“The Death of Socrates By Means of The American Philosophical Association,” by Q (2013), after “The Death of Socrates,” by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
In his essay, “Six Studies in The Decline and Fall of Professional Academic Philosophy, And A Real and Relevant Alternative,” Robert Hanna argues that academics in general, and academic philosophers in particular, have often been gently or even sarcastically mocked for “living in an ivory tower.” But it’s simply a brute social fact that massively most contemporary philosophers are both academics and also professionals, which, in turn, leads to a serious metaphilosophical problem. For the vocational vices of professionalism are (i) careerism, (ii) conformism, and (iii) coercive authoritarianism as specifically applied to the members of the profession working under its highly restrictive normative rules of work and code of conduct; the vocational vices of academicism are (i) dogmatism, (ii) esotericism, and (iii) hyper-specialization; and contemporary professional academic philosophy not only has all six of these vocational vices, but also has them in superabundance. This naturally yields the alienation and insulation of professional academic philosophers from the basic beliefs, concerns, needs, and activities of the rest of humanity outside the professional academy, even to the point of being fundamentally theoretically, emotionally, morally, and/or sociopolitically at odds with the rest of humanity, thereby entrenching them in an ivory bunker, a dire philosophical, moral, and sociopolitical situation which can be capsulized and summed up under the rubric of essential irrelevance to humanity. So it’s an accurate and serious criticism of contemporary professional academic philosophy that it’s essentially irrelevant to humanity; as Carlo Cellucci correctly puts it, although perhaps also understating the problem,
[m]ost of the questions considered by today’s [professional academic] philosophers are of interest only to academics working in a little corner of philosophy, not to those working in other corners of philosophy, let alone to people working in other subjects or to cultured people at large. (Cellucci, 2018: p. 14)
Now, the metaphilosophical problem of essential-irrelevance-to-humanity is also a perennial problem for professional academic philosophy, as John Dewey pointed out at length a year before the end of World War I (Dewey, 1917), as Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out at similar length sixty-six years earlier, in 1851, (Schopenhauer, 2014), and as Henry David Thoreau formulated it very crisply and indeed epigramatically in 1854:
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates…. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. (Thoreau, 1957: p. 9)
Indeed, if Hanna is right, then the problem of the essential-irrelevance-to-humanity of professional academic philosophy goes all the way back to 18th century philosophy, and more specifically to Leibnizian-Wolffian Rationalist philosophy, to Kant’s critical (and indeed Critical, and philosophically revolutionary) response to it in the Critique of Pure Reason, and also to Kant’s little-studied long essay or short book in metaphilosophy about philosophy’s relation to the professional academy, The Conflict of the Faculties (Kant, 1979; Hanna, 2021: ch. XVIII). Unfortunately—or perhaps, thinking presciently about the philosophy of the future, fortunately (Hanna, 2024)—however, the 270 year-old metaphilosophical problem of essential-irrelevance-to-humanity has reached its final crisis stage in contemporary professional academic philosophy. Correspondingly, in this essay, Hanna presents six short critical studies in the decline and fall of 20th and 21st century professional academic philosophy into its final crisis stage condition of essential-irrelevance-to-humanity, which is the bad news, and then he offers a real and relevant alternative to it—what he calls life-shaping philosophy—and also spell out a set of material conditions for the real-world implementation of life-shaping philosophy, which is the good news.
REFERENCES
(Cellucci, 2018). Cellucci, C. “Philosophy at a Crossroads: Escaping from Irrelevance.” Syzetesis 5: 13-53. Available online at URL = <http://www.syzetesis.it/documenti/archivio/anno5/f1/3%20ARTICOLO%20CELLUCCI.pdf>.
(Dewey, 1917). Dewey, J. “The Need for A Recovery of Philosophy. ” In J. Dewey (ed.), Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. New York: Holt. Pp. 3-69.
(Hanna, 2021). Hanna, R., The Fate of Analysis: Analytic Philosophy From Frege to The Ash-Heap of History. New York: Mad Duck Coalition. Available online in preview HERE.
(Hanna, 2024a). Hanna, R. “Kantian Futurism.” Journal of Philosophical Investigations 18, 47: 1-8. Available online at URL = <https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_18254.html?lang=en>.
(Kant, 1979). Kant. I. The Conflict of the Faculties. Trans. M. Gregor. Lincoln NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press.
(Schopenhauer, 2014). Schopenhauer, A. “On University Philosophy.” Trans. S. Roehr and C. Janaway. In A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Pp. 125-176.
(Thoreau, 1957). Thoreau, H.D. “Walden.” In H.D. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience. Cambridge MA: Riverside Press. Pp. 1-227.
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