got locked up. In Robert Frost’s words, “The town couldn’t stand him.” And it may be that towns and campuses and states and businesses will have little patience for public philosophy.

To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, anything that becomes useful immediately ceases to be philosophy and is placed within the hard or social sciences. If philosophy is the mining of the useless for the useful, it is always the most potentially useful thing, but its usefulness can never be known. Or maybe philosophy can, if used correctly, disrupt the useful/useless distinction by messing with misuses and misunderstandings endemic to the concept of use.  Public philosophy could make more prevalent the processes and attitudes, if not the specific terminology, of people who currently call themselves philosophers. If ‘justice is what love looks like in public,’ (Cornel West) what does wisdom look like in public, or what does loving wisdom look like in public? Is it asking for strangers to mediate intense arguments about metaphysics, or seeking philosophical input in the midst of business transactions, performing philosophy loudly among each other in the presence of strangers or normalizing the public practice of specific kinds of thinking/talking? Gadflying about town.