What is public philosophy?

Becca Rothfeld

What is “public philosophy”? I am not convinced that there is any such thing. I recognize the differences between good philosophy and bad philosophy, historical philosophy and contemporary philosophy, and philosophy of math and philosophy of mind. But I am skeptical that there is any meaningful, much less necessary, difference in kind between philosophy that happens to be printed in a newspaper and philosophy that finds itself cloistered in an academic journal. Both strike me as “just philosophy.”

In a recent blogpost for The Daily Nous, the decorated Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson proposed that the aim of “popular philosophy” is to “communicate recent research in academic philosophy to a wider audience.” Baked into this statement are three assumptions that I contest: first, that there is something called “popular philosophy”; second, that there is some distinct thing called “academic philosophy”; and finally, that the former depends on—and derives its value from—the latter. 

Long before the academy existed in its present form, people were busy asking and answering questions about the nature of god, time, knowledge, justice, beauty, thought, numbers, obligation, and the like. I find it hard to believe that their inquiries were never properly philosophical solely because their conclusions were not vetted by two anonymous peers and sequestered in a journal too expensive for most people to access. Aristotle maintained that “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” (1) Both now begin and at first began—because wonder is both what prompts us to philosophize in the first instance and what underlies all our subsequent attempts. Wonder can and does exist beyond the confines of the lecture hall, but contemporary analytic philosophy, even in its most arcane iterations, could scarcely exist without wonder.  

Insofar as there is any difference at all between “public” and “academic” philosophy, it is accidental, as evidenced by the recency of the division’s very legibility. The distinction at issue would have confused Schiller, who wrote plays one day and aesthetic monographs the next, or Hume, who penned many volumes of best-selling history books alongside his treatises—and who once observed that his “love of literary fame” was his “guiding passion.” Spinoza paid his bills as a lens grinder, and Nietzsche quit the academy to wander around the mountains. 

Ultimately, I follow Myisha Cherry in wondering, “Why can’t we just do philosophy and share it with the world without some special name for it?” (2) I also follow Cherry in suspecting that the term “public philosophy” is something of a smear—and that it begs the question in favor of the conclusion that work we intend to share widely is both other and lesser. Yet I grudgingly employ the phrase here because I believe it currently refers to something significant, namely philosophy designed to be read and puzzled over by anyone and everyone. Philosophy of this sort is not only valuable in its own right, at least when it is good, but also apt to surpass the work cloistered in academic journals, at least in some respects. But things could be otherwise: academic philosophy is tweedier than it has to be. This essay therefore offers both a diagnosis and a roundabout call for remedy.

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The most straightforward reason to embrace philosophy dreamt up outside the seminar room is that the academy is not and has never been equally hospitable to everyone. Until relatively recently, women and people of color were categorically excluded. The university where this journal was established did not admit Jewish students until over five hundred years after its founding. Although formal barriers to entry have been nominally dismantled, marginalized communities still face hurdles in the form of discrimination, harassment, and economic disenfranchisement. Many still conclude, often not incorrectly, that it is in their self-interest to philosophize in more welcoming environs. As Kristie Dotson writes, “a heavy professional and personal price is asked of people who do not give automatic approval to ‘philosophy’ as it currently exists.” (3)

To dismiss all public philosophy as derivative or unserious would be to dismiss a great deal of writing by those whom the academy has shut out. Of course, if none of this writing is of any philosophical merit, we should not lament its exclusion on philosophical grounds, even if we have moral reason to lament the exclusion of its authors. But I think that there is something of manifest philosophical value in the work of, e.g., Malcolm X and Shulamith Firestone (4). If I am right, then there is good reason to suppose—if we did not already—that traditional credentials are not the only or even the best assurance of philosophical acumen. 

Philosophy has traditionally been hostile not only to certain groups of people but also, and not unrelatedly, to certain areas of inquiry. Feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and philosophy of other forms of oppression have long been relegated to the margins. In my ten years of formal philosophical training, not once have I heard anyone utter the phrase “anti-Semitism” in connection with any philosopher but Heidegger, and this despite the fact that so many of our German darlings had choice words for the Jews in the very works we study. Anyone interested in anti-Semitism has no real option but to consult texts outside the Anglophone academic canon.

Other thematic biases are the product of less malicious prejudices, but they are nonetheless detrimental: in the last half century, metaphysics and epistemology have come to seem rigorous, while aesthetics and phenomenology have often been dismissed as fluffy. Philosophers have also shied away from current events, perhaps in part because journals can take years to even reject a paper, by which time the events in question are no longer current. And worst of all, at least by my lights, philosophy is now understood by most working practitioners as sharply discontinuous with literature. It is no longer supposed or even allowed to be beautiful. In this essay, I shall focus on some of the aesthetic reasons to prefer public philosophy, at least as matters currently stand.

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In her review of Nancy Bauer’s book, How to Do Things With Pornography, Amia Srinivasan writes: 

I feel a similar sense of admiring disbelief when I read Bauer, and when I read Srinivasan herself. Perhaps this is because several of the pieces in Bauer’s book and many of Srinivasan’s most breathtaking essays first appeared in public venues, where it is considered permissible and even praiseworthy to cloak skeletal arguments in the meat of robust style. But when I thumb through the most prestigious philosophy journals, I don’t see much writing like theirs. 

Many philosophers I know are convinced that papers are just a mechanism for transferring propositions from one head to another. Be this as it may, until we find a way of injecting a claim directly into an interlocutor's brain, pieces of philosophy will have to come cloaked in writing, and it is simply natural to evaluate writing in aesthetic terms—to evaluate it in part as form and sound. We care whether philosophy is right and whether its arguments are good, but we also care—we can’t help but care, and perhaps we are required on pain of aesthetic irrationality to care—whether it is beautiful. Public philosophy satisfies a hunger that academic philosophy thwarts, because public outlets value and cultivate writing that is delicious to read. 

We are deluding ourselves, and missing half of the point, if we insist that true propositions can be picked out of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s overgrown prose the way fruit can be yanked from rank beds of weeds. No doubt there are many ripe truths to be plucked: both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard make many clever arguments. But we would cheapen our love for thinkers like these ones—thinkers who took such pains with their prose, thinkers who wrote fictions and allegories and strange snippets of poetry, thinkers who invented new narrators for themselves and delighted in the “pepper” of polemic—if we suppress their writing as writing. Most people who love Nietzsche do relish the shock of his whole sensibility, whether or not they admit it. Some of us relish it so much that we don’t want to write sanely and soberly about Nietzsche but to write as well and as weirdly as he writes. But in 2020, you can’t be Nietzsche or Kierkegaard in Nous.

Scholarly journals insist so single-mindedly on precision that academic philosophers who write for them have come to fetishize clarity to the exclusion of all other writerly virtues. I don’t deny that clarity is often a boon, but a virtue along one axis can often prove a vice along another, and even the best virtues may occasion trade-offs. A paper might elicit intuitions more grippingly if it contains more examples, but by the same token, a profusion of cases can crowd out formal argumentation, in addition to muddying an otherwise clean dialectic. There is no obviously right answer to the question of which mode to prefer: richly illustrative papers are good, and rigorously argumentative papers are also good. I suspect the virtues we choose to center in our own work have more to do with our tastes than with our beliefs about what is objectively better. For my own part, I am glad that there are papers of different kinds, and people with different kinds of minds, and that philosophy affords me chances to dip into sensibilities radically unlike my own. The problem is not that so many of my colleagues aspire to write as crisply as Timothy Williamson, but that within the academy, none of us are allowed to write as lyrically as Stanley Cavell—and that the costs of clarity, defeasible as they are, are never even acknowledged. 

Here is a gesture, necessarily truncated, at just a few of them. First, essays containing so-called road maps eliminate all whiff of narrative tension by revealing at the outset what they will conclude in the end. Imagine if a mystery novel gave away its riches so cheaply! Part of the joy of watching an argument unfurl consists in the suspense we experience when we are unsure just where the dialectic will take us, or if a dilemma will be resolved. Second, beautiful writers sometimes select words for their sounds or for the images they summon, not just for their ability to latch neatly onto a referent. When William Gass writes “if I describe my peach too perfectly, it’s the poem which will make my mouth water…while the real peach spoils,” he has given us, in addition to an idea, the plush plumpness of a peach. Nietzsche observed that rationalists were allergic to the body, and I suspect that many philosophers are similarly allergic to the raw physicality of the prose in which their ideas are made manifest. (As Gass puts it, “a word is a concept made flesh.”) Finally, personality becomes palpable in style. To slice ornament away is to sever the self (and its context) from the writing—and to leave the reader without any sense of intimacy with the author. 

Proponents of clarity seem to assume that “the point” of philosophy is to track the truth, which is why they prefer whittled propositions to pulpy peaches. But there is a tradition according to which “the point” of philosophy is to entice us to see that which we thought were problems as non-problems, or to ease us into a new perspective, or to effect some sort of change in us beyond just feeding us a new truth or two. You might even think, along with philosophers like Heidegger, that the point of philosophy, much like the point of art, is to occasion something like the flash of revelation. For my own part, I believe philosophy has many purposes, that we ought to be free to choose among them, and that at least some of them sanction the extravagances of formal experimentation. 

This is one reason, then, why we might care about the aesthetic value of philosophy: if some work aspires to alter our pre-theoretical sense of things, then it can best achieve its purpose by being evocative. But there are also other reasons. If beauty is a good, then there is always a reason to value it, at least pro tanto. And beauty is not exactly irrelevant to persuasive power, no matter what we might like to think. Maybe most urgently, writing that feels more like an address from one human being to another can satisfy a core craving. In Henry James’s late masterpiece, The Wings of the Dove, one of the protagonists is surprised to discover that someone she had dismissed as unfeeling is in fact “adequately human.” Philosophy is often about our most personal acts and emotions: our grief, our anger, our vexed efforts to lace meaning to words. But for all its merits, academic philosophy is often so inadequately human. These days, public philosophy is much likelier to make the mouth water, to mound up as fresh and as full as a peach.