New Identity Crisis Kicks the Asses of All Prior Identity Crises

We here in the DoD have been on an unscheduled mental sabbatical prompted by the loss of our sense of humor following the U.S. election.  Indeed, we have been in the throes of an identity crisis that shut down all operations for a time.  For while our mission is to know more things, we realize that we didn’t in fact want to know THAT.  By THAT of course we mean ALL THAT, all the things that people are apparently equipped to accept and even embrace. Likewise, while we love a good swerve, that which takes thought and experience in some new and chaotic direction, we really weren't looking for things to plummet off a cliff.

So we here in the DoD have more than lost the thread, we’ve lost whole blankets.  Humor has given way to misanthropy and our ordinary curiosity about people and what they think is in retreat.  To cope with this, we have adopted as our therapeutic mantra something our grandmother used to tell us.  We (mentally) say to other people: "I'm gonna  slap you to sleep and then slap you for sleeping.”  This makes us feel marginally better, just as it used to do Grandma when she too was in high dudgeon.

Another Quarter Heard From

We here in the DoD, ever catholic in our source material, recently stumbled upon a bit of despair delivered from that redoubtable correspondent, A Philosopher Elsewhere.  Alas, he did not write to us, but we were nonetheless struck by his gift for pithy agony.  To wit:

This shit makes me want to retire. I already don't "go out" in the philosophy blog-o-sewer, and maybe I'll stop going to conferences too.  Many of these people are not able enough to both do good philosophy and engage constantly in sanctimonious, and often quite nasty, moral police work.  Many of them seem to be getting paid a lot to do mediocre scholarly work and spend 80% of their working hours on Facebook.

Aware that he did not solicit our opinion, we lack restraint and nonetheless offer it anyway. 

While we are ignorant of just what “shit” provokes dreams of retirement in A Philosopher Elsewhere, we are awash in empathy, for we too regularly dream of retirement.  Most often, our own dreams issue from a superabundance of desires to do more things than a typical mortal life can include – e.g., our current efforts to (finally!) read War and Peace are complicated by our having jobs that distract us.  Alas, on especially bad days the campaign against Napolean has to go on entirely without us.

But sometimes, we too find ourselves seeking flight from our well-paid, generally rather cushy, and unusually stimulating employment because we too have encountered those enemies of all that is holy, These People.  Like A Philosopher Elsewhere, we can even find These People making us reluctant to undertake paid travel to exciting locations to meet with peers and find out more things.  These People are sometimes just that bad.  However, we’re less confident that our These People is the same as the These People bedeviling A Philosopher Elsewhere.  Indeed, we find ourselves mildly envious of his These People, as their lack of a puritan work ethic sounds rather appealing.  And perhaps their extended time on Facebook has yielded more than usual quotient of adorable pet and baby pictures?  At any rate, what we take from all of this is that maybe all people have their These People.  And the real risk here is getting preoccupied by them. 

The provocations to misanthropy are many and perhaps misanthropy can be its own form of sanctimony?  Even mediocrity?  Maybe we do have a bit of the puritan in us because we find misanthropy the too-easy option where other people are concerned.  It’s just not hard enough to achieve to make us proud for feeling it.  From what we can tell, the supply closet of human disagreements and follies is never empty, and if we’re so inclined, we can always pull out more reasons for alienation and dismay, dislike and disapprobation.  But what’s the point, after all?  This, at least, is what we try to ask ourselves when we find our own These People getting us down. 

DoD Accused of Mission Creep

The DoD has as its mission to know more things and recently encountered worries that it is trying to know ALL the things.  Don't you think, our critics charged, that if you try to know all the things, you’ll end up knowing some things that really aren’t properly deviant?  And, what about standards?  Shouldn’t there be standards regarding what’s worth knowing within the reasonable boundaries of a discipline like deviance? 

These are hard charges.  To the basic question of whether we are tempted to try to know ALL the things, we must fess up and say, yeah, we’d really like that.  Even the idea of it is more than a little intoxicating.  We feel a tad drunk just thinking about it.  But however much we love the idea, we also recognize it is but a dream.  For we here in the DoD are mortal and expect no life, however curiously lived, will let you know more than a few things.  Still, we have tried to solve this problem – not the problem of our mortality since we think that largely a good thing – but the problem of how to know things when time is short.  We call our solution Other People™.  Other people are mortal too, but maybe if we get together enough of them that know enough different things then we at least get to peek in on all the things we can’t know under our own finite powers. 

With respect to whether this wanton listening to other people will fundamentally corrupt our purposes and dilute the discipline of deviance, we confess to having other priorities.  Rather than corruption and dilution, we're a lot more worried about missing out on things.  Because it seems to us that the arc of human inquiry can also be seen as the arc of missing out on things.  Historically, it often seems as if people listened most to the people who knew the same things they did or looked the most like them or sounded the most like them or...  Consequently, we don’t trust ourselves to decide before listening whether we should listen.  We also think that self-distrust is one of our finer qualities, right up there with thinking expertise and experience mean something.  The world is full of people expert in things we can never hope to know well, so rather than go with what our ratty conjectures or half-formed impressions might be, we look for those people.  Then when they say stuff we’ve not heard before, we listen.  

Ultimately, we figure, any need to sort out when and whether some thing or other belongs in deviance will only come much, much later.  Honestly, it’s a problem we’re happy to leave to our great-grandchildren, or even their great-grandchildren.  We expect that any robust airing of all the things long ignored is going to take time and lots of people tarrying together in the heady newness and happy confusion of it all.  Maybe someday someone will need to sort it all out, but hey, erring on the side not listening can give way for a while to listening.

DoD Named “Wise and Good!”

We here in the DoD are delighted to announce that we have been officially named “wise and good!”  Since such encomia don’t come around every day, we here in the DoD shall vigorously enjoy the compliment while and how we can.  The full announcement is here, but since we do love a good “contentious dialogue,” we thought we’d make parts of the announcement – especially the parts involving Confucius, that old Deviant – more dialogic and agonistic just to celebrate:

“Not All Things Wise and Good are Philosophy”

Philosophy originates in Plato’s Republic. It is a restless pursuit for truth through contentious dialogue. It takes place among ordinary human beings in cities, not sages and disciples on mountaintops, [Someone’s been reading too many old New Yorker cartoons with orientalist imagery! You do realize that this hackneyed imagery of sages on mountaintops is like seeing The Thinker sculpture and concluding that western philosophers sit around naked clutching their heads, right?] and it requires the fearless use of reason even in the face of established traditions or religious commitments [Fearless?  Socrates was pretty brave.  Still, the folks wandering around most philosophy departments don’t get to ride on those superhero cape-tails literally forever.  Go to the APA and then tell me here resides “fearless use of reason.” Oh, by the by, Confucius also faced Mortal Danger in his mountain-top wise guy disciple-wrangling.  It was just that his Plato-types – the folks memorializing him - didn’t make much fuss about it, which, if you think about it, is a intriguing writerly choice.]. Plato’s book is the first text of philosophy and a reference point for texts as diverse as Aristotle’s Politics, Augustine’s City of God, al-Fārābī’s The Political Regime, and the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s book Plato’s Republic (2013). [Uh, if general wow-power over many and millenia is the issue, it might be useful to recall that there have been people, lots of them, in East Asia over the two millennia since Confucius.  And a quite large number of them, it turns out, spilled much ink over Confucius.] The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. [Yeah, and he also said that it is more important that an idea be interesting than that it be true.  So maybe he was being “interesting” when he said that bit about Plato and footnotes.] Even philosophers who do not mention Plato directly still use his words – including ‘ideas’ – and his general orientation that prioritises truth over piety. [Yeah, we once said “justice” so call us Philosophers!  And we like truth.  In fact, truth is what motivated us to read a whole lot of stuff before trying tell other people what’s up with Confucius.] Philosophy is the love of wisdom rather than the love of blood or country. [E.g., Socrates didn’t give a damn about his Athenian identity.  That’s why he strode off into exile to make wise elsewhere… oh, wait…]  It is in principle [if not in actual fact] open to everybody, and people all around the world heed Plato’s call to live an examined life. [Plato would like to teach the world to sing. In perfect harmony… This global kumbaya moment has drawn a tear of joy from us.  Just one more reason to say, “Thanks, Plato!”]

I am wary of the argument, however, that all serious reflection upon fundamental questions ought to be called philosophy.  [Which is why we started the Department of Deviance.  We dislike wariness and thought we could be more seriously serious and fundamentally fundamental if we didn’t have to worry about provoking wariness in others, especially the “fearlessly” wary.]  Philosophy, at its best, aims to be a dialogue between people of different viewpoints [But never too different and never with any different ideas about philosophy.  Wait.  We just used ideas™  in a sentence.  Maybe that makes us Plato’s children after all?], but, again, it is a love of wisdom, rather than the possession of wisdom. [Fun aside:  This is why Confucius is always depicted with large sleeves.  He owned wisdom, and kept it tucked up his generous sleeve, just like our grandma does with her tatty tissues.]   This restless character has often made it the enemy of religion and tradition. [Often?  How often?  Thinking you’re a force of opposition when you’re reflexively echoing ideas™  born out of a contingent tradition may make you “restless” but we’re less convinced it makes you the enemy of all that is holy.  More like the occasionally nippy lapdog of all that is holy?]

Likewise, Confucius (551-479 BC) might be worth reading, [We sure do like to think so!] but it stretches terms too far to call him a philosopher. [As we learn in the Analects, Confucius was really into the rectification of names and hotly opposed name-stretching.] In The Analects, ‘The Master said, “When someone’s father is still alive, observe his intentions; after his father has passed away, observe his conduct. If for three years he does not alter the ways of his father, he may be called a filial son.”’ Confucius presents a comprehensive doctrine of a good life that includes filial piety and respect for elders. By contrast [with this one context-free sentence], in the opening pages of the Republic, Socrates ridicules the old man Cephalus for his poor understanding of the meaning of justice. [Sorry, Socrates seems like an amateur here. Unlike Confucius, who once hit an elderly guy with a stick while simultaneously pointing out that some old people lack even the grace to die.  If you’re going to get rough with the elderly, best to go all in!] Plato’s message is that philosophy has no patience for elderly people who like things the way they are and don’t want to wrestle on the terrain of ideas. [Confucius adored the way things were.  It was a love that dare not speak its name, or indeed dare show up in really any form in anything he actually said.] For the Confucian, Plato’s defence of critical thinking might seem like a recipe for family strife and social disharmony. [Yeah, because when we’re thinking critically, family can take a flying leap.  Seriously:  Fuck them if they can’t take a thought!  The priorities here are obvious to anyone who dwells on them.]

I doubt that philosophy departments are the natural home for scholars of Islamic jurisprudence or Confucian ethics. [Speaking as scholars of Confucian ethics, we gotta say, we are sooooo with you on this! Preach!] Should philosophers converse with scholars of different religious and moral traditions?  Of course. [Wait, why “of course”?  How does this seat with all that’s been said so far?  We’re just not seeing what’s in it for the philosophers and besides, wouldn’t that reduce the time they have for naked head clutching critiques of their families?]

To understand why the limits of philosophy matter, we need to situate the debate within ongoing debates about the funding of higher education. Last year, the Republican senator Marco Rubio said: ‘We need more welders than philosophers,’ a blunt articulation of a widely shared view among taxpayers and policymakers looking for reasons to eliminate, cut or defund philosophy departments.  In that New York Times op-ed, philosophy departments are accused [by philosophers themselves] of being ‘temples to the achievement of males of European descent’. The implication [according to these actual philosophers working in philosophy departments] is that academic philosophy is racist, sexist and worthy of an imminent demise. This will be welcome news for policymakers who want to prohibit federal funds from subsidising the study of philosophy, say, at community colleges or state universities.  [Because policy makers were all just waiting for the signal from philosophers to conclude that philosophers are useless.  Still, as Plato wrote, “The unexamined curriculum is not worth teaching.  Unless an unexamined curriculum can secure future institutional funding and the good will of Marco Rubio.  Also, poo on welding!” (Republic 643b)].

Let philosophy departments evolve organically as scholars convince their peers that a new author, idea or tradition is worth engaging. [And when those scholars inevitably fail at making the incurious interested, they can self-deport and leave philosophy to those with actual ideas™.]