What is Good Philosophy?

‘Shall we go on to explain why the majority of philosophers are necessarily corrupted, and show, if we can, that it’s not philosophy’s fault?’

Socrates in Plato’s Republic, 489d-e

What is good philosophy? At any given time, philosophy is what philosophers do. Look at what philosophers do; look at the picture of success for philosophical activity as it is in this time. You might be disappointed by what you find.

Academic philosophers construct and appraise arguments; they also study and teach the history of ideas. That is all. If you go to study philosophy, that is what you will learn.

And it only happens in one place – the University – where it is increasingly under threat. It’s considered to be a low-value discipline that offers comparatively little in return for any investment: in comparison, say, to business or the sciences.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Plato’s Socrates explains why the best of philosophers will always be considered good-for-nothings. Philosophy has a kind of ‘noseeum’ value, visible only to those who are in a position to see it but invisible to those who aren’t.

But what about the worst of philosophers? Because anyone who turns away from ideals and looks to reality would see clearly that ‘some philosophers were useless and others complete rogues’. Academic philosophers are not lovers of wisdom but adulterers. They say they love wisdom but they are always pursuing something else: a job, a publication, a citation. Those are their affairs.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way, and it’s not only because I might be jaded. Socrates too, the ideal philosopher, the one who says ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, the one who loves philosophy with a passion and will defend it to his death, asks: ‘Why are most philosophers bad?’

It’s as easy to answer that question now as it ever was. For the young academic philosopher, coming up through the system of philosophical education that we have in the 21^st century, it isn’t Socrates’ democratic ‘crowd of Athenians’ but the University that is ‘turning them [the young philosopher] into just the sort of people they [the University] want’. The University grades their undergraduate work according to some approximation of the standards of a publication in an academic journal; done well, that leads to post-graduate work to the same end; done well, that leads to PhD work to the same end; done well, that leads to publication in an academic journal; done well, that leads to a career to the same end; at which point the academic, having climbed into the ivory tower, turns around and offers a hand to those below, by teaching what they were taught: the standards required for publication in an academic journal. Try to go through an academic life without working to this end and you will see how far you get: not past the first hurdle.

‘Can a young man remain unmoved by all this? […] Won’t he be swamped by the flood of popular praise and blame, and carried away before it until he finds himself agreeing with popular ideas of right and wrong, behaving like the crowd and becoming one of them?’

Socrates in Plato’s Republic, 492 (emphasis added)

‘And yet we’ve said nothing of the most persuasive force of all’, Socrates continues. Imagine the academic has done all that is necessary to establish a career and then, at that point, their sincere study catches up with them and kindles, as Plato says, ‘a fire in the soul’. By this light they recognise the folly of the endless stream of petty publications and understand the damage that this way of carrying on does to the discipline. They change tack, working towards better work and taking their time to do so, adjusting their teaching to encourage a better ideal in their students. This slows things down. The route is circuitous. This doesn’t go unnoticed. They are inefficient. They do not hit certain targets. Questions come from above. They are encouraged to achieve more publications, more grant capture, to give better grades and more 1st-class degrees, to assign more standardised work and mark it more quickly, etc., etc. There is a certain pressure of expectation. Then the recently-idealistic academic philosopher looks left and right and sees how philosophy is faring in the ‘race’: not well. They know the devil will take the hindmost.

‘The punishments – disenfranchisement, fines, or death – which these educational experts inflict on those who won’t listen to them, bringing force to bear where persuasion has failed.’ (ibid.) The axe falls, and where it doesn’t fall it threatens to fall, hanging over the heads of all who would not toe the line and maintain the standards of professional philosophy. Who can remain unmoved by all this?

‘To escape harm and grow up on the right lines in our present society is something that can fairly be called miraculous.’

Socrates in Plato’s Republic, 492

There is an ideal of philosophy that holds it to account. It acts as a fixed reference point that we orient ourselves towards; even when that point shifts, like the sun, we follow it, acknowledging our relative time and place.

Philosophy is more than an ability to construct and appraise arguments and to preserve and pass on the history of ideas. I know it is more than that, even though I’m not sure what more it is.

Academic philosophy does not exemplify the ideal of philosophy: that much seems obvious to me. I think some philosophers see that too, though they think they are powerless to do anything about it, and they might be right.

But many philosophers seem to be locked in an observational bias: they don’t see it at all. It’s no weakness of philosophy since even great philosophers fall into this kind of trap. It’s like the observational bias that prompted Aristotle to ‘observe’ the sun orbiting the earth, or the inherent teleology of nature, or the natural inferiority of women. He was terribly wrong about all of these things but by his great influence left humanity with a lot of ground to recover: it took us 2,000 years. If only he’d appealed to a higher ideal he might have seen beyond what he observed and acknowledged the dissenting voices of his day: those that said that women were the equal to men, that nature has no inherent purpose, and that the earth orbits the sun. (All views that were present at the time. A little bit of ‘history of ideas’ there for you.)

‘What is good philosophy?’, you ask the academic, and they will point to the picture of success: this amounts to having many publications in prestigious academic journals. See their hiring criteria; see where the money flows. It is getting worse. If you ask the University manager or marketeer they will point to whatever produces the highest lifetime-earnings potential of philosophy graduates.

There are dissenting voices in this time. Let’s hope they are heard and taken seriously, and that academic philosophy doesn’t leave philosophy with too much ground to recover.