Bernard Kobes (Arizona State) calls my attention to the latest travesty about academic philosophy to stain the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, this one by Russell Jacoby whose qualification for the task--brace yourselves--is that he is a "Professor in Residence" in the History Department at UCLA. This item is not quite as perniciously ignorant as work by Carlin Romano, or as lazily ignorant as Alan Wolfe writing about Mill, but it is ignorant and misleading nonetheless, and does now raise a real question about editorial oversight at the Chronicle: why are you folks letting people with no discernible knowledge of the subject write about academic philosophy?
Now, to be fair, Mr. Jacoby also wants to savage economics and psychology departments. Here's how he starts:
How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past.
This is a quite breathtaking opening, especially because Hegel, Marx, and Freud were, all three, committed to a scientific ethos--Marx and Freud precisely in the modern sense (picked out by the pejorative "scientistic") of trying to construct theories, respectively, of history and the mind that passed muster by the standards of the natural sciences. One of many reasons little sound scholarship on Hegel, Marx, or Freud emanates from the departments Mr. Jacoby singles out is that those fields too often lack anything resembling a commitment to Wissenschaft, to rigorous methods and standards of evidence.
There is a further irony here, which is that the phenomenon in question is not a recent one, something one might have expected an historian to know. Hegel is taught far more often in philosophy departments now than he was in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s, when the combination of the popularity of Schopenhauer's anti-Hegelian polemics, the rise of German Materialism, and the "back to Kant" turn in German philosophy left Hegel out in the cold. And surely Mr. Jacoby must realize that in the heyday of behaviorism in psychology in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Freud was not exactly a welcome presence in academic psychology departments where any reference to conscious beliefs and desires in the explanation of behavior was itself thought suspect.
So part of what is completely untenable about this framing of the issue is that it assumes, falsely, that these disciplines, including philosophy, are "static," that because a thinker at time T self-identifies with a discipline that necessarily any discipline bearing the same name at time T+100 must be the same. But as the story of Hegel's neglect in Germany just a generation or so after his death rather dramatically illustrates, the assumption has no merit.
Of course, I have yet to raise a question about the factual assumption underlying Mr. Jacoby's critique, namely, about what is actually taught. Here's what he tells us:
A completely unscientific survey of three randomly chosen universities confirms the exodus. A search through the philosophy-course descriptions at the University of Kansas yields a single 19th-century-survey lecture that mentions Hegel. Marx receives a passing citation in an economics class on income inequality. Freud scores zero in psychology. At the University of Arizona, Hegel again pops up in a survey course on 19th-century philosophy; Marx is shut out of economics; and, as usual, Freud has disappeared. And at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Hegel does not appear in philosophy courses, Marx does not turn up in economics, and Freud is bypassed in psychology.
I assume that most historians have more regard for the use of evidence than is evident in Mr. Jacoby's completely absurd sampling method, one made even more suspect by facts that are quite easy to confirm on-line but omitted by Mr. Jacoby. The Department of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, for example, has a full-time, tenure-stream young scholar who wrote his PhD thesis on Hegel, and who teaches and writes regularly (and intelligently) about both Hegel and Nietzsche. (Did it occur to Mr. Jacoby that the on-line course descriptions might be outdated?) This is all the more notable given that the Kansas department is relatively small. The University of Wisconsin at Madison also has a full-time, tenured member of the faculty (Ivan Soll), who has written one book on Hegel, and many articles on Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, among others. So much for Mr. Jacoby's report of his random sampling.
Here, off the top of my head, is a list of tenure-stream faculty who teach and write about Hegel in just the top 20 philosophy departments in the U.S. (I assume that will qualify as the "scientistic" mainstream for Mr. Jacoby's purposes): Beatrice Longuenesse at NYU; Robert Brandom at Pittsburgh; Allen Wood at Stanford; Frederick Neuhouser at Columbia; Karl Ameriks at Notre Dame; Michelle Kosch at Cornell; Michael Forster and Robert Pippin at Chicago; Kathleen Higgins at Texas; Michael Hardimon at UC San Diego. That's not to mention, of course, all the faculty at these departments who regularly teach and write about Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others.
Aquinas, Epicurus, Duns Scotus, Hobbes, Reid, and Spinoza--among other major historical figures--aren't nearly as well-represented as Hegel, I'm afraid. Where is Mr. Jacoby's anger about this fact?
And should one be angry about it? Hegel is but one figure in the history of philosophy, regarded by some as of seminal importance, by others (like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for instance) as worthy mainly of ridicule. A typical philosophy department, even one with a PhD program, may have only fifteen or so faculty lines, with which it must cover the whole history of philosophy (ancient Greek and Roman, medieval, early modern, Kant and 19th-century philosophy, 20th-century analytic and Continental philosophy--and perhaps even the history of non-Western philosophical traditions) as well as areas of contemporary research in moral, political, and legal philosophy; philosophy of the sciences and mathematics; philosophy of language and mind; metaphysics and epistemology; and perhaps still others (logic, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, etc.).
Why, oh why, should the historical treatment of one figure, Hegel, take precedence over every other major historical figure or important contemporary topic? That's the actual question that Departments confront. And given the actual situation, it is rather striking that Hegel fares as well as he does compared to other figures in the history of philosophy.
Mr. Jacoby, however, has a real axe he wants to grind: namely, what he takes to be the anti-historical or a-historical nature of his target disciplines. (Imagine that: an historian is mad that other fields don't pay enough attention to his!) Here is his hugely ironic critique of psychology on this score:
[T]he ruthlessly anti- or nonhistorical orientation that informs contemporary academe encourages shelving past geniuses. This mind-set evidently affects psychology. The American Psychological Association's own task force on "learning goals" for undergraduate majors makes a nod toward teaching the history of psychology, but it relegates the subject to an optional subfield, equivalent to "group dynamics." "We are not advocating that separate courses in the history of psychology or group dynamics must be included in the undergraduate curriculum," the savants counsel, "but leave it to the ingenuity of departments to determine contexts in which students can learn those relevant skills and perspectives." The ingenious departments apparently have dumped Freud as antiquated. A study by the American Psychoanalytic Association of "teaching about psychoanalytic ideas in the undergraduate curricula of 150 highly ranked colleges and universities" concludes that Freudian ideas thrive outside of psychology departments....
The irony, of course, is that contemporary academic psychology shares the same "scientistic" commitments of Freud: namely, to discover truths about the mind that can pass muster by the evidential standards that have served us well in the natural sciences. Physics and Chemistry departments do not spend a lot of time on the "history" of their disciplines, and psychology departments, even if they were now dominated by Freudians, would not either. Perhaps the fact that psychology is a "soft" science (to put it nicely) should give them pause about such an approach; but, ironically, Freud would not have been an ally on this point.
After then attacking economics, Mr. Jacoby turns to philosophy:
Compared with economics, philosophy prizes the study of its past and generally offers courses on Greek, medieval, and modern thinkers. Frequently, however, those classes close with Kant, in the 18th century, and do not pick up again until the 20th century. The troubling 19th century, featuring Hegel (and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), is omitted or glossed over. General catalogs sometimes list a Hegel course in philosophy, but it is rarely offered. Very few philosophy departments at major universities teach Hegel or Hegelian thought.
We've already noted that this is partly false (many of the leading philosophy departments in the country have Hegel specialists on their faculties) and partly misleading (lots of historical figures are taught irregularly, there is always a question of resources). But Mr. Jacoby continues:
Philosophy stands at the opposite pole from psychology in at least one respect. In most colleges and universities, it is one of the smaller majors, while psychology is one of the largest. Yet, much like psychology, philosophy has proved unwelcoming for thinkers paddling against the mainstream. Not only did sharp critics like Richard Rorty, frustrated by its narrowness, quit philosophy for comparative literature, but a whole series of professors have departed for other fields, leaving philosophy itself intellectually parched.
That is the argument of John McCumber, a scholar of Hegel and Heidegger who himself decamped from philosophy to German. His book Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Northwestern University Press, 2001) savages the contemporary American philosophical profession and its flight from history. He notes, for instance, that 10 years after the 1987 "breakthrough anthology" Feminism as Critique, not one of its contributors, from Seyla Benhabib to Iris Marion Young, still taught in a philosophy department. The pressures that force — or tempt — big names such as Rorty and Martha Nussbaum to quit philosophy, McCumber observes, exert equal force on those outside the public eye. He charges, for instance, that senior editors dispense with peer review and run the major philosophy journals like private fiefdoms, and that a few established professors select papers for the discipline's annual conferences. The authoritarianism and cronyism drive out mavericks.
Professor Kobes, in his note to me, put it well: "This is a grotesque distortion of the state of our discipline. It is simply not true that the major philosophy journals dispense with peer review and are run like private fiefdoms. And I suspect it is at least misleading to suggest that people like Martha Nussbaum 'quit philosophy' (sic) because the discipline is unwelcoming to people paddling against the mainstream." Indeed: I am quite sure Martha Nussbaum, when she joined the University of Chicago Law School a dozen years ago, was "quitting philosophy" as little as I am today. Benhabib didn't "quit" philosophy either: she simply found the grass greener in Political Science Departments, where the top departments were keen to hire her when top philosophy departments were not. The reason, I'm afraid, is pretty simple, but one would actually have to know something to know this: Benhabib's work on Hegel and the Frankfurt School just is not as good, philosophically, as the best work on these thinkers by Allen Wood, Michael Forster, Raymond Geuss, Michael Rosen, Frederick Beiser, Robert Pippin, and others.
And finally--alas--if Mr. Jacoby had asked around he would have learned rather quickly that no one (not even the leading scholars of Hegel and Heidegger) considers Professor McCumber an authority on, or even a reliable guide to, contemporary philosophy. (Professor McCumber does teach in the German Department at UCLA which may explain why he looms so large on Mr. Jacoby's horizon.) For example, only Journal of Philosophy could be reasonably charged with being run like a "private fiefdom[]," as our earlier discussion of the topic brought out. In fact, philosophy is notable for the large number of high-profile journals run meticulously and utilizing blind peer review. Maybe this is driving out "mavericks" (like Professor McCumber?), or maybe it is driving out mediocrities and poseurs? The evidence on offer is, alas, compatible with both possibilities. It would take a lot more argument, and knowledge, to establish Mr. Jacoby's preferred reading.
Mr. Jacoby, sadly, is not done smearing a field he obviously has little knowledge of, for he continues:
Philosophy nods toward its past, but its devotion to language analysis and logic-chopping pushes aside as murky its great 19th-century thinkers. Polishing philosophical eyeglasses proves futile if they are rarely used to see.
Some philosophers, no doubt, "chop logic," just as some historians apparently "shovel bullshit," but we would, in either instance, do well to refrain from judging the state of a discipline by its weakest exemplars. It is true that philosophy that utilizes formal logic is harder for intellectual tourists like Mr. Jacoby to read, but I am afraid this does not establish its value. "Language analysis" is also, as every reader of this blog knows, contested and in some quarters abandoned as central to philosophical methodology. But what contemporary philosophers have in common is not "language-analysis and logic-chopping," but rather what they share with almost every other philosopher in history, namely, an interest in understanding--in "polishing philosophical eyeglasses" in order "to see"--the nature of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, meaning, morality, goodness, art, etc. Hegel is "murkier" than Quine, and also murkier than Hume. But murkiness has never been an obstacle to philosophical importance, from Leibniz to Hegel to Husserl to Dummett.
There is a lot right and a lot wrong with academic philosophy in the
United States these days. But to even get at the field's virtues and
problems one has to actually know something about the discipline, about
what work is actually being done, what methods are used, what topics and thinkers are being genuinely neglected, and which ones flourishing even though they are unlikely to bear fruits. There are, without a doubt, departments that are parochial and narrow-minded, whose faculties are under-educated and under-informed, sometimes about the field's history, sometimes about its contemporary contours, sometimes, remarkably, both. For my money, I would rather see much more history of philosophy (though not, I confess, much more Hegel), and less intuition-pumping ethics and metaphysics, which may well align my sympathies with Mr. Jacoby's. But the question is why my preferences, or his, ought to be treated as a pertinent benchmark for the direction the field moves? If the SPEP folks had not tainted the word "pluralism" a generation ago by using it as the fig leaf for bad philosophy, one might even say that what some departments now need is more "pluralism." The truth is, however, that most departments do rather well in covering philosophy, a remarkably capacious discipline, with unclear boundaries, and a rich and variegated history that permits of many different tellings.
As Professor Kobes wrote to me: "The Chronicle is widely read by deans and other university decision
makers. I am not aware of it publishing on a regular basis any better
informed commentator on philosophy than Carlin Romano and Russell
Jacoby." The solution is clear: philosophers need to write clearly and understandably about their work, how it relates to the work philosophers have always done, how it contributes to interdisciplinary projects in linguistics, computer science, biology, psychology, etc., and then submit those articles to the Chronicle. I doubt very much that malice against philosophy explains the embarrassing run of ignorant pieces CH has been publishing. I suspect, instead, it is lack of anything else available to fill the pages. For obvious reasons, intellectual tourists like Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Romano will regularly volunteer their amateurish musings about philosophy to CH, since they aren't going to appear in any forum in which the editors know something about the subject. That makes it even more imperative for philosophers to present their work and their discipline to a non-specialist audience.
Recent Comments