Variegated
Celebrating its ten year anniversary, The Philosophers’ Magazine publishes a post drawn from a larger piece in which the editors posed the following question to a panel of highly accomplished and celebrated philosophers:
Has philosophy responded adequately to the big events and debates of the last decade, such as climate change and the post-9/11 world?
It behooves scholars to ask themselves this sort of question regularly, even though – like all behoovery – it seems labored. In this instance, most of TPM’s philosophers predictably reply in the negative, and many of them further conform to expectations by interrogating the question itself. Colin McGinn has a pithy quip along these lines:
No, but it hasn’t responded inadequately either – which would be worse. What would an adequate response look like?
Good question. Although he alights briefly on the concept of adequacy, McGinn soon follows his colleagues to dwell upon the verb “responded” rather than on the adverb that conspicuously pressures it in the phrasing of the question. As a result of this choice, McGinn and the other writers skew their comments to the issue of action – what philosophers do; whether or not they should do it (or could do it) in a way that is informed by (or in response to) “big events and debates.” In their focus on the verb, none of these writers make clear to us how they have engineered the standard of adequacy that necessarily structures their replies.
In the absence of deliberate thinking on adequacy, many of these philosophers reveal intuitive perceptions of this quality, which makes TPM’s question much more interesting than it was probably set up to be. In this post, I want to look at the adequacy threshholds in which these writers seem to work, in the hope that this exercise will show that there is little consensus among these extraordinary minds as to the means by which they ought to tally the merit of intellectual responses to world events. Without consensus on how we can know responsiveness to be commensurate with the situation – or at least more transparency about the variegated quality of adequacy – it is really quite difficult to answer questions such as the one above to common satisfation.
Let’s look a little deeper into what these philosophers say, to pick out a few clues about the sort of adequacy that would need to exist in order for each of these writers to answer TPM in the affirmative. Roughly, the TPM philosophers can be divided into four groups based on what they think constitutes an adequate response.
For one group of writers – including McGinn and Jerry Fodor – philosophy simply does not have a plausible responsibility to respond to events or debates at all. Fodor is snarky: “Has Art History responded adequately to the post-9/11 world? Why should philosophy be different?,” While McGinn puts it a little more charitably: “Philosophers should respond, but it’s not clear to me that philosophy should.” We might call these writers adequacy agnostics. For both of them, the ambit of philosophy is not sufficiently capacious to include climate change or 9/11. Sure, these things should matter to people, even in the unlikely event that these people happen to be philosophers; it’s just that these big events aren’t philosophical subjects, so philosophy can be neither adequate nor inadequate in addressing them. Philosophers can have opinions about torture, sea ice or what to do about the price of eggs, but these opinions don’t count as professionally informed.
A second group of writers consider adequacy from a pedagogical point of view, recommending that in light of the big events, educators ought to revive dormant curricular material. To address climate change, for instance, Simon Blackburn suggests a return to the stoics, while Alisdair MacIntyre recommends Marx. Martha Nussbaum has the most developed post on this sort of pedagogical adequacy. She believes that philosophers are responding adequately when “good work” appears, when issues receive “the attention they deserve,” and when paradigms “have begun to be challenged.” As if advising a plucky student or reviewer, she says that “philosophy advances by argument and contestation, and we need more powerful worked-out theories of different types.” As an example, Nussbaum notes that good work is being done on animal privileges, because “the menu [!] of theoretical options” on this subject is expanding. She even gets specific about what “good work” would look like in the cases of global warming and post 9/11 society: “extensive empirical knowledge, and therefore partnerships with other disciplines such as economics, law, and history.” You can tell from their responses that Blackburn, MacIntyre and Nussbaum see events in the news and think about their conference papers, edited volumes, students’ doctoral projects, course offerings and syllabi. It’s all so shockingly educational.
In the TPM post, a third group is made up of what we might call the lecturers, philosophers who measure adequacy based on how much meaningful discourse is taking place in the public sphere concerning the big events of the day. A.C. Grayling, for one, thinks that the response of philosophy has been inadequate because issues such as 9/11 have been lacking in contestation
These are quintessentially matters that require exploration and debate, clarification, vigorous challenges to our too-ready reactions and our fears, and constantly renewed perspectives on how to think about them and how our world might best be managed in response to them.
For Grayling, this is a job for the philosopher’s argumentative aptitudes. Peter Singer likewise pegs adequacy to the “amount” of focus and attention that philosophers train upon these issues, lamenting “We didn’t focus enough on climate change in the early days, before it hit the headlines.” Meanwhile, the philosopher’s response to 9/11 should take the form of “discussion” about “the ethics of war, of torture, and of responses to terrorism.”
Grayling’s “debate” and Singer’s “discussion” become a kind of performance for Slavoj Zizek, who evaluates the adequacy of philosophy based on its capacity to
Tell the general public haunted by the problems of ecology, of racism, of religious conflicts … how the way we perceive a problem can be part of the problem, mystifying it instead of enabling us to solve it. There are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions.
Zizek the great communicator. Just as the agnostics seem like theorizers and the pedagogues seem like teachers, these three seem like big-hall lecturers, and so do the last category of writers that I want to highlight – those for whom the adequacy threshold is only met when talk is succeeded by practical action. Let’s call them the applied philosophers. Jaakko Hintikka argues, for instance, that philosophy would only be adequately dealing with big issues if its vaunted discussions result in “constructive practical or ideological suggestions.” John Searle concurs, demonstrating two “philosophical mistakes made in current American and Coalition policy:” the category mistake of declaring war on the method of terrorism, which Searle argues is “like having a war against transportation;” and “the fallacy of assuming that big events must have big causes.” Had philosophers applied their minds to help to give 9/11 a sense of scale, Searle believes, perhaps it would have been possible to encourage a more precise response rather than pursuing the ill-defined military adventures of recent years.
Of course, the standard of adequacy-as-application sets a bar that is far higher than the others noted above. The first three groups found ways to turn at least one of the traditional roles of the philosopher into an affirmative source of meaning with which to define responsive adequacy. In other words, if we do enough writing, teaching, theorizing or public lecturing that responds to the big events, then we will satisfy at least one of the agnostics, pedagogues or lecturers. But the last two philosophers wants to use political policies as the measure of adequacy of the philosophical response. This is most unrealistic. In the first place, this idea exports the measurement of adequacy from the actual philosopher and places it in the hands of the politician who acts on suggestions. It is seldom shrewd to hand philosophy’s proxy to politics. Secondly, this notion presupposes that philosophers actually qualify for the list of those who are consulted for their views on pressing matters of state. If we wait for someone to meet this last test before we are allowed to declare philosophy adequately responsive, we shall be waiting for a very long time indeed.
In any case, TPM ought to be commended on its anniversary for giving us this small but useful aperture through which to peer in on the variegated ways in which philosophers think about adequacy in the contexts of their professional and public roles. Indeed, I think TPM’s post gives us more perspective on the ambitions of the philosophical mind than it actually tells us about how philosophy has managed to muddle through the last ten years – adequately, as always.
