On Philosophy and the Academic World

Yesterday there was a New York Times piece on philosophy that I found interesting. The authors lament how philosophy has changed in order to maintain a place in today’s universities. It has lost its role of teaching wisdom and goodness, and instead has become so technical and specialized that it has become incomprehensible and irrelevant to most people.

I have a lot of sympathy for these concerns. Like the authors, I too am a philosophy professor and thus practice what philosophy has become in today’s world. I try really hard to write clearly, and I think my academic work is important, but when it comes down to it, most of my friends’ eyes glaze over when I try to explain what I do, and they nod off when they try to read my academic writings. There are maybe three other academics in the world who read my work, but they really like it and regard it as important! This is about as much success as an academic philosopher can hope for. A few become somewhat famous, but, honestly, can you name three of them and summarize the insights that made them famous? My guess is that if you can do this, it is because you yourself have studied some philosophy at the college or graduate school level.

This situation may look bleak, but I do not think it is really as bleak as it looks. First of all, I do think there is value in what academic philosophy has become, both in terms of the writing and the teaching that academic philosophers do. Second, I do not think it has to be only that – I think universities can maintain this kind of philosophy and re-create the older version that we have almost, but not completely, lost. And, third, the true spirit of philosophy lives on outside of academia too.

There is much I can say about the first and third points I mentioned above, but I most want to discuss my second point. The dilemma the authors of the New York Times piece illuminate does not have to be an either/or dilemma. We can have both. What I mean is that academic philosophers can practice the older form of philosophy as well as the version demanded by today’s academic institutions. Philosophy departments can also promote both modes of doing philosophy. That is, in addition to upholding the current academic requirements of philosophy, philosophy departments can also choose to promote true wisdom, and can assume the role within their universities of attending to the ethical dimensions of life and education.

In fact, I am fortunate enough to be part of such a philosophy department. I teach at a small liberal arts college, and we talk frequently about the ideals of a liberal arts education. The philosophy department is small, and we realize that most of our philosophy majors are not going to become academic philosophers. In fact, most of our students are not actually philosophy majors or minors. What is our responsibility to them, then? Our answer is that our responsibility to them is to encourage them to care about goodness and excellence, to help them develop their powers of imaginative and creative thinking as well as their powers of clear and rigorous thinking, to teach them to look for how ideas change the world, and, above all, to inspire them to seek wisdom.

On Contemplation

We are a week and a half away from starting our spring semester. I am concerned about the state of the world, and constantly wonder how the world’s problems might be solved. I like to think that my teaching and writing might have some positive influence, but to be honest I am not at all sure about that.

I find today’s world busy and full of distraction. I am trying to be more intentional again about carving out space and time for true contemplation. There are so many forces in today’s world vying for our attention, and if we are not careful, we can let those forces do our thinking for us. Contemplation is the path back to the true independent thinking that arises from our authentic selves. There have been times when contemplation was disparaged as “naval gazing,” implying that it is a selfish activity of those privileged enough to have that rare luxury called “free time.” I have become convinced that the real reason people try to discredit contemplation is because it is actually very powerful and thus threatening to those who would try to control us by controlling our thinking.

In truth, contemplation is the most unselfish thing we can do, because contemplation is how we free ourselves from fear-based reactive modes of existence and learn to live from love instead of fear. When we live from fear, we are likely to be furthering the agendae of the forces of society that operate through manipulation by fear. But when we live from love, we give from what we uniquely have to give, and we give what the world most needs from us.

Plato's Attempt to Control Early Education

In Book II of Plato's Republic, Socrates begins to discuss the education of young children. He doesn't want children exposed to bad stories, but wants them to be exposed only to good stories. Students are frequently outraged at this "censorship."

The line that Socrates wants to draw seems to be that he doesn't want young children exposed to stories that teach falsehoods. Instead he wants them exposed to what is true.

The particular way this plays out is that he wants to reject false stories about the gods: stories that portray them as petty and immoral, hating each other and treating each other badly. Instead, he wants the stories about the gods to be stories that portray the gods as good.

A student in class today objected that this was one-sided: to only want to teach goodness. At some point, young people need to be exposed to the reality of problems and badness in the world.

But goodness and truth are so tightly-aligned in ancient Greek thought that my mind made a sideways shift and I wondered if this student's objection might sound to Socrates like someone saying, "But teaching only about truth is so one-sided! If education is to be balanced and fair, we should give equal time to teaching falsity as well!"

That, of course, was not what my student intended to say at all. But our contemporary political world seems at times to champion such a view!

More specifically, Socrates thought that it was bad for young children to hear stories about badness prevailing. I agree with my student's concern that people at some stage need to face the reality that bad things can happen. But how we tell those stories does matter, I think. Do we tell these stories in ways that disillusion and intimidate? Or do we tell these stories in ways intended to inspire and empower people to triumph over life's adversity?

Kierkegaard Quotation

From Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling:

"Suppose someone wanting to learn to dance said: 'For hundreds of years now one generation after another has been learning dance steps, it's high time I took advantage of this and began straight off with a set of quadrilles.' One would surely laugh a little at him; but in the world of spirit such an attitude is considered utterly plausible. What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself; and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age."

--Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling, translated by Alastair Hannay, Penguin Books, 1985, p. 75.

Skills vs. Knowledge

During our final discussion at May College yesterday about our curriculum, several of my colleagues questioned the skills vs. knowledge dichotomy. I appreciate their concern, and very much agree that skills and competencies count as forms of knowledge.

But I do still think that there is an important distinction that can be drawn, that is very relevant to our discussions about what effect we hope that liberal education has on our students.

Developing skills and competencies is very important. As we've discussed, this makes our students better able to do certain things: analyze, synthesize, reason, communicate, etc.

But when I originally raised the question about whether there are other kinds of knowledge we want our students to have by the time they graduate, I was getting at something different that I believe is also very important: Do our students have a good understanding of the world?

We wouldn't necessarily have to specify exact factoids of knowledge that we want everyone to know -- I agree that it would be a nightmare to try to do that (and of dubious value)! But we can approach such a question in a more general, but still meaningful, sort of way. For example, what are the ways that we hope that students can map the world by the time they graduate? We have talked about how we want our students to have global awareness, cultural awareness, environmental awareness, and historical awareness. These are some ways of mapping the world, and they can be analyzed to a finer level of detail as well.

Don't we want our students to have a pretty good understanding of the cultural diversity of the world, its religious diversity, its biological diversity? Don't we want our students to have a pretty good understanding that much of what happens is structured by some combination of natural laws plus the operation of human agency? Don't we want our students to have a pretty good understanding of the best scientific knowledge of patterns of natural processes (laws of nature) and patterns of human behavior and human interaction? Don't we want students to have a good working knowledge of the major social systems that structure our lives: political systems, major world religions, economics, processes of information sharing, the arts? Don't we also want our students to also have a historical perspective on all of the above?

Another metaphor that may be helpful: this is about giving students different lenses with which to examine the world around them -- not specifying exactly what they must look at and how exactly they must see it.

I worry that we are too quick to devalue knowledge just to "information," and too quick to think that in this age of the internet and information overload, the content of what we teach is not important because everyone can just "look it up" when it becomes relevant for them to "know" something in particular.

What I'm trying to describe is a sense of knowledge that is not just facts or information. It is, instead, expanded awareness and enriched perceptiveness. It requires the practice of examining the world through different lenses. It is not just passive absorption, but involves a more subtle kind of skill or competence that involves the ability to get outside of oneself and encounter a greater world that is Other to what one already knows. It requires the development of strategies that enable one to meet this world on its own terms, and then integrate this new awareness responsibly and meaningfully into one's understanding.

We already do teach in ways that foster this kind of ability and this kind of awareness in our students. What I am trying to say here is that we must bring this dimension of education too into our discussions.

Your Anti-Transcript

I once heard a faculty member complaining about how many St. Lawrence students didn't know such-and-such from his discipline. With horror, I realized that I didn't know such-and-such about his discipline myself, because I had not taken even one college-level course in his discipline!

Out of curiosity, I later pulled out the SLU course catalog and decided to see if it was actually possible for an SLU student to take a course in every discipline. The answer is that it would be very very hard. I think what I came up with was that only a student who does a single 8-course major could possibly do this, if such a student planned very very carefully. But most of that student's coursework would be 100-level courses, and faculty would not be very happy with that.

Now emboldened by this finding (if a St. Lawrence student can't do it, and St. Lawrence's requirements are not that demanding, it was surely impossible at my college, which had more demanding requirements), I decided to take stock of my education relative to the full list of academic departments and programs. I decided to use St. Lawrence's listing, since this is my current academic home.

So I made a list of all the departments and programs in which I had not taken even one college-level course. I encourage you to make such a list as well. This is your Anti-Transcript, showing the Shadow Side of your own formal education!

I think that this is part of what makes these conversations about general education requirements so difficult. We all do have gaps in our education. If we are not careful, we can get defensive about those gaps. We can try to pretend that the fields of study we have not studied at all are not really all that important -- but we don't really know that, because we don't know what we don't know. Or, out of embarrassment about those gaps, we can overcompensate by wanting to require what we had not been required to study, in an attempt to ensure that our students do not later come to regret the gaps that we later came to regret in our own education.

Part of what is exciting about discussing general education requirements is how much we can learn from each other about our different fields of study. Is there anything in your field of study that you regard as so essential that you really do wish everyone knew it? Are there ways to teach each other (faculty in other disciplines as well as students) this essential knowledge and these essential skills, besides just through courses?

Ethics as a Critical Literacy?

At St. Lawrence University, we have been discussing our curriculum.

One of our current "Aims and Objectives" is "a personal ethic of considered values," but I notice that nothing similar clearly shows up on the new "Liberal Learning Goals for SLU" draft, although something like this is implicit in "Civic responsibility and self knowledge" and the items listed under this.

The phrasing on the AAC&U "Essential Learning Outcomes" handout is clearer. This listing includes "Personal and Social Responsibility," with "Ethical reasoning and action" as a sub-item.

How important do you think it is to keep ethics as an essential literacy? How important do you think it is for students to clarify and develop their own ethics and values? How important do you think it is for students to foster a commitment to living responsibly in relation to other people and the natural world?