PHILOSOPHY AND tHE - Purlieu

A Philosophical Journal
Special Edition
PHILOSOPHY AND
tHE UNIVERSITY
Zabala
Babich
Vattimo
Martinengo
Crowell
thomson

Purlieu: /‘perl-‘yu/
1. Outlying place or district; environ
2. Margin of a kingdom‘s forest, thick enough as to risk
severance from authority.
Purlieu is an international publication committed to showcasing
exceptional student works hand-in-hand with relevant and distinct
perspectives of contemporary academic and cultural figures.
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Volume One, Issue Three
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Founding Managing Editors:
Dennis Erwin
Matt Story
Editorial Board:
( Chair ) Dale Wilkerson
University of North Texas
Charles Bambach
University of Texas, Dallas
Matthew Calarco
California State Fullerton
Manuel Cruz
University of Barcelona
Carmelo Dotolo
Urbanian Pontifical University, Rome
William Egginton
Johns Hopkins University
Sharin Elkholy
University of Houston-Downtown
Jamey Findling
Newman University
Luanne Frank
University of Texas, Arlington
Patricia Glazebrook
University of North Texas
Josh Michael Hayes
Santa Clara University
Christoph Jamme
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Jiang Yi
Beijing Normal University
Irene Klaver
University of North Texas
Bruce Krajewski
Texas Woman‘s University
Liangjian Liu
East China Normal University, Shanghai
Jeff Malpas
University of Tasmania
Michael Marder
Duquesne University
Robert Piercey
Campion College at Regina
Francois Raffoul
Louisiana State University
Lucio Saviani
University of Rome
F. Scott Scribner
University of Hartford
Gianni Vattimo
University of Turin
Robert Wood
University of Dallas
Santiago Zabala
ICREA / University of Barcelona
Holger Zaborowski
Catholic University of America
1

CONTENTS
4 � Editors‘ Letter Dennis Erwin & Matt Story
6 � Being in the University:
The Legitimations of
Analytic Philosophy or a
Philosophical Education?
20 � Interview: Philosophical
Antagonism and the
Effects of Intellectual
Fashion
30 � The University and
Research in Italy
37 � Interview: An
Impoverishment of
Philosophy
73 � Thinking the Pedagogical
Truth Event After
Heidegger
Santiago Zabala
ICREA / University of
Barcelona
Steven Crowell
Rice University
Gianni Vattimo
University of Turin /
European Parliament
Alberto Martinengo
University of Turin
Babette Babich
Fordham University
Iain Thomson
University of New Mexico

www.purlieujournal.com

From The Editors
Zabala | Being in the University
Purlieu was founded, one year ago, with the hope of introducing a new
community of scholars and philosophers who are beginning their careers in
the midst of an apparent re-valuation of the relationship between philosophy
and the university. This re-valuation is fueled by current global economic
changes influencing universities and departments.
Philosophy students of this generation find themselves engaged in
on-going discussions about the strength of the discipline, its role in the
university, the future of academia, and their own futures within the field.
Within the latter issue lies the tension between the necessity of making a
living and pursuing the life of the mind. This is a major concern of today‘s
students, and one hopes—we hope— that there is still a means by which
many of today‘s brightest thinkers can reconcile the two. With each issue of
Purlieu we have tried to address this concern by interviewing contemporary
thinkers who might provide insight into the direction of academia and public
thought.
Out of this shared desire, Purlieu and Santiago Zabala arranged to
publish his essay ―Being in the University.‖ Excited by the piece, we invited
other professional academic philosophers we knew and respected for their
unique perspectives on similar issues regarding ‗Philosophy and the
University‘. The result is this volume, Purlieu‟s first Special Edition,
featuring essay contributions from Gianni Vattimo with Alberto Martinengo
(translated for Purlieu by Robert Valgenti), Iain Thomson, and Santiago
Zabala, as well as interviews with Babette Babich and Steven Crowell.
It has been tremendous honor and a remarkable privilege working
with these contributors. Thank you, all of you, for working with us.
We‘d also like to thank Dale Wilkerson, whose work and guidance
have been invaluable, and without whom this issue never would have
happened. And we would like to thank our close friends and family,
particularly Stephanie Erwin and Victoria Baria, for their continuous
support.
4
// DE & MS

Call For Papers
Articles are welcome in any area of philosophy or
philosophical perspectives, including but not
limited to: Gender and Race Studies, Literature,
Political Science, Ecology, Education,
Communication Studies, Linguistics, Sociology,
Anthropology, Poetry, Urban Studies, and
Psychology.
Articles are blind-reviewed and judged on their
philosophical merit and relevance. Articles should
be double-spaced Word documents, with a cover
page (including institutional affiliation) and
300-500 word abstract. For stylistic concerns,
consult the University of Chicago Press Manual of
Style.
Imagery is encouraged; however it is the obligation
of the author to obtain permission for any imagery
within the article if it is not within public domain.
Authors will not be charged extra for images.
www.purlieujournal.com
Purlieu

Zabala | Being in the University
Dr. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. He is the
author of The Remains of Being (2009), The Hermeneutical Nature of Analytic Philosophy
(2008), co-author, with Gianni Vattimo, of Hermeneutic Communism (2011), editor of
Weakening Philosophy (2007), The Future of Religion (2005), Nihilism and Emancipation
(2004), Art‘s Claim to Truth (2009), and co-editor with Jeff Malpas of Consequences of
Hermeneutics (2010). His forthcoming book is Being Shaken co-edited with Michael Marder
(2012).
A very healthy thing for philosophy would be to rethink its
own historical origins. I think it has been much too
unhistorical and has lost a lot of the insights of the past.
Fruitful lines of thinking and development have been
abandoned partly because of fashion and partly because of…
the availability of certain simple, reasonably well-understood
problems where you can do technical work that will succeed
and will even be rather classy in a way, and elegant. In a
way I think philosophy always has to keep going back to its
own sources and try to return to the central problems that
every generation somehow rethought and reformulated.
~ Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics (2004)
Being is challenged in the university today by the hegemony of analytic
philosophy. The teaching of how to measure the quality of philosophical
argumentation through formal logic is squeezing out ontological accounts of
existential problems from the history of philosophy. An increasing number
6

Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
of departments all over the world are funded and rewarded only as long as
they follow the secure path of modern science; in other words, if they adopt
a problem-solving approach that assures objective results. In classrooms,
the transmission of logical notions prevails over fruitful dialogues with the
aim of educating students according to certain metaphysical assertions.
While this transmission might be useful for being at the university, it
definitely is not useful for Being in the university—an institution where it is
possible to question the fundamental concepts of philosophy and also of
oneself. If, as Hans-Georg Gadamer explained, ―we understand only when
we understand differently,‖ then much more than the transmission of
information happens during a lecture; there is also the possibility to disclose
to students (and professors) their interpretations, differences, or even
existence. Philosophy does not stand together with other disciplines, such as
medicine or architecture, in legitimizing practices; rather, its practice is
questions whose answers have never been legitimized or settled. Answers to
the question of Being can only come from devotion to thought. Unlike
economics or chemistry students, who are often motivated by the jobs their
discipline guarantees, philosophy students are primarily motivated by the
questions the discipline of philosophy will invite them to confront. 1 Noam
Chomsky‘s critique in this paper‘s epigraph is clearly directed against
analytic philosophy‘s ahistorical and technical method; that is, its
subordination to science when philosophy is a theoretically self-sufficient
discipline. Philosophy is not wisdom but rather ―love of wisdom,‖ where
truth is sought and questioned instead of analyzed and applied.
Using the ontological difference to individuate the relationship
between philosophy and the university might seem misleading at first,
considering ontology is itself a branch of philosophy, but it is the necessary
point of departure for those who consider philosophy‘s ongoing
subordination to science a misfortune. Such subordination is particularly
evident in the prevailing role that analytic philosophers have in most U.S.
departments and some European universities. Their alliance with the
methods of science has compromised philosophy‘s ontological nature, which
distinguished it from all the other disciplines throughout history.
The goal of this brief essay is to point out why Being in the
university ought to be the main concern of a philosophical education now
that analytic philosophy has subordinated philosophy to scientific, corporate
methods of legitimation. This subordination has reduced students to simple
consumers of the information transmitted by the professor, has confined the
role of professors to demonstrating the legitimacy of their competence
through articles published in ranked journals, and has allowed new
disciplines such as Business Ethics and Biomedical Ontology to become
part of the mandatory academic program. While these features vary across
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Zabala | Being in the University
departments and nations, as a rule they have ontologically changed the
relations between the professor and student, the professor and his research,
and philosophy and other disciplines. But where do the origins of
philosophy‘s subordination to science lie, and why has analytic philosophy
managed to prevail in departments and academic programs across the
globe?
For most analytic philosophers, exploring the origin of their position
is useless because, as a historical enterprise, it would not benefit their
professional development, which requires results, solutions, and verifiable
applications. This explains why the few responsible analytic philosophers
who ventured into the history of their position have not achieved much
recognition among their colleagues. Paradigmatic examples include Ernst
Tugendhat, who in 1976 published Traditional and Analytical Philosophy
(which reconstructed the history of proposing semantic solutions to the
ontological question of Being), 2 and Richard Rorty, who three years later
released Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (in order to indicate the
limitations of the semantic solutions his colleagues followed so consistently).
While Rorty admired Tugendhat‘s theoretical operation, particularly his use
of Martin Heidegger‘s philosophy, he went further than his German
colleague and explained how the subordination of philosophy to science that
I mention above is rooted is the essence of metaphysics, that is, in the
obsession with revealing the truthful context of the subject matter.
Following the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, and
Heidegger, Rorty suggested that this truthful context is simply the
determination of Being as presence, that is, descriptions of the present state
of affairs that automatically privilege temporal, spatial, and unified
presentness over their opposites: ―insofar as the pure relationship of the Ithink-unity
(basically a tautology) becomes the unconditioned relationship,
the present that is present to itself becomes the measure for all beingness.‖ 3
Although these descriptions vary among the different branches of
philosophy (aesthetics, ethics, and logic) most philosophers (at least until
Friedrich Nietzsche‘s, Heidegger‘s, and Jacques Derrida‘s deconstructions of
metaphysics) considered Being as a motionless, nonhistorical, and
arithmetic object that operated just like the European sciences, which
Edmund Husserl declared in crisis in 1936. 4 In sum, philosophy—especially
since the Enlightenment, when the empirical sciences were given priority
because of their total organization of all beings within a predictable
structure of causes and effects—became a scientific enterprise and left aside
the wider realms from which philosophic problems arise.
During the past century, prominent analytic philosophers such as
Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski, George E. Moore, Rudolf Carnap, and Wilfred V.
8

Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
O. Quine not only found that ―philosophy of science is philosophy enough‖ 5
and that it should be submitted to ―the secure path of science‖ 6 but also
described how it could better serve by becoming a set of ―regional
ontologies.‖ These ontologies hold that the relation between subjects and
beings is the only relation worthy of philosophical insight and leave aside
the meaning of Being, that is, the ontological priority of understanding
Being. This is why today there is a parallel between these regional ontologies
and the sciences in their ongoing compartmentalization or specialization. 7
Analytic philosophy has pursued these regional ontologies to extreme
conclusions: first through Husserl‘s early phenomenological project 8 and
most recently through the work of John Searle, for whom the conservation
of the ―Western Rationalistic Tradition‖ (limited to the standards of
objectivity, truth, and rationality) constitutes the ―essential presuppositions
of any sane philosophy.‖ 9 But what does such ―sanity‖ refer to? Again, to the
Western rationalistic tradition, which he circumscribes to the followers of
―Russell, Wittgenstein and Frege.‖ 10 Searle, against Tugendhat or Rorty, has
not bothered to venture into the metaphysical origins of his own position
because the ―task of the philosopher is to get the problem into a precise
enough form, to state the problem carefully enough, so that it admits of a
scientific resolution.‖ 11
As the completion of realism, analytic philosophy not only
legitimizes scientific enterprises but also delegitimizes any different
philosophical positions that do not submit to science. This is evident in
Searle‘s debate with the (continental) 12 philosopher Derrida. 13 In this debate,
the American philosopher and his analytic followers acted as scientists
instead of philosophers by considering the French master‘s assertions
―either false or trivial‖ without engaging in a dialogic exchange. 14 Against
Derrida‘s iterability argument, 15 Searle saw not only an incomprehension of
John Austin‘s type/token distinction, but most of all a loss of control
implied by the French philosopher‘s arguments. The possibility that we
could lose ―control of the meaning of the utterance‖ implies for Searle that
―the whole system of distinctions, between sentence meaning and speaker
meaning for example, is undermined or overthrown.‖ 16 But Derrida, as a
other philosopher open to questioning the ontological foundation of his own
arguments, pointed out that reality does not take place simply ―between
sentence meaning and speaker meaning‖ because ―iterability alters‖; 17 that
is, when texts are inserted into different contexts they will produce new
meanings that are different from the ones we were accustomed to. This
implies that every text, sign, or word is not possible without what makes its
repetitions possible; its constituents are never ―simply‖ or ―really‖ fully
present to themselves; they are often missing. Derrida named this infinite
loss of constituents ―dissemination‖ in order to indicate how
communication, contrary to analytic philosophy, is never a unified realm
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Zabala | Being in the University
because its horizons constantly flee the non-wholly-present elements of its
constituents. Such questions or suggestions are unacceptable to analytic
philosophers who have become ―self-declared advocates of communication‖
against the ―slightest difficulty, the slightest complication, the slightest
transformation of the rules.‖ 18
Analytic philosophers have used the objections of Derrida (and other
continental philosophers, as the Sokal affair demonstrated) 19 to take over
philosophy departments in the name of truth, clarity, and objectivity. In this
way they are not only serving science but also legitimating it in the name of
philosophy. If prominent philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas, Gianni
Vattimo, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Žižek are not welcome in
analytic departments, it isn‘t because they are less ―professional‖ than
Pascal Engel, Donald Davidson, Peter Strawson, Michael Dummett, or
Daniel Dennett, but rather because they are less inclined to circumscribe
philosophy to science. In sum, the reason for analytic philosophers‘ success
in dominating departments must be sought it their legitimation of scientific
enterprises that are bound to governments, which in part also depend on
such enterprises. 20 After all, government funding agencies prefer objective
results that can impose political systems and control alterations rather than
possibilities for theoretical, ethical, or linguistic emancipations. As we can
see, analytic philosophy‘s ―imperialistic approach‖ shows an interest in
establishing a descriptive, obedient, and universal civilization where ―no
theoretical work, no literary work, no philosophical work, can receive
worldwide legitimation without crossing the [United] States, without being
first legitimized in the States.‖ 21 If we agree, as Derrida pointed out, that
―linguistic hegemony cannot be dissociated from the hegemony of a type of
philosophy,‖ 22 it shouldn‘t be a surprise that analytic philosophy has
predominantly developed in the United States, where science‘s latest
developments occur and where philosophy has almost disappeared from the
public debates.
As Michael Marder recently pointed out in Telos, philosophy has
become ―a discipline in crisis, a discipline literally split, in an exceptionally
asymmetrical fashion, between two competing strands that go under the
names ‗analytic‘ and ‗Continental.‘‖ 23 This split has been particularly useful
for analytic philosophers to unify their goals and dismiss as
nonphilosophical all those working on the fundamental questions that have
troubled philosophers for millennia: the meaning of life after death, the
value of democracy, or the ethical consequence of science, all of which
request deep historical research and ontological perspectives. Although
Rorty proposed other terms to individuate the distinction (such as ―analytic
philosophy and conversational philosophy,‖ ―systematic philosophy and
edifying discourse,‖ ―ahistoricist and historicist philosophers‖), I believe we
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
should start simply distinguishing between ―analytic philosophy and
philosophy.‖ The main difference of philosophy (that is, ―continental‖
philosophy) from analytic philosophy is not its emphasis on the history of
the discipline and the classical ontological questions that tormented Plato,
Descartes, and other classic thinkers, but its reluctance to submit to
science. I‘m not suggesting that those concerned with formal logics should
be fired from philosophy departments, or that no one should study
philosophical problems raised by science, but rather that the discipline‘s
ontological status, which is what distinguishes it from all the other
disciplines, remains its fundamental approach.
There is nothing more disturbing for a genuine philosophical
education than that ―undergraduate students are trained in problem-solving
approaches, drilled in formal and symbolic logic, and, frequently, not given a
chance to explore the history of philosophy in depth.‖ 24 All supporters of
continental philosophy, Marder continues, are being relegated ―to the
margins of the profession, whose unofficial rankings of programs in
philosophy deliberately leave out those departments that boast particular
strengths in the already marginalized fields of study.‖ 25 Marginalizing these
classical questions in favor of a scientific training in problem-solving
approaches in formal and symbolic logic not only reduces students‘ interest
in philosophy but also allows the value of the discipline to be determined by
universities instead of by the philosophers who teach in them. Strong
promoters of analytic philosophy, such as Brian Leiter, confirm how ―in the
U.S., all the Ivy League universities [Harvard, Yale, Princeton], all the
leading state research universities, all the University of California campuses,
most of the top liberal arts colleges, most of the flagship campuses of the
second-tier state research universities boast philosophy departments that
overwhelmingly self-identify as ‗analytic.‘‖ 26 Following this corporate ranking
approach, students interested in German idealism, Donald Davidson, or
pragmatism should not study with a specialist like Terry Pinkard, Jeff
Malpas, or Richard Bernstein because they don‘t teach in these top-ranked
universities. 27 How can students become disciples of philosophers (as
Aristotle was of Plato, Thomas Aquinas of Albertus Magnus, Kant of Martin
Knutzen, Hannah Arendt of Heidegger, or Robert Brandom of Richard Rorty)
if the relation is limited by university ranking?
In sum, among the most alarming consequences of analytic
philosophy‘s instructive method is the transformation of the student into a
simple consumer of information transmitted by a ranked university. If
philosophy is submitted to science‘s established methods, where traditional
questions and authors are dismissed, students have to learn to simply
accept and apply these same paradigms. Instead of becoming autonomous
disciples (Beings) who confront fundamental problems from the history of
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Zabala | Being in the University
philosophy, they turn into controllable students (beings) who follow the
indications dictated by legitimized academics. The same problem affects the
professors, who, instead of being asked to engage in research to publish
books (as most philosophers have done throughout the history of
philosophy), are now requested to expose their results in articles (similar to
scientists). 28 While it makes sense for scientists to publish their research in
journals given the space required to expose the results, philosophers‘
research constitutes their only ―result‖; much more space than allowed to an
article is needed to elucidate, for example, the Hegelian origins of Stanley
Cavell‘s aesthetic investigations. As far as new disciplines as biomedical
ontology or business ethics are concerned, the problem is not whether they
are added to the philosophy program but whether they are given the same
priority as ―History of Greek Philosophy‖ or ―Introduction to Sartre.‖ The
relation that is established between the student and teacher, the academic
research obligations, and the disciplines are disenchanting philosophy‘s
genuine concern for wisdom into an imposition of intelligence. But what are
the hopes for redirecting academic programs into philosophy‘s historical
origins in order to propose new and fruitful lines of thinking?
While it is obvious there should not be a philosophy department
that does not systematically teach every epoch of the history of philosophy
so that students can choose to specialize in a particular theme, classic, or
issue that she finds interesting, it is less clear what the purpose of such
program should be. Whom can a philosophy department train—students,
disciples, or geniuses? The answer to this question again depends on
whether we decide beforehand to submit philosophy to science.
According to Leiter, ―geniuses‖ such as Nietzsche, ―one may hope,
will find its way in the world without the benefit of rankings. But for those
who want to pursue a scholarly career in philosophy, one cannot do better
than to pursue training in analytic philosophy—even if one plans to work, in
the end, on Hegel or Marx or Nietzsche.‖ 29 As we can see, Leiter, like an
ecclesiastical fundamentalist who submits to a cleric‘s interpretation of
sacred texts, is convinced that only analytic philosophy can correctly read
these classics. It is probably this legitimized culture that led a student to tell
Gadamer, when he was teaching at Boston College, ―Oh, Professor Gadamer,
I see that you are teaching Plato this semester! What a pity, because I have
already done Plato!‖ 30
Against these legitimations that impede students‘ pursuit of
questions previously studied, philosophy must educate them to ―become
who they‖ are because
of the kind of Being which is constituted by the existentiale of
projection, Dasein is constantly “more” than it factually is,
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
supposing that one might want to make an inventory of it as
something objectively present and list the contents of its
Being, and supposing that one were able to do so. But Dasein
is never more than it factically is, for to its facticity its
potentiality-for-Being belongs essentially. Yet as Beingpossible,
moreover, Dasein is never anything less; that is to
say, it is existentially that which, in its potentiality-for-Being,
it is not yet. Only because the Being of the “there” receives its
Constitution through understanding and through the
character of understanding as projection, only because it is
what it becomes (or alternatively, does not become), can it
say to itself “Become what you are,” and say this with
understanding. 31
Being in the university today must educate students ―to become
who they are,‖ that is, to fulfill as much as possible the projections that
constitute their own Being. This is probably why Heidegger, in the
introduction to his lecture course of 1928, The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic, points out to the students that ―having devoted your current Dasein
to academic studies is a form of existence in the university.‖ 32 But if
students, through the fundamental questions that constitute the history of
philosophy, must be educated to develop their initial devotion to thought, it
is not simply to keep the discipline alive but because it is a living discipline.
This is why dialogue is so important in a lecture. 33 For the relation between
the teacher and student to be genuine there should never be a ―place in it
for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official.‖ 34
Being in the university ―is only living, in the moment of self-understanding,
and that means in one‘s own free, productive grasp of the task harbored in
philosophy.‖ 35 After all, Kant himself believed a student would not ―learn
philosophy [in the university, but] learn to philosophize.‖ 36
As Iain Thomson suggested, we should focus on an ―ontological
education‖ not simply for the sake of ―understanding what is, but of
investigating the ontological presuppositions implicitly guiding all the
various fields of knowledge.‖ 37 Thus, if philosophical disciplines such as
ethics, aesthetics, or politics disclose the essence of morality, beauty, or
democracy it is not because they are more scientific or objective or in
possession of better ―analytic,‖ ―logical,‖ or ―linguistic‖ tools, but rather
because their questions are posed from the essential position of the
existence (Dasein) that questions them. While for analytic philosophy‘s
legitimations, this ―position‖ (Dasein) is simply something that must be
fulfilled with correct information; for philosophical education it must be
encouraged to disclose itself. If teaching becomes more difficult than
learning it is not ―because the teacher must have a larger store of
information, and have it always ready,‖ but rather because the
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Zabala | Being in the University
real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than—
learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the
impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by
“learning” we now suddenly understand merely the
procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of
his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to
learn than they—he has to learn to let them learn. The
teacher must be capable of being more teachable than his
apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground
than those who learn are of theirs. 38
Philosophical education does not take place as the problem of Being
but rather through the problem of Being; it is through this fundamental
problem that students will be demanded to ―learn‖ or ―become what they
are‖ ethically, aesthetically, or democratically. This is also the meaning of
Derrida‘s ―dissemination‖ argument against Searle: texts inserted in
different contexts will produce new meanings that are different from the
ones we were accustomed to: ―different,‖ not ―truer,‖ in other words,
disclosing new horizons for productive dialogues between students and
professors. It is through these dialogues that academic programs may focus
on ―Being in the university,‖ that is, on educating students to become ―what
they are‖ instead of ―what they are supposed to be.‖ But since this process
also involves the professor, whose main obligation is to let students learn
and who therefore ―has still far more to learn than they,‖ teaching and
research must be harmoniously integrated. A university that does not
support philosophical research that leads specifically to the publication of
productive books is similar to a philosophy department uninterested in
student participation and contribution to its courses. We can overcome the
analytic philosophy culture of legitimation as long as we allow both students
and professors ―become who they are‖ in lectures and through their
publications.
Perhaps the efforts of (continental) philosophy against the culture of
legitimation might also help other disciplines dissatisfied with the recent
Bologna Process (for the unification of European higher education, which
basically follows the U.S. educational system), which evaluates students on
the basis of credits that measures hours studied. The subordination of
higher education to social control and regulation is a clear example, as
Miquel Caminal said, of ―directing teaching at whatever is more profitable in
market terms, more attractive to business, both for the person buying the
knowledge and for the person selling. In universities in the liberal
democracies, knowledge is imposed through the capacity to purchase it.‖ 39
In this context, such analytic disciplines as biomedical ontology or business
ethics will not only become profitable in market terms but also measure the
amount of hours a student studied. Philosophy students and professors
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
must unite in the ontological education this discipline provides through the
direct reading of classic texts in order to overcome any analytic, scientific, or
political subordination.
To comment or respond to Santiago Zabala‘s essay, please
send an email to: editors@purlieujournal.com
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of Purlieu.
Notes
1. As Heidegger explained in his course of 1928 (now available as The Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic): ―You do not get to philosophy by reading many and
multifarious philosophical books, nor by torturing yourself with solving the
riddles of the universe, but solely and surely by not evading what is essential in
what you encounter in your current Dasein devoted to academic studies.
Nonevasion is crucial, since philosophy remains latent in every human existence
and need not be first added to it from somewhere else‖ (M. Heidegger, The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim [Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1984], 18.
2. Most of the favorable reviews of Tugendhat‘s books have been written by ―continental‖
philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Robert Pippin, and Manfred Frank while the
few hostile ones came from Barry Smith, Kevin Mulligan, and other defenders of
logical analysis. For a reconstruction of Tugendhat‘s philosophy and its reception,
see S. Zabala, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst
Tugendhat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
3. M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (1989), trans. P. Emad and K.
Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 140.
4. E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, (1936/1954),
trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
5. W. V. O. Quine, ―Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory‖ (1953), in The Ways of Paradox and
Other Essays (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 151.
6. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2008), 384.
7. A confirmation of this compartmentalization can be found in S. Psillos and M. Curd, eds.,
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science (London: Routledge, 2008),
where the editors state in the introduction how the ―philosophies of the individual
sciences have acquired an unprecedented maturity and independence over the
past few decades‖ (ix).
8. We are here referring to the ―Munich phenomenology‖ group, that is, A. Reinach, J.
Daubert, A. Pfänder, and M. Geiger. For a complete account of all the
phenomenological movements, see E. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological
Movement: A Historical Introduction (Berlin: Springer, 2007).
9. J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), iii.
10. Searle, Conversations with John Searle, ed. G. Faigenbaum (Montevideo: Libros En Red,
2001), 169.
11. J. Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 32.
12. While the difference between analytic and continental philosophers is evident, I will
explain later why I‘m reluctant to use the term ―continental‖ and prefer simply
―philosophy.‖
13. The debate comprises these texts: J. Derrida, ―Signature, Event, Context‖ (1971), in
Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press:
1982), 320; J. Searle, ―Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,‖ Glyph 1
15

Zabala | Being in the University
(1977): 198-208; J. Derrida, ―Limited Inc.,‖ supplement to Glyph 2 (1977): 162-
254, reprint, in J. Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. G. Graff (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1988), 29-110. For a complete history of the development and
essence of the debate, see Raoul Moati, Derrida/Searle: Déconstruction et langage
ordinaire (Paris: PUF, 2009); J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism
After Structuralism (1982; Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 110-34; and Ian Maclean,
―Un dialogue de sourds? Some Implications of the Austin-Searle-Derrida Debate‖
(1985), in Jacques Derrida: Critical Thought, ed. I. Maclachlan (London: Ashgate,
2004), 49-66.
14. In 1992, a group of analytic philosophers lead by a known supporter of Searle, Barry
Smith, attempted (without success) to convince Cambridge University to avoid
honoring Derrida. In their letter, published by the Times, Smith and the others
declared that the French master‘s assertions are ―either false or trivial‖ and that
his ―originality does not lend credence to the idea that he is a suitable candidate
for an honorary degree‖ (B. Smith et al., ―Derrida Degree: A Question of Honour,‖
Times [London], May 9, 1992).
15. Iterability is the capacity of signs, texts, or words to be repeated in new situations,
hence, grafted onto new contexts. A ―context is never saturated‖ because, as
Derrida argued, every ―sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the
usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put
between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and
engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does
not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that
there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring‖ (Derrida,
―Signature, Event, Context,‖ 320). As we can see, ―iterability alters‖; that is, when
texts are inserted into new contexts they continually produce new meanings that
are both different from and similar to previous understandings.
16. Searle, Conversations with John Searle, 166.
17. Derrida, Limited Inc., 62.
18. Derrida, Limited Inc., 158.
19. The Sokal affair (Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern
Intellectuals‟ Abuse of Science, New York: Picador, 1999) is probably a better
example than the Searle/Derrida debate because it highlighted the deep
separation between philosophy and science, which, for the benefit of both, should
be kept separated.
20. For a development of this point see the first chapter of G. Vattimo and S. Zabala,
Hermeneutic Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, in press).
21. J. Derrida, Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, ed. P. Pericles Trifonas
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 29. This imperialistic nature of analytic
philosophy was also stated by Searle in an interview with the Harvard Journal of
Philosophy, where he expressed his desire to write a book on the ―ontology of
civilization‖ (Z. Sachs-Arellano, ―Interview with Searle,‖ Harvard Review of
Philosophy 12 [2004]: 132-33).
22. Derrida, Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, 29.
23. M. Marder, ―A Discipline in Crisis: The View from Within,‖ available in
http://www.telospress.com/main/
index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=407. It must be mentioned that these
philosophical divisions interact with cultural and political disputes especially in
relation to the major continental philosopher: Heidegger. Many analytic
philosophers still dismiss continental philosophers simply because of the
collaboration of the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century with National
Socialism (for eleven months as the president of the University of Freiburg before
quitting because the Nazis would not allow books by Jews in the library). Analytic
philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and others who left Germany
after the rise of Hitler superimposed democratic disputes on philosophical
debates, discrediting all of Heidegger works. While Heidegger made a mistake for
eleven months of his life, his work (and that of all his disciples) should still be
studied as carefully as that of David Hume, who considered negroes naturally
inferior to whites, or Frege, who openly declared his anti-Semitism, something
Heidegger never did.
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
24. M. Marder, ―A Discipline in Crisis: The View from Within.‖
25. M. Marder, ―A Discipline in Crisis: The View from Within.‖
26. B. Leiter, ―‗Analytic‘ and ‗Continental‘ Philosophy,‖ available in
http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp.
27. Professor Pinkard teaches at Georgetown University (which although is ranked in Leiter
list, it‘s not in the top 30 University according to his measures); professor Malpas
teaches at Tasmania University; and Professor Bernstein teaches at the New
School University in New York.
28. It should be pointed out how T. Adorno, who was very critical of the scientific
consequences of the enlightenment, after the second world war become very
alarmed that music had to be cut in order to fit the temporal limits of industrial
LP. See T. Adorno, Essays on Music, edited by R. Leppert (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: California University of California Press, 2002). It seems today we are
also force to cut books into articles to fit the requirements of the ranked journal
industry.
29. B. Leiter, ―‗Analytic‘ and ‗Continental‘ Philosophy.‖
30. D. Misgeld and G. Nicholson, eds., H-G. Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History:
Applied Hermeneutics, trans. L. Schmidt and M. Reuss (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1992), 5.
31. M. Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York:
Harper and Collins Publishers, 1962, 2008): 185-186 [146]. I have modified the
translation.
32. M. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 7-8. I have modified the
translation.
33. I have specified the meaning of dialogue in ―Being Is Conversation,‖ in Consequences of
Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and S. Zabala (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 2010), 161-176.
34. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (1954), trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harpers &
Row, 1968), 15-16.
35. M. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 8.
36. I. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 292.
37. I. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 101. Dermot Moran also makes
interesting points on philosophical education today: ―The Analytic and
Continental Divide: Teaching Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism,‖ in Teaching
Philosophy on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, ed. D. Evans and I. Kuçuradi
(Ankara: International Federation of Philosophical Societies, 1998), 119-154.
38. M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 15.
39. Miquel Caminal, ―The University Under Debate,‖ Metropolis (Autumn–Winter 2008–
2009). Also available on
http://www.barcelonametropolis.cat/en/page.asp?id=23&ui=138&prevNode=33&
tagId=101. As I. Thompson points out, the tasks of philosophy and the university
in general have not always been the same:
Recall that on the medieval model of the university, the task of higher
education was to transmit a relatively fixed body of knowledge. The
French preserved something of this view; universities taught the
supposedly established doctrines, while research took place outside the
university in non-teaching academies. The French model was
appropriated by the German universities which preceded Kant, in which
the state-sponsored ‗higher faculties‘ of law, medicine, and theology
were separated from the more independent ‗lower‘ faculty of philosophy.
Kant personally experienced The Conflict of the Faculties of philosophy
and theology (after publishing Religion within the Limits of Reason
Alone), and his subsequent argument that it is in the best long-term
interests of the state for the ‗philosophy faculty‘ to be ‗conceived as free
and subject only to laws given by reason‘ helped inspire Fichte‘s
philosophical elaboration of a German alternative to the French model.
At the heart of Fichte‘s idea for the new University of Berlin, which
Humboldt institutionalized in 1809, was the ‗scientific‘ view of research
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Zabala | Being in the University
as a dynamic, open-ended endeavour, research and teaching would now
be combined into a single institution of higher learning, with philosophy
at the centre of a new proliferation of academic pursuits (I. Thomson,
Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education,
100).
As this passage demonstrates, it is important to allow philosophers to
become involved in the political decisions that will determine the
discipline‘s role and place within the university because of the different
philosophical cultures that constitute each epoch.
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INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell
Dr. Steven Crowell is the Philosophy department Chair, as well as the Joseph and Joanna
Nazro Mullen Professor in Humanities, at Rice University, where he has taught since 1983. He
served as an Executive Director for the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
(2001- 2004), and also served on the Executive Committee (1998 – 2004). His book, Husserl,
Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology, won
the 2002 Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize for the best book in phenomenology, and he is a
co-editor for the journal Husserl Studies.
PURLIEU: As the Chair of Philosophy at Rice, do you see your
department and philosophy departments in general, having
responsibilities not shared by others in the academy? If so, what are
they? And, what obligations or duties are involved in maintaining those
responsibilities?
CROWELL: At Rice University, currently, the department structure is still
pretty traditional, and it is a relatively small school that does not have the
kind of departments that one might find at a much larger public institution
– the Department of Broadcasting, or Hotel Management, and so on. At an
institution where such departments exist, I would certainly say that the
philosophy department has certain special responsibilities not shared by
these more ―vocational‖ entities. But I‘m not sure that it has special
responsibilities beyond those that would be found in the basic fields of a
liberal arts education. On the other hand, I personally still subscribe to
some (probably very attenuated) version of the idea that philosophy is a kind
of ―meta-― discipline which draws from other fields but also has a unique
intellectual profile that combines features of both the arts and sciences. I
think it can be hard for students to think with ―both sides of their brains‖ –
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
despite their rhetoric, universities tend to encourage students to divide up
into ―art‖ types and ―science‖ types – and perhaps the philosophy
department has a special obligation to be a place where the virtues of both
aspects of the intellect can and must work together.
But this is probably honored more in the breach than in the
observance. I think that the key to maintaining those responsibilities is,
quite simply, to stand up against any proposal for ―reform‖ (of the
curriculum, of departmental structure, of university mission, etc.), from
whatever quarter (administration, students, faculty pundits, etc.) that overemphasizes
the sciences over the arts, and vice versa, and to refuse all
faddishness.
How have relationships between the private sector (professional
organizations, endowments, etc.) and institutions of higher education
changed in the last three decades?
You know, I haven‘t really focused on this issue in a serious way, so I‘m not
sure I have much to say about it. Obviously, universities (even public ones)
are more beholden than ever to external funding, and this can bring with it
both opportunities and challenges. It is often hard for university
administrations to resist establishing a program or center for which a donor
is available, even if no curricular or other need for such a program exists.
And untrendy ―basic research‖ in various fields – especially in the
Humanities – can go begging, since it can be hard to make those outside the
academy (or even in it!) see its importance. I suppose that one of the things
that can help to even out the imbalances here is a strong faculty hand on
the university‘s academic offerings. But faculties are almost never of one
mind on such issues.
As former Executive Director of the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy (SPEP), you have a unique perspective on the
organization‟s history and outlook. How has SPEP changed since the
time you took over as Director, and how do you see the organization
evolving in the future?
SPEP began quite small, in the 1960s. It had little or no administrative
structure beyond organizing an annual meeting of philosophers who were
interested in phenomenology and its offshoot, existentialism. These
movements were not well represented in American philosophy departments,
and in a certain sense SPEP can be seen as one of the first examples of a
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INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell
trend: philosophers getting together to form societies (i.e., outlets for sharing
work and eventually publication) devoted to specific aspects of the
philosophical landscape that were not well represented at the annual
meetings of the American Philosophical Association, which was dominated
by certain versions of what came to be called ―analytic‖ philosophy. I can‘t
go into the subsequent history here in detail, but it is important to note that
even when SPEP was founded, phenomenology and existentialism were by
no means the only important non-analytical philosophical approaches in
continental Europe – there was the Frankfurt School critical theory, the
beginnings of Gadamerian hermeneutics, and various versions of
structuralist-inspired thought, to name just a few – and very soon SPEP
grew to include those interested in these movements as well.
By the time I served on the SPEP Executive Committee (starting in
1998) this pluralist character was what defined SPEP, and there was much
discussion of whether the name should be changed to something like
―Society for Continental Philosophy.‖ By then, the term ―continental
philosophy‖ had come into general circulation as a rubric in Jobs for
Philosophers, but there was no agreement on what it meant. Nor is there
such agreement today. But in the previous decades certain philosophy
departments had developed as centers for ―continental‖ philosophy, and this
interjected a heavy dose of politics into SPEP itself: from being an
organization whose sole purpose was to hold an annual meeting, it (perhaps
inevitably) began to see itself as an ―advocate‖ for continental philosophy as
such, against a mainstream philosophical culture that was perceived (often
rightly) as hostile to what was going on in the continentally oriented
departments. Indeed, in 1999 SPEP formed an ―Advocacy Committee‖ and
began to urge its members to support SPEP candidates in APA elections, a
tactic that has been quite successful. I am certain that at the first SPEP
meeting some of those who attended had an ―adversarial‖ relation to analytic
philosophy, but by now that relation has become strongly institutionalized
in the SPEP self-definition, and an enormous committee structure has
grown up to handle the internal divisions that would naturally arise in such
a large and diverse organization.
When I was on the Executive Committee I felt that adopting this
adversarial and overtly political stance toward analytic philosophy was
counter-productive, but I can certainly understand those who hold a
different view. And in my own work – which is firmly centered in the
phenomenological tradition – I find that less and less of what flies under the
banner of continental philosophy has relevance to what I think is important,
so SPEP meetings hold less interest for me these days. But at the individual
level that sort of thing happens all the time.
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
More distressing, I find, is this: as it becomes clearer that
―continental‖ philosophy means ―whatever is being done in certain SPEPsupporting
graduate programs‖ the tendency to emphasize SPEP‘s
adversarial status and purely political goals can only take on increasing
importance, providing criteria for decision-making in the organization. From
my point of view this will render SPEP less, not more, relevant in the
broader space of philosophical education in America.
For some, the aims and influence of SPEP are still matters of
controversy, which seems to us related to broader discussions
concerning the „analytic/continental divide‟ in philosophy. Are they
related in your view? What do you think of the usefulness of this
distinction and its possible future?
If you read the SPEP mission statement it becomes apparent pretty quickly
that there is ―no there there.‖ From the website:
SPEP is the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy, a professional organization devoted to
supporting philosophy inspired by continental European
traditions. With a membership of over 2500 people, it is one
of the largest American philosophical societies, and strives to
encourage work not only in the philosophical traditions of
phenomenology and existentialism, but also in all those areas
commonly associated with „continental philosophy,‟ such as
animal studies, critical theory, cultural studies,
deconstruction, environmental philosophy, feminism, German
idealism, hermeneutics, philosophy of the Americas, postcolonialism,
post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory
and race theory.
We foster discussion on all philosophical topics, from
art and nature to politics and science, and in the classic
philosophical disciplines of metaphysics, epistemology,
ethics, and aesthetics. SPEP is actively committed to
philosophical pluralism and to the support of historically
under-represented groups in the philosophical profession.
A statement such as this must change every time intellectual
fashion changes – which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has nothing to
do with any split between continental and analytic philosophy, since it has
nothing to do with philosophy, period. As I mentioned above, SPEP has
(almost) always seen itself as a pluralist institution – where ―pluralist‖
means both ―welcoming of many different approaches to philosophy‖ and
―critical of the analytic mainstream‖ – and there is nothing inherently wrong
with this. If like-minded people want to get together and share their work,
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INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell
what‘s the problem in that? And if that work is not thought of very highly by
philosophers who belong to a different tradition, that‘s a fact of life that
those like-minded people will have to deal with in one way or another.
Defining something called ―continental‖ philosophy as the ―other‖ to the
analytic mainstream is one way of doing that. But as you can see from the
proliferation of ―theories‖ and ―studies‖ in the SPEP mission statement, one
of the broad tendencies in SPEP is to include under its mantle many things
that mainstream philosophy departments would not consider to be
philosophy at all, and this points toward larger problems from the point of
view of what SPEP hopes to achieve in the context of graduate education in
philosophy in the United States.
Of course, it can always be argued
that who defines ―philosophy‖ is a matter of
who is in power, or whatever, but I don‘t
intend to engage these arguments here. And
among SPEP members you would no doubt
find a good number who feel that
―philosophy‖ is dead anyway. But if SPEP‘s
aim is to encourage pluralism in philosophy
departments – that is, not merely to get a new
faculty line here or there, but to show that
what SPEP members are doing is important to
the field of philosophy – then it must engage
with the mainstream and cannot merely
insist that mainstream departments simply
accept whatever goes on in SPEP as
something that must be ―represented‖ in the
curriculum. There may, in other words, be
good reasons for excluding it, or leaving it to
If SPEP‘s aim is to
encourage pluralism in
philosophy
departments, then it
must engage with the
mainstream and
cannot merely insist
departments simply
accept whatever goes
on in SPEP as
something that must
be ‗represented in the
curriculum.‘
other departments. Here one would have to get into a deep discussion of
what sort of standards govern philosophical discussions generally: no one
thinks that all work done in analytic philosophy is good philosophy, and no
one thinks that all the papers on a SPEP program are good papers. But in
any adversarial position it is almost inevitable that each side will consider
its stuff as ―on the whole‖ (in contrast to the other side) good philosophy,
while holding the other side‘s output to be ―on the whole‖ weak or otherwise
deficient. That‘s the problem with the adversarial approach and the problem
with maintaining the analytic/continental divide.
I am by no means pessimistic about the possibility of carrying out
constructive dialogues between those who, say, do ethics or philosophy of
mind from a (broadly construed) analytic perspective and those who
approach them from critical theory, phenomenology, deconstruction, and so
on. But this is already to reject the adversarial position that (some feel) is
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
needed to protect the very existence of non-mainstream thinking in the
academy, and it demands that the partners in dialogue entertain the
possibility of having to put their own entrenched standards at stake in the
dialogue itself. Both of these facts make it difficult, within SPEP, to find a
direction. And I think the organization is quite directionless at the moment.
On the other hand, taken simply as an organization responsible for staging
a large annual meeting, SPEP does not need a ―direction,‖ and it is quite
healthy.
Earlier in this issue, Santiago Zabala writes:
―[A]mong the most alarming consequences of analytic
philosophy‘s instructive method is the transformation of the
student into a simple consumer of information transmitted
by a ranked university. If philosophy is submitted to
science‘s established methods, where traditional questions
and authors are dismissed, students have to learn to simply
accept and apply these same paradigms… The relation
that is established between the student and teacher, the
academic research obligations, and the disciplines are
disenchanting philosophy‘s genuine concern for wisdom
into an imposition of intelligence.‖
Do you agree with Zabala‟s claims? Has the philosophical
„divide‟ adjusted or altered the overall structure of university
education?
I guess the operative distinction in the quote is between ―wisdom‖ and
―intelligence.‖ The quote does not define the former, but seems to link the
latter to ―science.‖ At the same time, ―science‖ is linked with the dismissal of
―traditional questions and authors‖ and this with ―analytic philosophy.‖
While I do think that there is a difference between wisdom and science, I
would not like to separate ―intelligence‖ from either of them. And while I do
agree that housing philosophy in the research university has the effect of deemphasizing
the development of ―wisdom‖ (whatever that might be), I‘m not
sure that, to the extent that philosophy is a search for wisdom, it really
belongs in the research university. Or at any rate, the standard format of
career advancement in such universities – publication and conference
participation on the tenure track – is hardly a map for either the pursuit or
the attainment of wisdom.
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INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell
Instead, a lot of what gets produced in the name of ―wisdom‖ is – to
be frank – drearily self-important puffery and appallingly fuzzy thinking.
After all, one presumably cannot churn out wisdom on command, yet that is
exactly what is required in the context of a research university. Whether one
is in an analytic or a continental department, one must publish early and
often, and most of what gets published is not all that good. I do think that
A lot of what gets produced
[in the university] in the name
of ‗wisdom‘ is – to be frank –
drearily self-important puffery
and appallingly fuzzy
thinking. But who says that
the university is the best
place for philosophy to
thrive?
wisdom may get transmitted in the
teaching process somehow, sometimes,
but it is not exclusively the province of
analytic or continental styles of
teaching. Certainly, being concerned
with ―traditional questions and
authors‖ hardly guarantees a nose for
wisdom; nor is it at all the case that
good work in the history of philosophy
is not being done by analytic
philosophers. And I would strongly
disagree with the characterization of
the teaching methods of analytic philosophy as transforming ―the student
into a simple consumer of information‖ or as submitting philosophy to
―science‘s established methods.‖ That‘s just too reductive. Shall we say, in
turn, that continental philosophy transforms the student into a ―disciple at
the feet of the sage‖ and submits her to ―wisdom‘s esoteric authority‖?
Philosophy is an interesting enterprise that straddles the ―divide‖ between
art and science, and it is easy to caricature practitioners who lean too far to
one side or the other. Certainly, in today‘s university that aspect of
philosophy that can most readily be measured by publications and
―problems‖ is dominant. But who says that the university is the best place
for philosophy to thrive?
At any rate, if one looked at the history of the university, beginning
in the Medieval period, with an eye toward the wisdom/science divide, I
expect that one would discover the same tensions that we feel today. Those
members of the Philosophy Faculty who expounded Aristotle in the
thirteenth century often did so in the name of a ―science‖ that was in
tension, to say the least, with the dominant ―wisdom‖ – which was taught in
the Theology Faculty. And the question of whether ―logic,‖ unadorned with
revelation, can stand alone was certainly not unknown. Having said all that,
the issue adumbrated in the quote – how can we communicate to students
what it means to be liberally educated, and what structures should the
university develop in order to facilitate this goal? – is a deep and important
one.
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
Students frequently wonder about the practical implications of training
received at the university. This is no less the case for those of us
studying philosophy. What can you tell us about your graduate study in
philosophy at Yale three decades ago and its relationship to your
everyday professional concerns as Chair at Rice? How did the formal
study of philosophy prepare you to meet your professional
obligations?
There is something paradoxical about one‘s graduate training. On the one
hand, one works very hard to identify an area of specialization, to master it,
and to craft an identity – mainly for the job market, but also, of course, to
set out on a path that will be personally productive and rewarding
intellectually. On the other hand, much of what one learns and does will be
irrelevant in ten years or less. One‘s intellectual focus (and maturity,
knowledge, etc.) will change – perhaps for the worse, if one is in a
particularly grueling job situation – and one‘s responsibilities (departmental
and university committees, national organizations, teaching) will be vastly
different than what one experiences in graduate school. Of course, this is no
different than with any other academic training: a lot of it is just
credentialing and gate-keeping.
To put it another way: one learns what one needs to learn ―on the
job.‖ But to get that job one needs to demonstrate certain abilities, and
these (presumably) are what graduate programs try to inculcate in their
students.
From that point of view,
nothing essentially has changed since
my days at Yale: the idea was to
provide a context in which students
could apprentice in the profession –
learn to read and think in such a way
that publishable work can come out
of it; get familiar with classroom giveand-take
as a teaching assistant so
that one day you can lead your own
class, etc. The difference now is this:
because most universities are under
severe economic pressure, there is
great emphasis on getting grad
students into their own classes earlier
and earlier; and because of the unrelenting insistence on university and
departmental rankings, there is a great push to get students to publish
earlier and earlier. Both of these trends (which are of course reflected in the
27
As most universities are
under severe economic
pressure, there is great
emphasis on getting grad
students into their own
classes earlier and earlier;
and there is a great push to
get students to publish earlier
and earlier. Both of these
trends are, in my opinion,
very regrettable.

INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell
ramped-up expectations about teaching and publishing in the highly
competitive entry-level job market) are, in my opinion, very regrettable, since
they work against the main intellectual point of it all: to give the student
time to learn how to think independently and critically. The present
situation tends, in contrast, to produce slaves to intellectual fashion.
Recently, the Chair of a philosophy department in the U.S contacted
Purlieu, asking “is it simply that the academic world has adopted an
economic paradigm, namely, that we need to increase production every
year? Well, just as economic growth is clearly unsustainable, so is this
inflation of scholarly publications.” We ask ourselves often, what is the
value or harm of a periodical such as this one—which aims to connect
and amplify discourses found within the profession—given the rapid
proliferation of independent and corporate publication opportunities?
What is your response to this Chair‟s comments, and what do you see
as the future for academic publishing?
Good question. It seems to me that if a publication such as Purlieu develops
an audience, then it has a reason for being. The problem comes when people
who write in it want others to recognize that effort as ―counting‖ toward
something else: fame, fortune, or (as the case may be) tenure. That raises
the whole question of what should count toward tenure, and I‘m not going to
address that here.
Suffice to say that ―academic publishing‖ used to mean that some
sort of gate-keeping function was being served by editorial boards,
refereeing, and so on. This has been eroding for years. University faculties
expanded greatly in the 1960s, and with that came the demand for
publication. It is very hard to find any university these days that is content
to tenure a professor on the basis of teaching. In general, the proliferation of
outlets that arose in response to this demand did two things: it allowed a lot
more mediocre work to get published, but it allowed a lot more good work to
get published too. It‘s just damned hard these days to find a way to get to
the good stuff without having to go through the mountains of bad.
To comment or respond to Steven Crowell‘s interview, please
send an email to : editors@purlieujournal.com
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of Purlieu.
28

tortuga o liebre
purlieu 2012
Yevgeny Khaldei / Shellshocked Reindeer, Murmansk

Vattimo / Martinengo | University and Research in Italy
Dr. Gianni Vattimo is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Turin and a
member of the European Parliament. He is the author of A Farewell to Truth; The
Responsibility of the Philosopher; Art‘s Claim to Truth; After the Death of God (with John D.
Caputo); Dialogue with Nietzsche; The Future of Religion (with Richard Rorty); Nihilism and
Emancipation; After Christianity; and (with Santiago Zabala) Hermeneutic Communism.
Dr. Alberto Martinengo is Research Fellow at the University of Turin. He works on the
heritage of the hermeneutical tradition, particularly from an aesthetical point of view. His
research deals with the notion of reconstruction as keyword of the debate on the limits of
hermeneutics. He has published a book on Reiner Schürmann (Introduzione a Reiner
Schürmann, 2008) and a volume on Paul Ricoeur (Il pensiero incompiuto, 2008).
Dr. Robert T. Valgenti is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College. His
research interests include 19th and 20th Century Continental philosophy, hermeneutics,
contemporary Italian philosophy, and the philosophy of food. He is the translator of several
essays by Italian philosophers into English and is currently completing his translation and
critical introduction to Luigi Pareyson‘s Truth and Interpretation.
Among the many protest movements that have spread across Italy in the
past few years, one of the liveliest and loudest at getting their point across
was the ―Wave‖ [Onda]. Gathered under this name since 2008 are important
elements from the world of the university: primarily, politically left-leaning
students; however, it is also common to find significant elements from
among the various contingent laborers 1 employed by the Italian university in
remarkable and at times—as we will see—disturbing numbers.
The ―Wave‖ movement is a response to the first projects of legal
reform put forward by the government of Silvio Berlusconi: the so-called
30

Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
―Tremonti-Gelmini‖ reforms, named for the Minister of the Economy, Giulio
Tremonti, and the Minister of Universities, Mariastella Gelmini. On the one
hand, much is known about the ills of the Italian university, even abroad
(from the system of competition for professorial posts, to the age-old
problem of the fixed number of students). But it is said, very correctly, that
all of that aside, our universities are still able to prepare professionals and
scholars who are competitive on the global stage. The same can be said of
the capacity of our system to guarantee access for diverse sectors of the
population, thanks to the public trust in the university, which remains an
important engine of development and social mobility. Nevertheless, in these
years the merits of the Italian system appear to be in grave danger, and our
governments have not demonstrated even the slightest ability to confront the
ills of our universities.
In short, it is a fact that if Italy suffers from ―brain drain,‖ it must
also mean that our institutions are producing graduates and researchers
who can demonstrate their own abilities and the high level of their
education. And it is equally clear that today our faculties accommodate
students who come from families who occupy extraordinarily different social
strata: students who thus have the chance to be educated at a level that
would have been unthinkable merely one or two generations ago.
Nevertheless, the Tremonti-Gelmini reforms (the reason why the students of
the Wave have rightly called them this will be clear in a moment), not only
ignore the ills mentioned above, but in fact place in grave danger the public,
social and cultural values that until recently the Italian university had
maintained, in spite of everything.
To speak of the ―Tremonti-Gelmini‖ reforms, as many have rightly
done and still do, is to underline the actions of the Berlusconi government,
which in substance are essentially budgetary reforms that behind the shield
of cutting waste have in reality struck at the heart of the control of our
universities. This government was born in 2008 under the slogan of the war
against loafers and identified in public workers their proper, nearly singular,
objective. Now, it is right to say that something has happened when such a
slogan, with the help of the Tremonti-Gelmini reforms, has also been
directed at the university. The cuts at the base of ordinary funding (the
amount of the budget that the minister apportions to the life of the public
universities) have in reality a dramatic effect on the life of some
departments—all departments, including the best ones (and there are many
of them), to which mechanisms of reward have not yet been granted.
In short, the Italian university is suffering—this is clear. And it
suffers more than other European universities on account of a government
that is not able to recognize that knowledge and research are fundamental
31

Vattimo / Martinengo | University and Research in Italy
factors of economic development. But the paradox is that this suffering
regards precisely the weakest zones of the university: the students and the
plethora of contingent workers who today make our universities move
forward. To speak of the ―suffering of the university‖ does not signify the use
of a purely rhetorical expression, one perhaps dictated solely by ideology.
The suffering of the university is something extremely concrete. The Italian
university suffers from the cuts of the Tremonti-Gelmini reforms because it
no longer has the money to pay for telephone bills, printer paper, the
maintenance and repair of machines that would be considered essential in
any office around our country (from photocopiers to sophisticated laboratory
equipment), the travel expenses for work and research conducted by
employees and collaborators, the daily maintenance of the buildings
themselves (from cleaning to the painting of offices), along with basic and
essential services (keeping libraries open, replacing obsolete computers,
etc.). Now, if this is the waste that needs to be cut, the government is
unable to explain which corporate and capitalistic mindset could ever accept
that its own employees should pay out of pocket for the proper maintenance
of their most essential equipment. This is the suffering into which the
Tremonti-Gelmini reforms have thrown the university.
But the greatest paradox—as I anticipated—is that teachers are not
the only ones who have to pay for those cuts. To the generalized reduction of
economic resources for the university there corresponds in reality a marked
increase in difficulties for those who take advantage of the ―service‖ of
teaching (namely, the students) and for those to whom such a ―service‖
brings new blood in terms of research and development (namely, young
contingent researchers). To a university that does not have the money to
maintain libraries (hours of operation, the acquisition of new books,
interlibrary loan) or to welcome students in buildings that meet the
minimum standards of decency (classrooms of sufficient size, computers
and other services for students), there corresponds in reality an increased
difficulty, on the part of less affluent families, to continue the education of
their own children.
Fewer libraries, fewer computers, dilapidated classrooms and
uncomfortable seats signify an ever-greater burden placed upon families
who try to respond as best they can to the deficiencies of the institution. The
cost of allowing one‘s children to study is always increasing: and this
happens not only because of the more general economic crisis, but also (and
primarily) because the services that universities are able to provide for those
who enroll are always diminishing.
Given all of that, some in [Italy] claim that it is a luxury to conduct
research, or in other terms, it is a luxury to reward the legitimate
32

Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
aspirations of the young who have demonstrated their brilliance in an
academic course of study and who yearn to do research, not as a hobby that
is cultivated on weekends, but as their reason and source of sustenance.
The reforms of welfare and of contractual models (which even some centerleft
governments have been willing to support) have made it so that in the
university, forms of ―non-structured‖ or contingent work have grown
exponentially, to the point of reaching disturbing levels. In many cases, the
official count that universities produce on the number and types of workers
in their institution demonstrate that in some departments nearly half of the
people who work there do so on contingent contracts (contracts by the
project, temporary collaborations, training, scholarships): that amounts to
saying that for every ten ―full-time‖ workers, there are often just as many
who work with them on a contingent and thus precarious contract.
However—one might ask us—isn‘t this the model closest to that of
other Western countries? Why is this such a scandal in Italy? Here is the
real problem: if, in fact, in the United States and in many other countries
research is often associated with the status of fixed-term work, it happens
that this occurs through contracts that in general are much more lucrative
and that balance their precariousness with much more significant financial
compensation. Now, over the course of years, it is increasingly clear that our
country has adopted this model, but has added to it a level of pay that is not
even minimally close to that found in other countries. In concrete terms, in
our departments we have spent 50% of the budget on contingent workers;
and these 50% work with contracts that in many cases don‘t even earn them
1,500 euro. To be clear: this is 1,500 euro per year, not per month. It should
also not be forgotten that, above all, in the Humanities departments, the
precarious nature of these positions is a given fact that accompanies
academics from graduation to their retirement forty years later.
But how have the Tremonti-Gelmini cuts taken part in this
situation? First of all, it is clear that in the approved measures and in the
applicable decrees in phases of elaboration one sees only a general
reshuffling of the cards (according to the principle ―change everything,
because nothing really changes‖), but no concrete effect on the real defects
of our universities that I mentioned earlier: programs and career
advancement, among others. And, in the second place, in matters of
contingent labor it happens in very many cases that contracts have
worsened beyond the imaginable. We speak of the reduction (and, in many
cases, of the suspension) of research fellows, which are the highest
academic posts for our most talented students. And we speak of the
transformation of contingent contracts into ―zero compensation‖ contracts,
that is, ones that use manpower hired explicitly on a voluntary basis: with
33

Vattimo / Martinengo | University and Research in Italy
teaching or research activities now conducted in a manner completely
without compensation.
In recent years, the Italian public university has become this:
universities that live on little; students who work in dilapidated and
crumbling structures, with services whose usefulness diminish day by day;
teachers who find themselves in workplaces where pay is guaranteed, but
often without the support one normally finds in any business, no matter
how big or small it is (despite the slogan ―university business,‖ which
politicians would pretend to follow); young contingent researchers who are
forced to work for free or are underpaid, publishing research recognized in
the entire world but without even the smallest chance for a future in our
own country.
Europe, as a society of knowledge, can and must also save Italy in
this. And it ought to do it with some very concrete initiatives:
1. The imposition in member states of recognized and recognizable
criteria for the judgment of merit and productivity, in order to reward true
merit;
2. The increase in available sources of funding for research in all
disciplines (including the humanities), in order to improve the working
conditions for contingent researchers;
3. The increase of international exchanges, through large economic
concessions to Erasmus students and to young researchers;
4. Aid to publishers for the translation and diffusion of the most
important scientific publications in the member states of the Union.
To comment or respond to Gianni Vattimo and Alberto
Martinengo‘s essay, please send an email to :
editors@purlieujournal.com
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of Purlieu.
Notes
1. Translator‘s Note: The Italian noun ―precariato‖ denotes temporary employment, but the
root of the word ―precario‖ connotes the precariousness of these positions. I have opted for
the word ―contingent laborer‖ as its translation, as this is the term used currently to
indicate faculty and researchers who work without jobs.
34

Call For Papers
Articles are welcome in any area of philosophy or
philosophical perspectives, including but not
limited to: Gender and Race Studies, Literature,
Political Science, Ecology, Education,
Communication Studies, Linguistics, Sociology,
Anthropology, Poetry, Urban Studies, and
Psychology.
Articles are blind-reviewed and judged on their
philosophical merit and relevance. Articles should
be double-spaced Word documents, with a cover
page (including institutional affiliation) and
300-500 word abstract. For stylistic concerns,
consult the University of Chicago Press Manual of
Style.
Imagery is encouraged; however it is the obligation
of the author to obtain permission for any imagery
within the article if it is not within public domain.
Authors will not be charged extra for images.
www.purlieujournal.com
Purlieu

www.purlieujournal.com

Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
Dr. Babette Babich is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Fordham University where
she has taught since 1989. Her work focuses on Continental philosophy, especially Nietzsche
and Heidegger, philosophy of science, as well as politics and aesthetics. Her books include
Nietzsche‘s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life; Words in
Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger, and her most recent, Nietzsches Wissenshaftsphilosophie. She is the Executive
Editor of New Nietzsche Studies, a journal she founded in 1994.
PURLIEU: As the editors of Purlieu we have been accused of
attempting something superfluous — or even detrimental — to the
field of philosophy. Among the charges leveled against us, some
critics have claimed that we risk diluting the rigor demanded of our
discipline and that we thus compromise its integrity. As the editor of
seven books and the founding and Executive Editor of New Nietzsche
Studies, what can you tell us about our duties as editors? More
generally, what is the value and the future of academic publishing,
both with periodicals as well as books?
BABICH: These are excellent questions, and as is often the case with
excellent questions, I find more than just a few queries packed into what
you say. And it is because you have just started a journal (and because I
have founded not just one but two journals, one founded as an
undergraduate, which continued after I graduated for several years before it
vanished, as well as New Nietzsche Studies, which you mention above and
37

INTERVIEW: Babette Babich
which of course continues), I take your first set of questions as very
important indeed. Because such issues are rarely addressed in the
profession and because the new technologies of publication and
communication have changed much of the playing field, I feel compelled to
reply to your question at some length. Later, I‘ll abbreviate my replies to
your following questions for the sake of balance.
To begin with your initial remark regarding ―the charges leveled
against‖ your editorial project, such charges seem to reflect what we may,
for convenience, call the ―gate-keepers‖ worry. 1 I recall a conversation with
Larry Hatab in which he denounced the many publishing opportunities, as
he perceived them, that seemed to be springing up everywhere. At the time
(and now), I didn‘t see the explosion as being either all that explosive or
indeed as undesirable — so obviously we were on different sides on the
matter.
I held that we needed even more journals than we have. And in my
view, current journals, even new ones, tend to reproduce very standard
points of view, just with different names. I believe that one should have, just
as Nietzsche argues, as many viewpoints as possible. And yet I should
underline, and this is a more elusive point, I do not believe that we should
have only or just those viewpoints we regard as ―good.‖ I say this because
what we call ―good‖ is itself a judgment established on the basis of the
things we take ourselves to know. Another word for such judgments, as we
learn from hermeneutics, is prejudice.
Nietzsche had his own way of putting this as he foregrounds it at
the start of his The Gay Science, after his musical jokes (and here it matters
very much that we keep in mind, from a publishing perspective, which was
always of crucial interest to Nietzsche, that The Gay Science was a prelude
to his Zarathustra, itself a parodic or, again, playful prelude to his very
important and to date ill-understood, Beyond Good and Evil):
it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an
intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely
populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everyone looks at
you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales,
calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when
you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do
people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. (GS
§2)
Larry, who is of course an excellent Nietzschean in every other
sense, had his own good reasons for his concern. The gate-keeper‘s worry
reflects the confidence we have, and we academics do count on this
conviction for hiring and tenuring and so on, that so-called better or ―top
tier‖ journals — and we may extend this to our views of publishing houses
38

Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
or even of universities and so on — are indeed better than other journals
and publishing houses. And we hold that they are better (this is the point
David Hume tries to make in his On the Standard of Taste) in some sort of
objectively sanctioned fashion. It is essential to a conviction, in order for it
to be a conviction, that it remains unquestioned.
The notion of ―top-tier‖ corresponds to what the sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu called ―distinction‖ and such things are the most solid things we
have in our capitalist world: silk and cashmere are in truth more valuable
(more goes into their production) than, say, acrylic or polyester. Beyond the
stuff of stuff, beyond fabrics, a Rolls Royce, like a Bentley, is an excellent
car, but how much better than a Jaguar? Or to make it a harder question,
how much better than a Ferrari?—a Porsche? —a Mercedes Benz? —and so
on. The car industry happily provides exemplars to answer such questions
and much of what counts as excellence is perceived excellence. In addition,
when it comes to truly high-end automobiles, it is a buyer‟s market only,
and that means that most such questions hardly concern us as consumers,
as users, and to that extent our own experience of high-end ―excellence‖ in
the real world is a spectator‘s, an observer‘s, rather than a user‘s
experience. The ―goodness‖ of the Rolls Royce, for most of us, is to see it
driving past us if we are in downtown Beverly Hills or out in the Hamptons.
So too, and this is the value point of the cost issue, an Ivy League education
is similarly exclusive (ergo rarified) and excluding (and this is, the
economists tell us, how scarcity is manufactured).
Publications are different by nature. And desktop and online
publishing only make the issue more complex. Thus the anxiety about new
publications is related to anxiety about whether or not they have been
properly ‗vetted‘ and this in turn is really about another question: will these
new publications upset established apple carts? And so on. Nevertheless,
founding journals is something you have in common with a number of
illustrious forbears such as Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Hölderlin.
At the start, one journal is no better and no worse than any other.
In fact, your greatest challenge is not so much the project you are beginning
but whether it can be kept: there are many journals that have appeared,
with ‗good‘ editors, and ‗good‘ contributors, only to vanish after a single
issue. Thus what makes a journal, beyond reader judgment (and on an
individual level that is always a matter of taste: what issue do you pick up?
which do you continue to read?), is the editors‘ vision. At the same time, it
depends even more on the authors who contribute, and yet more important
(and I would actually add layout to the mix) is the question of dissemination.
Dissemination is related to distribution, but in addition, and this is still
more elusive, there is the challenge of acquiring readers even given
distribution. Thus what makes a journal (or a press) top quality has to do
39

INTERVIEW: Babette Babich
with ―reception‖ and reception is tied to academic capital, again, in
Bourdieu‘s sense of the term. Publishers such as Harvard University Press,
Oxford University Press, Gallimard, Walter de Grutyer, have such capital.
At the same time, the paradox of academic capital is its utter
dreariness: the material such well-respected publishers publish is so very
standardized (as a matter of sheer conventionality) that one very soon
discovers that one is only reading the same old (or same young) folk talking
to (and about) the same old (or young) folk. This is, for example, a complaint
commonly uttered against the New York Review of Books just because the
New York Review of Books, like most review publications, does not exist in
order to, say, as one might innocently suppose, review books as such as
much as it exists to review just and only the kind of books its
editors/reviewers like — which almost always means only the kind of books
its editors/reviewers write. This is well before Eli Pariser and others wrote
about the Internet bubble, the academic bubble that used once to be called,
shades of Simeon Stylites, the ivory tower.
However, even as the inherent circularity, insularity, nepotism of
academic publishing can be deadly, at the same time (and this is also the
stuff of media studies, propaganda research, and the sociology of
advertising, this is the McLuhan effect), it‘s also the case that as a species
we crave repetition: repetition reinforces our beliefs and all of us are happy
to confirm our prejudices. This is how
the ‗bubble‘ (Google is calling this
your ‗circles,‘ Facebook just filters
your buddies for you without giving
the filter a name) works as a bubble.
Leibniz liked the word monad, in this
case, to push the metaphor,
windowless even with, just because
of, windows and internet access.
As I see it, the charges leveled against you derive from this broader
circumstance. In general, what we don‘t like is for people who rock the boat.
And when one starts a journal, I would say, especially as an undergraduate,
one is inevitably rocking the boat, whether or not one means to be.
To turn to your question about the ―duty‖ of an editor, I should
qualify my views by emphasizing that I always also edit with the perspective
of an author in mind. For my own part, and I am also thinking historically
about what has been the case with regard to journals founded in the past
(here we are back to Schiller and Hölderlin, et al.), the role of an editor is
ultimately, and inevitably, to produce a whole. The editor qua editor edits a
journal or (a book collection), that is then published as an entirety: the
40
What we don‘t like is for
people who rock the boat.
And when one starts a journal
one is inevitably rocking the
boat, whether or not one
means to be.

Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
journal is not this or that article, the book is not this or that chapter, it is
the book as a whole. It is this entirety that conveys the spirit of its editors,
its editorial board, and (this works backwards because this is also what
draws future contributions) its authors as well.
In this sense, the role of the editor is like a musical conductor‘s role,
whereby the role of the editor is to permit or allow a certain overarching,
unified voice or spirit to emerge. This spirit is already in evidence in what
makes a given issue of a journal to be a particular issue (sometimes this is
effected by nothing more than an ingenious title, sometimes it is evident in
reading a table of contents), and it is what makes a book collection to be a
book rather than a collocation of unrelated essays (this last question, when
it comes to collections, is something book publishers worry a good deal
about, although and in fact publishers tend to publish collections that are
timely even when they do not cohere).
At the same time, and I always find this surprising, not only do
authors rarely appreciate an editor‘s efforts, authors brought together in a
journal (or a book collection) tend not to read one another. This is relevant
because when one speaks of readers one automatically discounts the
authors themselves just as one discounts the editors and the reviewers and
conjures up, in the general fantasy that is publishing, a great mass of
readers: which mass is then reified as the ideal reader. But the one thing
that emerges from web 2.0 hype is that for the most part all of us exemplify
in the best and worst, i.e., most literal, way what Mark Twain once said (I
owe the reference to Tracy B. Strong): all of us have music and poetry inside
of us, but most have a hard time getting it out.
Well, Mark Twain, i.e, twice and again: it‘s not hard anymore. Thus
there‘s YouTube, there‘s Facebook, the rightly-named Twitter (proving, as if
it had needed to be shown, that deep or complex thoughts cannot be
expressed with brevity), and any number of other outlets. All ways, as I
argue elsewhere with respect to today‘s internet, that are surprisingly
similar to the activity of writing on a public bathroom wall, metaphorically
speaking . . . 2
Graffiti, Kilroy was here, or better words to that effect, is of course a
kind of publishing and in many ways it trumps Twitter and proves that, in
context and in the real world, far more can be done with far less.
Hence, when the Barnes and Noble store closed at the Lincoln
Center triangle of Broadway and Columbus Avenue, for a brief moment,
passersby would be able to see what had been written on the wall in the
universal idiom of spray paint, the medium and font of choice for urban
commentary: ―UNION JOB NOT‖ and all the despair of the current
41

INTERVIEW: Babette Babich
downsizing that is shattering the American nation and its dream is written
there.
The real world point here has to do with the writing one can read on
such a wall. In the case of a closing store, that inscription is soon painted
over or boarded up, but with a journal that can last in the case of a print
issue as long as the issue itself lasts, in libraries, stores (of course there are
fewer and fewer of these and that trend will only continue), personal
collections, and so on. What one encounters with a real print issue of a
journal is the whole journal; printed and bound, for any given issue of a
journal is effectively a book, and like a book collection, it is the editor, from
the point of view of the Library of Congress, who counts as the author. 3
By the same token, this experience of an encounter with a journal
(or a magazine) is changing with the atomizing effects of on-line publishing,
an atomization which extends the original insularity of the authors of the
articles themselves, as the authors of those articles (never mind the
intentions of the editor, and this is even the case with a commissioned book,
that is to say: even when an editor conceives the theme and invites
contributors to contribute) remain intrinsically isolated one from another.
Readers too relate to the text as such in an increasingly atomistic
fashion, and as Nietzsche once observed fairly disparagingly, one often reads
(just as one often stops reading altogether) only for the sake of a book of
one‘s own. But as I noted above, and as many commentators on the internet
or web have also noted, especially Jaron Lanier but also media theorists at
every level, there is a massive ―conversion‖ of consumers aka ―content users‖
who are now, willy-nilly, and merely by posting, merely by ‗sharing,‘ also
―publishing.‖ The point is an instructive one, and it would be great if
economists could learn a bit from it.
Those who produce are also those who consume. Note that this is
not new: it was always so. What is new is that it is now true for more and
more people. The writers in other words are the readers. This is literally so
in the case of a Twitter ‗retweet‘ which is simply a more redundant version of
a Facebook ‗like‘ — all of which are so many ways to advertise.
By contrast, of course, the old model of publishing assumes a set of
dynamics that have not changed since the means of the propagation of texts
in antiquity: there we are back to writing on the wall, with parallels to and
with proportionality that were themselves much older, drawn from public
spaces to the theater in the open air and from the specific acoustics of a
closed space, a cave, a tholos tomb (and we still see this in the lecture hall)
or, expanding the theater (and therewith the lecture hall), to a public rally in
the open air, where with the last we now assume loud speakers, as we must
do ever since Hitler made this problematic. As Rudolf Arnheim noted, among
42

Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
many others who have explored this, an understanding of this phenomena
must be extended ‗over the air‘ itself, across borders, with a study of radio
broadcast. 4 Thus we cross the world, and today, given a network link,
wireless or not, publishing is broadcast on the internet, visually in every
graphic sense and acoustically. As the model goes: there is productive
content (whether online, on the radio, at the podium, on stage) and there is
a listening, receptive audience: ‗Hello world,‘ says the first time blogger.
The ideal is the theatre, which is very interesting as that goes back
to the dawn of democracy in antiquity, or the musical concert (which was in
antiquity the same as Nietzsche sought to remind us, not that those who
study him have managed to notice), and it continues to this day in a market
economy, which engenders the kind of entertainment that made the world ―a
stage‖ in the middle ages, because what one wants, after all, are paying
customers. It is the spectacle that sells, or better said, as Nietzsche also
shows to the frustration of his Zarathustra: it is a particular kind of
spectacle, in this case that would be the cruel prospect of the undoing of the
―overman‖ (the fall of the tightrope walker) that attracts people to the market
place to begin with.
This works with a medieval masque or fair, as this also works with a
travelling show, with today‘s music concerts, be they classical or not, or
when the circus comes to town (provided one does not think, as one ought
to think, about the cruelty to animals). For the terms of publishing today,
the trouble begins when it comes to understanding the new media.
And today, in point of fact, everyone pays. You get your internet
from somewhere; even if you don‘t personally pay AOL or Compuserve, you
do pay the phone company for DSL or you pay for cable or what have you.
Or if you use your university connection, you pay for that pretty directly
(even if the university, to confuse matters, sometimes calls these ‗indirect
costs‘). The problem when it comes to publishing, and it is this that gets
Lanier‘s goat, is that the same everyman (to use that metaphor as we may,
having introduced the medieval masque above) also produces or generates
their own experience.
Again: everyone pays but not everyone gets paid. And that last bit
continues to resist comprehension although it is the most obvious of all,
which was the point of Shakespeare‘s all the world‟s a stage, as I already
alluded to it, and the point your composition or journalism teacher tried to
drive home to you by suggesting you write, à la Kerouac, from ‗life.‘ If you
want to sing Karaoke fine, if you don‘t want to sing fine, you are still part of
the spectacle if you turn up for Karaoke Night at your local bar. And as
Lanier and others are at pains to explain, you are still part of the spectacle if
you skip the local bar and simply tune in to American Idol.
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Likewise, and because of its ubiquity, you are involved with
YouTube whatever you do. YouTube is a giant machine for ―free‖ content
supplied by both individuals and professional content makers. Content
drives a system that goes beyond content itself. Indeed, the content is
ultimately utterly irrelevant. It is there to occupy your mind, catch your
critical attention while the real work is worked upon you, that is to say, the
more interesting you, from the point of marketers, that is the uncritical and
more receptive you. This is true of the poem, as T. S. Eliot tells us, and it is
true of music and it is true of Google and Facebook ads, which is also how
and why Google and Facebook make the money they do make. You don‘t
think you pay attention to these ads but you do, and ten out of ten people
(ok: nine because I would certainly say Yes! let them be gone forever, if
anyone ever asked) say in fact, No: they would not want advertising banned
from television: they want ads on tv, on the radio, on the internet. Even
those who oppose ads, as in the case of the activist journal Adbusters, 5
produce a product that is indistinguishable, and that is of course the
editor‘s point, from a journal full of ads.
Everyone pays but not
everyone gets paid…
And that last bit
continues to resist
comprehension although
it is the most obvious of
all. The problem for the
producers/consumers is
that content production
happens to be a one-
way street.
The problem for the
producers/consumers is that this content
production happens to be a one-way street,
as Lanier and others have observed. In
general, it does not lead to a book contract,
or a record contract, or a movie contract.
Most of my colleagues, especially those with
an interest in political philosophy, who
would like to have CNN, say, call them in as
―experts,‖ do not in fact get called. Most
bloggers will not be able to turn their blogs
into a book. (Sorry.) If you write a book
about your senior year and turn it into an
ebook, it may not get buyers; but then again
it might. Lanier worries that is an inevitably
one-off phenomenon, affected all the way down by a certain interplay (and
many of his critics fail to note this and simply counter that, after all, it
might happen again, not note that this is not how Lanier puts it, between
mimesis and projection/conjecture). The point is the old science fiction
paradox, which academics, from Žižek to me and many others, love to write
about by abbreviating the reference to the SF paradox to a mere mention of
the movie, Minority Report (though Twelve Monkeys is probably more to the
gut existential point), and Minority Report is in fact, and as Avatar was, a
kind of advance marketing for putatively future technologies (so far,
however, 3-D screens, for example, are not selling as well as had been
hoped).
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Beyond the monotony that is the inevitable consequence of this
phenomenon, the problem is the most pernicious for musicians. Indeed
musicians tend to get the short of end of the stick in all times. They were not
well served by the past system: the recording industry serves the recording
industry not the musicians, and radio serves the recording industry not the
musicians and not the listeners (what choice do you have, a question one
always ponders when one‘s local public broadcasting station hits one up for
bucks to support programming of a kind in which one as a member of the
public has in fact no say whatever). Thus as Lanier observes in his book,
you are not a gadget, the internet offers all kinds of possibilities, among
them musical, but almost none of them serve the working musician. 6
In other words, as the saying goes, ‗Don‘t quit your day job.‘ In his
Against the Machine, Lee Siegel tries to track this from the start, going back,
as Lanier also goes back, to the now nearly romantically iconic WELL (but
this was also true of almost all of the old BBS and .alt communities, and
indeed every chat room, a certain vestige of which survives, albeit, one-onone
in Facebook messages). For Siegel‘s point, as I would gloss it, trades on
the inherently economic equivocation built into the meaning of ‗exchange‘
per se: ―behind every intimate expression lay a self-advertisement; hidden in
the invitation to a relationship was the bid for a profitable connection.‖ 7
It‘s all about the sell, as Marschall McLuhan observed a long time
ago — which is why, although people periodically ―rediscover‖ him inside
and outside of the academy, McLuhan never left the advertising world. Not
for a single moment. Elvis may have left the building: McLuhan is always
with us.
Siegel too refers to McLuhan: he even includes a citation. Lanier
repeats the same point leaving out Siegel along with his references. This is
not a comment against Lanier, Siegel himself published his book apparently
after slashing his own references which live on as allusions, as echoes and
mentions which the majority of the readers one worries about, the readers
one supposes will be lost if one has too many (that would be any) footnotes,
can blissfully ignore: what you don‘t see won‘t bother you.
What concerns Siegel is the nature of the urge to turn one‘s private
experience into a public commodity, and Siegel‘s book is about the
eagerness of the public in general to do just that. To illustrate, consider New
York on New Year‘s Eve. The crowds who show up in Times Square do not
merely come to see the ball drop: they come decked out and fully hoping to
be seen seeing the ball drop.
This is not about expression: this about the media, i.e., this is a
reflection on publishing.
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Thus Siegel titles his central chapter, every allusion to McLuhan as
patent as you please, ―The Me is the Message.‖ 8 And the point is that exactly
this message is Madison Avenue‘s message: like the shirt or tie you plan to
buy: the savvy salesperson sidles up to you, murmuring, it‟s you, it‟s all you.
And we identify with this, a mirror of selling and sold, sold and selling. Thus
the other day at a camera store, a young man pointed to his glasses and
explained that this identified him as a PC, ‗You know,‘ he said to me
patiently, noticing my bewilderment: ‗like the commercial,‘ dutifully
deconstructing the point for my benefit: ‗Macs don‘t wear glasses.‘ I did not
buy the camera I came to buy.
Here the point is to become, and we are indeed to become, like the
tv–commercial-watching-young-salesman himself, the products we
‗consume.‘
For editors this is a conundrum, but it is also an opportunity and
others can tell you the opportunity. The conundrum is what interests me as
an editor and as a philosopher, for as an editor (and indeed, as an author)
what follows from this is that it is hard to count on readers. Hence, as
Derrida would say, ‗friends, there are no friends!,‘ here we may simply say:
‗readers, there are no readers!‘
To return to the heart of your question, when you ask about the
duty of the editor, the question is inevitably an ethical one. For my own part,
I follow what I take to be the editor‘s imperative. For me this is not about
serving a public, more or less imaginary as that public happens to be
imaginary in a Lacanian sense, 9 but I take the role of an academic editor —
and I note of course that this will be different if one is editing items of public
or general interest — to be always to allow the author to speak.
From an editor‘s point of view, what this means in real effect is that
in academia as elsewhere, the editors, like the sound engineers in a music
concert or a music recording, are invisible. As a corollary, you should note
that editing will never do anything for you, neither for your ego nor for your
career. Editing will not get you into graduate studies; it will not get you a
job. In part this is a structural matter: the role of the editor is all about
bringing out, foregrounding, the work of others, sometimes this is by way of
direct editing, including direct cuts and glossing (this is hard because you
have to be able to judge what is meant and you have to be correct in that
judgment and every author, not only Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, claims to
mean what they do not in fact say, not because they are perverse but
because of the way language and context work in a text). In most cases in
the academic world, editing is simply a matter of recommending revision
(this lets the author say what they mean). Or the ultimate edit, which is of
course either publishing a text as is or refusing it.
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But at the end of the day, and this too is a corollary of editorial
invisibility, it remains the author, not the editor, who is responsible for what
is published under the author‘s name. When articles appear in print they do
not carry a little asterisk saying, ‗changed here and there by editorial fiat‘
although such changes can and do happen (my own titles have been
changed by editors, my texts have suffered awfully idiotic rephrasings and,
on the other side of the desk, for my own part and as an editor, to my pain,
if mostly for space reasons but sometimes for reasons of precision, I have
myself had to change the odd title or two).
At the same time, to go back to the idea of the supposedly undiluted
―rigor‖ of the profession, now to use the language of your critics, an editor‘s
judgment nearly always reflects, like the New York Review of Books already
mentioned, today‘s prevailing standards and these are not only all-toohuman
but notoriously subject to change. And as standards they often fall
short of precisely what they claim to ensure as mentioned above:
distinguishing between good and bad work.
Here I find it salutary to reflect on the fact that Nietzsche‘s own
academic peers refused to recognize his work at all (never mind refusing to
name him as ―best‖ in his era). Nor has that changed in his field of classical
philology and that remains the case now after an interval of more than a
century.
Max Weber pointed to this as well – and although it always seemed
to me that Weber could have had Nietzsche in mind I believe he was
thinking (as authors often are) only about himself in fact. At the heart of
Weber‘s recommendation to anyone considering an academic life as a
vocation, be it as editor, or author, professor, researcher, no one ought to
consider academics (which he also called ―science,‖ using good German 19 th
century terminology as he happened to have done) if what one expects of it
is to be recognized for one‘s work. The unfairness of this lack of recognition
is the signal character of academia. It is also the prime reason for despair
and burn out among academics.
Weber‘s advice is empirically well-founded. Nor should one enter
into the life of a scholar, as an academic or a scientist of any kind, if one has
hope to be recognized thereby for talent, for achievement or for dedication.
Nor should one enter the life of academia if one hopes to find colleagues in
the true sense (ah, that would be others who share your interests). Weber‘s
reasons for saying this were empirical hence his advice is practical: so many
counsels of prudence, as Kant would say, and Thomas Kuhn would go on to
repeat them, with a good deal less verve, a little later. For us what follows
from this is that supposedly higher gatekeepers, the people one supposes to
be in control, the academic departments who make various appointments,
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especially at the level of distinguished chairs, the editors and the peer
reviewers who vet submitted essays, the publishers who publish, all do so
always according to their own reasons and ―excellence‖ is inevitably the least
of these.
The current worry in the peer-review process used in the natural
sciences in particular, and arguably this is most the important for a sciencefaithful
public such as our own, concerns the nepotism or inherent
circularity of peer review. In fact, that is to say: in end effect, peer review
guarantees not objectivity but insularity. Like the New York Review of Each
Others Books, as it is sometimes called, the problem with ―peer review‖ in
the natural sciences is that it inevitably concentrates power (and grants) in
smaller and smaller circles of mutually reinforcing self-promotion. 10 The
problem of industry supported research, namely that sponsored by big
tobacco and big pharma and so on, is only a more transparent and
manifestly more egregious variation on this. Science in general, and this is
the source of the influence of the sciences in the university, draws enormous
revenue (only museums and archaeological sites compare) from all kinds of
sponsors, the government included, and that sponsorship as Feyerabend
the problem with ―peer
review‖ in the natural
sciences is that it
inevitably concentrates
power (and grants) in
smaller and smaller
circles of mutually
reinforcing selfpromotion.
Where power
is conferred on a few
hands, one hand
inevitably washes the
other.
emphasized is by no means neutral. 11
Where power is conferred on a few hands,
one hand inevitably washes the other.
For Weber, and speaking
practically, what this means for the student
is that if one wishes to choose the life of the
mind or the life of public service, that is
academia/science or politics as a vocation,
one is choosing science or politics as a
vocation, that is to say: as a way of life.
These then are recommendations for action,
so Weber counsels us. At the same time,
what people do in practice is not ideal. And
what one does in anything that one is called
to do, one does because one feels, for
whatever reason, and this will vary from
person to person, that it is worthwhile to do
(maybe it serves a personal ambition,
maybe everyone in one‘s family is also an academic, maybe one has nothing
better to do, etc.)
Your last question in this first series of questions is also, because it
is general, the most difficult. You ask: ―what is the value and the future of
academic publishing, both with periodicals as well as books?‖
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I think the most immediate value of specifically academic publishing
is that is about the ―life of the mind.‖ Publishing is its life‘s blood as it were,
and only through publishing can the ―life‖ of the life of the mind be assured
beyond individual scholarship itself (or Wissenschaft as both Goethe and
Kant and Nietzsche and Husserl and Heidegger spoke of it). This life is the
ultimate value of the real or actual production of books: by which I mean the
generation of the books themselves, the journals themselves, and that for
me is always all about ‗real‘ journals and ‗real‘ books — of the real-life kind,
on real paper.
Of course I realize I sound old-fashioned by talking about real books
and real paper. At the same time, the point I am hoping to make is a
physical, visceral, vital one. I would add along the way that the publication
of real journals, real books, already presupposes, as higher things tend to
do, the lesser coincident things as well, namely digital publication. Thus by
saying that publishing ought to be ―real,‖ I am hardly choosing against
virtual or online publication, PDFs or E-anything. Publishing a journal in
print form automatically generates the digital form (for we are not talking
about setting type as this Gutenberg-style legacy is a craft which is no
longer practiced and has thus become an ―art,‖ occasionally resuscitated
and meaning, to be sure, and I underline this: that much of what once
belonged to it qua craft is lost, perhaps irretrievably so as the things that are
the most crucial in any craft are always the things that go without saying
and are hence unrecorded 12 — but what is certain, in any case, is that the
printer‘s skill in setting type is not used in today‘s academic publishing). 13
I have already expressed my preference for print journals, but note
too, as far too few of us do — even on the level of theoretical reflection on
digital publication — that digital publishing as such is one of the most
evanescent, that also means the most fragile, invisibly so, of all publishing
forms. For this reason, real, physical journals; real, physical books, are
essential for enduring scholarship and preservation remains, given our
mortality and given our forgetfulness, the reason for scholarship as such.
At the same time as I would argue that there is no reason to choose
between ―real‖ and virtual publication, just such a choice happens (by
default) more and more. Excellent on this topic would be both the
aforementioned books by Lanier and by Siegel but also Cliff Stoll‘s Silicon
Snakeoil, which last includes an account of the mindless destruction of
information that was resultant not simply by destroying books as Google
has been and is doing (wholesale), but the things one never notices: the loss
of the accoutrements of past information technology, that would be
university library card catalogues, which contained, in their physicality,
corresponding in each case to their uniqueness to each institution,
inherently uncatalogued information added by the librarians (usually
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INTERVIEW: Babette Babich
penciled in by hand, with soft, paper and revision friendly, lead), 14 both in
user choices and through the unfortunate effects of decisions made by
librarians, which again reflect issues more of ideology than budgets. In
addition, and this matters in the context of periodical publication, when a
library cuts, as many libraries have cut, periodical subscriptions or book
orders, such cuts rarely translate to savings overall. Much rather, funds
spared in that way are usually spent in another way (this is a consequence
of working with ―budgets‖ of any kind but especially as institutionally
administered and one has recently been able to observe the terrible cost of
―budget thinking‖ during the debt ceiling debates which could only consider
certain — and never other — cuts). 15
This Heidegger emphasizes, if it is also true that my old teacher Don
Ihde, despite his brilliance as an analyst of technology, manages because of
his own later focus on his own work (here Ihde is exactly like Heidegger who
was in turn exactly like Nietzsche) to miss the point of the point Heidegger
had been making with regard to both the printing press and the typewriter.
For his part, Ihde is only following Friedrich Kittler, but Kittler, who is
himself otherwise quite ingeniously brilliant, nevertheless, and like many
people in Germany (and elsewhere), seems apparently afflicted with the
desire to eschew Heidegger on principle (Sloterdijk is only somewhat of an
exception to this). Yet Heidegger, attuned as he was to the dynamic
evolution of technological artifacts, reminded us that ―the invention of the
printing press coincides with the inception of the modern period.‖ 16 To be
sure, Heidegger observes, this is the ―triumph of the machine,‖ but his point
is that it moves our relation to reading, to writing, away from a relation to
the word, to another way of forming the word. We no longer ―form‖ words
with a stylus in our hands, with a reed pen or an ink brush in this way.
Following the imprint of the printing press as the printer composed it,
thereby setting a page as a whole and at a blow, we are all become
typesetters, printer‘s assistants, ourselves: turned via the touch typing of a
Hemmingway towards the finger. Perhaps better said, we now key without
impact, we text: we have a fingertip relationship and increasingly less and
less of a haptic or tactile one to our keyboards, our blackberries, iPads:
soon, this is the point, again, about the pre-marketing marketing function of
Minority Report, we will soon write in the air (thus the future is a not a
personal jetpack or little spaceship, à la the Jetsons, but simply a business
woman, usually oriental, surrounded by technological displays and
competently conjuring an invisibly curved column of still more transparent
displays in the air around her, as seen in televison, internet, and magazine
advertisements, as these always reinforce one another), but we will not be
writing, and perhaps not even indicating, but something a bit closer to
‗completing‘/‘completed by‘ via the services of what we fairly revealingly call
a cloud which by then, of course, we will call something else.
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Academic study allows us to pay attention to things such as the
past relationship to the text as this informed what scholars of the past wrote
about, in some cases and here Foucault but also Pierre Hadot, Ivan Illich, 17
and a range of authors following the Homer question and the use of new
technology (recording and computer analysis) have all of them helped us to
frame the question once again. As Hadot has taught us, what we take to be
straightforward theoretical texts were written therapeutically, that is to say
very literally for the sake of life, as practical aids to changing one‘s way of
living, rather than for the kind of speculative theoretical reflection that
appeals to us as children of the text and less and less of the book.
I hardly need to remind you that there are more publications now
than ever before. What is worth remembering as a scholar and a thinker is
that less is read than ever before. New authors should keep this in mind.
The sheer fact that you publish something does not entail that it is read.
Even if your blog has a respectable number of hits, it does not follow that
your blog has been read, and there is a similar caveat concerning the email
you may have received telling you that one of your articles has been
‗downloaded‘ so and so many times. In fact, the more articles one
downloads, the less, so I would hazard to say, one reads them.
As an illustration, consider the stunt at MIT recently used to
dramatize the inaccessibility of scientific articles to a reading public. 18 If we
bracket for the sake of argument (this is not a court of law) the closet Aaron
Swartz is said to have broken into, there are still a few hoops to jump
through, yet a few ―gates‖ to pass through. Access to MIT‘s library (access to
the ―Tool,‖ as MIT undergrads used to call their library when I was in
Boston/Cambridge) does not rank right up there with general access for
anyone. Just think how hard it is to get into your university library: what is
a mere annoyance for you in possession of an ID card turns out to be an
obstacle for anyone without one. My only point, the point worth thinking
about here is that accessing, downloading the articles, does not correlate to
articles actually read by the person who so assiduously downloaded them —
and of course Swartz very geekily did this, i.e., automatically, but to do so
requires a certain amount of gadgeteering which is why he needed to be in
an inaccessible place to begin with and indeed why he needed to be in the
particular place he was.
Increasingly, we are all such geeks, minus the latest or best
hardware and certainly minus the publicity plan. That is to say, to a greater
and greater degree, we tend to download on automatic pilot. The
determinism or autonomy of ―downloading‖ allows us to do this. I note as I
have already cited Stoll‘s point to this effect, that periodical reading rooms
are increasingly disappearing at university and college libraries across the
country. At my university, the entire periodicals room which had been
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INTERVIEW: Babette Babich
architecturally designed into a library recently built at Fordham‘s Rose Hill
campus in the Bronx, featuring grand light for reading, was re-purposed
into a museum (rather like Stoll‘s dream of housing socks in old card
catalog drawers). Ironically and to be sure, the light, so excellent for reading,
cannot but be a liability for the artifacts housed there (even in their light
filtering display cases), and it is hoped that the curator eventually notices
this.
At the same time, and this attests to the continuity between
technologies of one kind or another, one always ran out of time in old
fashioned reading rooms which means that one always anticipated running
out of time, in advance of time. Thus if one could not make copies
automatically, one spent one‘s archival time, Nietzsche did this, I myself did
this in reading rooms where photo-copying was prohibited, taking manual
notes, with the mind to reconstruct later. The entire industry of ―Nietzsche
philology,‖ i.e., source scholarship, is thus concerned not with the
philological issues of interest to Nietzsche himself but and much rather with
the inevitably positivist and inevitably limited minutiae of sifting out what
Nietzsche thought all by himself, as it were, from what Nietzsche took or
derived from others. The very obvious fact that the two bleed into one
another in the life of the mind only compounds the philosophic limits of this
kind of work. 19
If the technology at one‘s disposal is a real-live reading room, with
real-live limited hours but featuring copy machines, we anticipate the
consequences of limited time and proceed to subvert the same. This kind of
subversion however is conformity, determinism. We tailor our behaviour to
the fact that there are, as the T shirt goes, so many books, so little time.
Thus we spend our time copying the journal for an article to read ―later.‖ 20
I have binder volumes of articles I copied years ago just for this
purpose, and I have in fact read many of them (because I am keen on
reading). But I would also argue that the reason I have read many of them is
the fact that I happened to have a real photocopy that I could read later the
same day or happen across so many years later, be it serendipitously or
deliberately. Today, what makes the PDF phenomenon so intriguing for
philosophical reflection is the fact that when one has a PDF one does not
have a real ―copy.‖ One scans a text, even better one downloads it from
JSTOR. With that virtual advance, there is no need to actually read the text
or (recalling the digital activism of Swartz‘s automatic downloading stunt)
have any contact whatever with the text at all. As an author, you may still
get a note that your article has been downloaded so and so many times, but
this does not mean that anyone has read it.
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
In fact, most articles, most books, have very few readers and among
those readers, so I would say (but this is the professor in me talking), very
few can be said to have really read the text. I have a German friend, the best
of my best friends, who vigorously denies having read books I know he has
read because I have seen him reading them with my own eyes and because I
know the marginal marks he makes (he has left many of these in my own
books). Now he happens to be a Suabian, and Nietzsche says that Suabians
simply like to lie, but in his defense, it matters that his father was a
classical philologist and it matters that he himself was a student of modern
philology, a rigorous training which meant, as it took me years to realize,
that he would refuse to say that he had read something until he had really,
really read it.
Nor was he wrong in so stylizing what counts as reading for this is
the very kind of reading an editor or an author hopes for.
When it comes to PDF‘s, Jaron Lanier has pointed out that the hit
phenomenon has the effect it has on us because we have adapted ourselves
to the structural design he names the UNIX legacy. This is the effective
absence of time as part of the command line interface. We count on this
absence (this is how we adapt to it/subvert it to use the sociologist‘s
language) when we text during down moments (as my students do this in
elevators, they also do this in class). But when we send them we know that
we are not dealing with the infinitely timeless patience of the machine
command line: we are no longer out of time, as it were. Once sent, the
message enters the real time that it takes for a text message to arrive at its
destination, for with texting as with email or a Facebook or blog post or a
tweet, we assume that arrival to be instantaneous. This we parse in human
time and hence we expect an immediate response the minute we send it. In
this way we negotiate the difference between lived or real or human time and
the timeless time of the command line (that is, until we hit return or ―send‖
which is another name for return and we should note that the metaphor in
question has already lodged itself in our consciousness). The immediacy of
email or texting, which is between writing for the long term, parallels,
although it is to be sure not the same as, immediate, face-to-face
communication as Ihde very insightfully analysed this last and newer
scholars would do well to explore this. (Note for instance that Facetime or
Skyping is inherently difference from meeting in person, however much the
software purveyors and your own increasingly busy life work to persuade
you to think otherwise).
There are all kinds of problems here (of course, what is at stake is
nothing but a version of the Turing test), but the only issue that is currently
thought to matter in a cash culture such as ours is whether or not you
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yourself or a machine has submitted an order form for a purchase or for
some other purpose, signed an online petition, and so on.
The Turing dimensionality of the test in question moves beyond or
outside of the command line interface because it cannot do otherwise if it
wishes to function as a test. What is problematic is that, and because it has
to produce feedback of a digital kind, it is a matter of translation.
Google wants the data for scanning purposes and otherwise, this we
know, or should if we were consciously noticing the ads (we do notice
subliminally/peripherally). Thus to prove that we are the one placing an
order or whatever, one is given a squiggled text or garbled text of the kind
that can nevertheless be read (eventually, and this is the fatality of this
process, because Google wants the data, in a fairly short term, this test will
no longer be able to function as a test), but it functions for now and one
types in the so-called ―captcha‖ and one is good to go. 21
If our relation to the text has moved from the hand holding a stylus
or a quill pen of the kind Nietzsche still used before his very temporary
foray, encouraged by his illness and his myopia, to the use of typewriter, to
the typewriter/keyboard/keypad, using the tips or pads of our fingers. As
typewriters change (Nietzsche‘s typewriter was actually better than the
typewriters we know from our parents, just in terms of precision/speed), so
too texting, now ‗aided‘ with helpful machine completions (younger people
learn to accommodate this telegraphy, and accommodate one must in order
to use it), because as Heidegger also reminds us, the machine, be it old or
new, the technology (or the technique as Ellul would say) ―imposes its
use.‖ 22
In A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy,
you claimed that analytic philosophy
―. . . stands to science as scholastic philosophy once did to
theology. Continental philosophy differs from analytic
philosophy in its openness to questioning which also
means that it is less concerned with solutions than it is with
critical questioning (including the question of its own
presumptions or prejudices). But this focus on critical
questioning also means, at least ideally, that continental
philosophy does not aspire to take its rational warrant from
science itself.‖
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Nearly a decade on, there remains heated discussion about this
„analytic/continental divide.‟ What is the usefulness of this term and its
possible future?
The ―heatedness‖ of the discussion in question is mostly, so far as I can tell,
a matter of denouncing the ―significance‖ of the distinction altogether and
thus ultimately tending to deny its very existence. Your question regarding
the ―usefulness of this term‖ seems to point in this way for it seems to be
most ―useful‖ in order to pretend (here the Brian Leiter-report and
associated blogs are good instantiations of this particular ―use‖ or desire as
nerdish wish fulfillment) that scholars such as those whose work one does
not like can be not merely ignored, this is the ostrich effect, but and
ultimately ―designated‖ out of existence. And this sort of thing is quite old
hat in academia, which has always been a competitive arena (going as far
back as Heraclitus who recommended junking everyone else but himself).
It‘s also emblematic of the modern, thus we hear the trope at the
penultimate level of Nietzsche‘s short ―History of an Error,‖ which is more
about the natural history of errancy and illusion than an account of the
difference between the ―real‖ world (which originally of course meant the
ideal world) and the apparent or phenomenal world when he writes:
—an idea no longer of any use . . . — an idea grown useless,
superfluous, consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, How the Real World at Last
Became a Myth)
It goes without saying that abolishing ―an idea grown useless‖ is
inherently risky not for reasons of, say, reverential regard but because the
supererogatory is not therefore or thereby ―refuted.‖ Occam‘s razor is a
principle of convenience, not demonstration, and it is not a matter of
ontology. In the case of Nietzsche‘s particular example, if we proceed to
abolish the so-called ―real world‖ we will find that ―we have also abolished
the apparent world (Ibid.).‖ The case of the real/apparent world is a case of
co-relevant concepts. Nietzsche‘s joke is in the rhetorical array: it‘s because
the idea may be said to be ―useless,‖ one supposes one may do away with it:
because it is ―superfluous,‖ one concludes that it has been, as a result,
―refuted.‖
Why not get rid of it?
More than one person 23 has told me that that one of the more
compelling points in my article, as you quote it, from Carlos Prado‘s book
collection, A House Divided, 24 is that I highlight the closed-off character of
analytic style philosophy. Thus contemporary analytic philosophy is not
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open to questioning, and it is not closed because I say so but on its own
terms. Thus I describe traditional continental philosophy in its critically
hermeneutic and reflectively phenomenological character as the practice of
intensifying questions. I contrast this with analytic philosophy‘s ongoing
passion for deflating, puncturing, or otherwise dissolving questions, here,
again, just to use the rhetoric of the mainstream. It is a common place in
analytic philosophy to dismiss questions as such, i.e., ―unmasking‖ them as
not (really) ―real‖ questions, declaring them pseudo-questions. In this sense,
analytic or mainstream philosophy regards its task as the solving of
problems (to this extent, analytic philosophy follows Karl Popper), dissolving
all other problems and issues as irrelevant or unreal, as pseudo-problems.
I should say that in the same way that continental philosophy
describes a philosophical style and is thus otherwise than a description of
philosophy as currently practiced on the continent, 25 analytic philosophy
which is otherwise called ―mainstream‖ or received philosophy, is itself and
likewise a style, referring to more than one kind and is thus not only a
single or specific method or locus.
In the case of continental philosophy, we do not ask which of the
world‘s continents counts as the locus of continental philosophy. The
referent, as we know, betrays the Anglo-Saxon, British origins of the
distinction as such. Hence talk of European philosophy hardly settles the
question as some have sought to settle it, nor is the issue resolved by
arguing that there is no difference to speak of because analytic philosophy is
now dominant the world over.
Again, and in place of analytic problem solving, I highlight
traditional continental philosophy‘s willingness to pose questions and to
hold with them as such, as I take Heidegger and Nietzsche as prime
exemplifications of this willingness to question and even, and as I have
sought to do in my own work, to render what is questionable or problematic
even more problematic.
Where one asks whether it is ‗useful‘ to distinguish between
maintaining and dissolving problems, perhaps simply by stipulating them as
solved or else by declaring them useless or meaningless, as so many
distinctions to be ―abolished,‖ one still means thereby to eliminate what is
problematic and as a consequence one gets to dismiss those who present or
maintain such problems. This is what makes the focus on what may be
designated as ‗useful‘ or ‗efficient,‘ an expeditious one. This is done by the
difference quashing power of the first person plural. Hence, one says: ―we‖
don‘t need to talk about continental and analytic philosophy any longer,
―we‖ don‘t find the distinction ―useful.‖ But such a way of speaking has its
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own utility and the result of that is a patently monolithic conception of
philosophy.
My worry in response to this has always been, firstly, that
philosophy is and has always been all about making distinctions. 26 ―I‘ll
teach you differences,‖ says Wittgenstein, himself quoting Shakespeare in
his turn. Secondly, as just noted, I am struck by how self-serving such
claims have tended to be for certain elements of the academy. When I first
wrote this essay in 1991, twenty years ago, I noticed that when authors
claimed as they did in book after book on the post this or post that ―turn‖ in
analytic philosophy, authors tended to declare how very advanced analytic
philosophy was, how open-minded it was, and so on but all such books
tended almost without exception to use such claims as the basis for
excluding or limiting rather than encouraging dialogue, conversation,
exchange.
If one wanted to talk about Husserl and Heisenberg in the
philosophy of science, as one of my teachers did, or about Nietzsche and
about Heidegger as I did, one met closed doors, there was and is no
dialogue, no conversation, certainly no exchange. And when it comes to the
profession, simple non-mention, utter exclusion turns out to be far more
efficient than refutation.
It does not seem to me that claiming that the distinction isn‘t
‗useful‘ or that it is ‗meaningless‘ is terrifically different.
The purpose to be served is exclusion.
We all already know all that, say the powers that be, but analytic
philosophy isn‟t that way at all, it has changed, analytic philosophy is now so
various and so new, hence it is, as my colleagues at Fordham will tell me,
that there are so many different kinds of philosophy of mind and analytic
metaphysics and so on, the logic of which adverting to such proliferation of
kinds and kinds translates in effect to saying: don‟t talk to us about your
concerns, about the kinds of things you do, we‟re not interested, we don‟t
want to hear from you, we don‟t want to hear from those like you, we already
know what you have to say. And besides: we don‟t „understand it.‟ Instead of
engaging in dialogue, instead of talking about what has been done in your
tradition and what your current concerns are, what you ought to do is listen to
us. Rather than exchange and conversation: it is just and only analytic
philosophy that should be read, you should hire scholars trained in analytic
philosophy who do so-called „continental‟ work, you ought to dialogue with
analytic philosophers only, converse solely on our topics, using only our
terminology.
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It seemed to me then and it still seems to me that this only serves
the purpose of enshrining one particular style of doing philosophy as the
only style of philosophy. And this is the effect whenever one says, as many
younger scholars who also and despite an analytic formation describe
themselves as continental (in good analytic fashion, let it be noted), let‘s not
perpetuate such distinctions, but let‘s talk instead of ‗good‘ and ‗bad‘
philosophy. But what counts as good and what counts as bad always turn
to be kinds of philosophy that exemplify that same analytic formation.
I will hold off discussing the last issue you raise in your question for
my reply to the following question as it bears on the issue of science (in
place of theology).
Much of your work has focused on Nietzsche‟s relationship to science.
What is the significance of Nietzsche, a figure predominantly read in
the humanities, to a philosophy of science and to practical scientific
endeavors?
I hold that Nietzsche matters for anyone who wants to think
philosophically, i.e., critically about science. 27 I say this because Nietzsche
undertakes to question science purely philosophically by raising the
question of science as a question and as such. This is the question
Nietzsche poses in a preface added to his first book in the wake of his
experience of being misunderstood by his peers with respect to his project
there (as scholars continue to fail to understand it). That book, The Birth of
Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, hardly seems, as you correctly point out,
to be a book about science as such or at all and certainly it seems irrelevant
to the so-called hard sciences.
Nietzsche‘s first book, the book he says is all about this very
question of science, thus seems to be very much concerned with what you
call the humanities, that aesthetic philosophy, historical questions of poetry
and theatre and literature and music as well as political culture. Yet it is
exactly with reference to this book that Nietzsche claims that he is the first
to raise the question of science as a question. Most scholars simply dismiss
this claim. I take it seriously and when one does that and when does so in a
sustained fashion, one sees that Nietzsche‘s book is a genuinely,
methodologically scientific undertaking just where Nietzsche qua classical
philologist seeks to understand the genesis of the tragic work of art as the
title of the book tells us that he does, out of the sounding, i.e., out of the
spirit of ancient Greek (as this was, so Nietzsche had discovered, an
explicitly, literally musical voicing). 28 The ―science‖ in question, disciplinarily
speaking, was Nietzsche‘s own discipline of classical philology,
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methodologically articulated in accordance with the procedure of ‗any
science whatever‘ as this was supposed possible in the 19 th century and
Nietzsche did suppose this, following Kant, and the very specific
understanding of the nature of lyric poetry in the tragic, musical work of art,
in terms of the function of the chorus, and the entirety of the tragic artwork
in terms of the role of culture as a whole in the same tragic era of ancient
Greece, just and precisely because that era comes to an end, as Nietzsche
argues in his first book, with the tragedies of Euripides (and coincidentally
with Plato/Socrates).
Note that what we name tragedy today, what Shakespeare called
tragedy, what Walter Benjamin called tragedy, has in consequence nothing
to do with the historical focus of Nietzsche‘s book and only thus can one
understand why he speaks of the possibility of a rebirth of tragic culture
(and his appeal to Wagner and his followers to support his cause).
With Nietzsche‘s claim that he is the first to raise the question of
science as such, as we have already noted this above, he takes science
methodologically and as I show elsewhere, citing Karl Jaspers, this
emphasis on method was no kind of conceit: many scientists, including
students of medicine and physiology, turned to philology just to learn the
rigors of method. Nor was it an accident that Darwin himself turned to the
linguistic schema that was the legacy of the very same Alexandrian
grammarians that Nietzsche speaks of in order to borrow the differential
relations between the evolutionary development of language to pattern his
own theory of the origin of species. And what Nietzsche means (and we recall
that he recommends that one question grammar itself) is thus that he is the
first to put the presuppositions of science itself in question, as this of course
corresponds to the very Kantian question of putting science itself on the
path, as it were, of a science.
Nietzsche also raises the related question of truth, he questions
causality as well as our presuppositions about it, and he goes on to frame or
raise the question of the origin of logic itself in very logical and historical
terms, again and in every case logically or scientifically (and in the case of
the last he reminds us of the oddity of our universal conviction that we can
proceed from non-knowledge to knowledge, transition from error to truth,
and in general and thereby manage to advance from mythic thought and
convention to logical and rational thinking). How, Nietzsche asks, does that
work? How is it possible to begin with error and proceed to truth? If we
begin with superstition and ignorance, exactly how do we attain
enlightenment and knowledge? Everything depends upon the question of
foundation or ground and Nietzsche‘s question asks the ultimate question of
ground.
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As I have pointed out throughout my career, these are logical
questions. Logic conserves or preserves what truth one has to begin with.
Reasoning logically, we do not deviate from correct insights, whereas illogical
process leaves any and everywhere, even when our premises are true.
The problem for Nietzsche (and Heidegger), as for Kant, Hume,
Descartes, is to find a secure foundation.
Today we no longer worry about such questions because we take
science as our foundation, as our point of departure. Hence, we take ‗as
true‘ what science says is true. And maybe it is, but philosophy does not
raise critical questions.
Here I return to the parallel you cited above in your previous
question on the analytic/continental divide, where scholastic philosophy
once served theology and where theology indeed and very conscientiously,
even anxiously required its services (even if this anxiety tended to lead to an
ultimate movement to ―deny reason‖ in order, as it were, to make room ―for
faith‖), today‘s science is not in need of philosophy‘s contributions be they
analytic or continental. Just this sovereignty on the part of modern science
is problematic for the dominant mode of philosophizing, that is, analytic
philosophy, to the extent that it embraces (as traditional philosophy never
for its part ‗embraced‘ theology, per impossibile, in the case of Aristotle)
science as its model, or ideal.
In other words, analytic philosophy embraces an enterprise, the
natural sciences, that has no need of its services.
Such an embrace does not characterize the critical, continental kind
of philosophy of science, like Nietzsche‘s, as I have argued, that does not
model itself on science and does not aspire to be taken ―as‖ science
whenever that might be possible but instead and much rather puts science
itself in question. In this way, although analytic philosophy emphasizes
what is called ‗critical thinking,‘ there is in fact a radical avoidance of
critique especially where it concerns science, and I have always found this
problematic for the philosophy of science. I have some small comfort, though
it may not comfort him to have me cite him here, but the perfectly analytic
P.M.S. Hacker makes a similar point. 29
Now to say that analytic-style philosophy radically avoids critique
when it comes to science is hardly to say that there is a lack of critical
terminology in analytic philosophy, and it doesn‘t mean that analytic
philosophers aren‘t nasty about this or that. Indeed, from the point of
feminist and other perspectives in the academy, speaking more universally,
one of the more problematic characteristics of mainstream philosophy is
that analytic philosophy features a style and modality that is one of the
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nastier styles to be found in the academy as a whole, specifically when it
comes to friendliness towards women in philosophy, 30 which thus extends,
as I have argued in another context, toward other reflective styles or ways of
doing philosophy such as the continental modalities we were discussing
above.
If analytic philosophy does not question science, science in turn, as
I have noted, does not for its part regard philosophy, no matter whether
analytic or continental, as theology once regarded philosophy. Thus it is not
the case that science gives a hoot about the distinctions between
philosophical kinds that I am making here. Hence I have always found it
worth reflecting that when it comes to the relevance of the philosophy of
science of any flavor (analytic or continental), for ―practical scientific
endeavors,‖ to use your terminology to refer to the work of contemporary
scientists, science itself happily proceeds without referring to philosophy at
all. Thus although traditional philosophers of science may regard what they
write upon as having more significance to practical scientific endeavors (as
opposed, say, to Nietzsche‘s philosophy of science), the scientists themselves
do not depend upon philosophy of any kind and are, it would appear,
universally united in not taking it to be particularly significant for their own
practice.
And indeed that has always been true. If Quine could say that
mathematics is philosophy enough, the physicists, and this is why Nietzsche
addresses himself directly to the physicists (―my dear Messieurs Physicist,‖
he writes), might counter that physics is philosophy enough. If yesterday‘s
scientist, scientists like Heisenberg and Einstein and Schrödinger, enjoyed a
background that included philosophy in addition to classical studies, that
did not mean that they revered the philosophers of science of their day. They
always held themselves perfectly capable of philosophizing all by themselves
— and many did. They did not need to and they did not appeal to their
colleagues in philosophy to help them out.
Let me note further that analytic philosophy, especially analytic
philosophy of science, especially the cognitive sciences, are not at all
sanguine about this state of affairs and they often undertake to do whatever
they can to get scientists to pay attention to them. Hence it is precisely
analytic philosophy — and precisely to the extent that it very deliberately
patterns itself on science — that is concerned to persuade science to take its
efforts seriously, to find its efforts useful, and so on. This may well be
behind the recent turn to empirical philosophy, which is philosophy by
survey, an amusing ennobling of the appeal that is called the argumentum
ad populum (and which used once upon a time to be regarded as a textbook
fallacy). 31 I note in passing however that this changes little with regard to
the point I am making here, inasmuch as this turn will at best make of
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philosophy a social science, which social sciences have their own anxieties
about presenting themselves to the natural sciences as sciences. In place of
19 th century method, we have 20 th (and so far or to date 21 st) century
quantificational analysis.
I don‘t think analytic philosophers have had much success
persuading the scientists per se that they need analytic philosophy. Analytic
philosophers, claiming to speak for the scientists, do however have success
in persuading university deans that they in fact represent the sciences
although I don‘t know how long this will last. I have often thought that if
there are, as indeed there are, many universities that host Departments of
Cognitive Science along with Departments of Linguistics and Departments of
Neuroscience as well as Departments of Cognitive Pyschology, Information
Science, Robotics, and so on, that a Department of Philosophy taken as
Perhaps it might be
useful to replace
departments of analytic
philosophy…with real
science studies
programs that would
teach stock or standard
accounts of the aims of
science to the general
public, i.e., science
literacy.
translator of the sciences to the sciences,
might well seem to be redundant or
unnecessary, assuming, as I assume, a
competent faculty in the aforenamed
disciplines, all of whom can teach what
analytic philosophers regard as ‗critical
thinking,‘ and all of whom know the
sciences to which analytic philosophers
appeal (say, regarding brain states) far
better than the philosophers themselves.
Unlike theology that conscientiously
drew upon philosophy, science faculty are
well able to explain their own ways to
themselves and to students and others and
do not need such handmaidens or (ancillae).
Perhaps it might be useful be to replace departments of analytic
philosophy, dedicated as many are today to a kind of simplified science
literacy (and not the critical analysis of science, as that last has died the
death of the so-called strong program of the sociology of science and the
evaporation of the anthropology of science into actor network analysis), and
to the celebration of what it takes to be the content of science, with real
science studies programs that would teach stock or standard accounts of
the aims of science to the general public, i.e., science literacy.
This is not the same for continental philosophy which for the most
part, and because it is less and less what it used to be and more and more
what analytic philosophy has left over for it to be, dutifully avoids reflection
on science like the plague. This is not the case for continental philosophy of
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science but, as if I needed to emphasize this once again, that is a very small
subfield.
As someone who has spent considerable time working abroad, what
are the primary differences among university systems in the United
States and in the countries of Europe, and how do those differences
bear on the way philosophy is regarded in these places?
European universities have the great luxury of drawing upon students who
have been trained at the level attained by secondary education in Europe,
which is actually, although Americans rightly hate it when I say this — I
lament that I have to say this — breathtaking by comparison with an
American high school education, even a private high school or prep school
education.
By the time European students get to university they know
languages (and American students tend not to learn languages at all, not
even when they are doctoral students), they‘ve read texts. Most importantly,
perhaps, they have learned how to read those texts, which is something that
American students do not do perhaps for the simple reason that like high
school teachers, professors in the US teach out of fragments of texts or bits
of books. In other words, most US philosophy professors use textbooks and
self-made textbooks (those would be course packs) and draw on examples or
case studies rather than reading what they call the ―history‖ of philosophy,
and so on.
In addition and related to this, European students have also grown
up in a culture of the same bookish and musical sort. In other words, there
is a general regard for knowledge and for training, and especially for
philosophy (that does not mean analytic philosophy as it currently conceives
itself but it does mean philosophy as it has been historically and
traditionally conceived). In the US, many people have little understanding of
the meaning of philosophy and this circumstance has worsened in my
judgment as today even educated people in the US assume that ‗philosophy‘
is exactly (and only) what the analysts say it is. 32
I am reminded here of Theodor Adorno‘s wry reflection that one of
the things that he learnt for the first time during his sojourn in America was
just how unimportant, how non-influential the so-called ―life of the mind‖ or
the intellect, could manage to be for a society as a whole. 33 What Adorno
realized, this was the culture shock of the man who went on, on the basis of
this shock to write about what he thus called the ―culture industry‖ for the
rest of his life, was that what immediately enjoyed respect in Germany, what
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seemingly went without saying in Europe, counted for little or nothing in the
United States. This is an acknowledgment, on the one hand, of the freedom
of the American spirit, 34 but and because this is Adorno speaking (who
immediately and rudely connects this with what he also calls the least
common denominator of intellectual capacity), it is also and on the other
hand, a sobering point, and rather than bristle at the very idea, we should
feel chastened by it.
As a corollary, and in fact, when we go abroad we are often delighted
by the opposite circumstance as it holds in Europe, whereby, metaphorically
speaking, we all become so many Neg-Adorno particles, (not that so very
many of us can afford to travel in Europe any longer). What is telling here is
that if you wander about the US and tell folks on your travels that you are
studying philosophy you can expect to meet a certain amount of
incomprehension and even more indifference. By contrast, your expressions
of philosophical interests will likely meet comprehension and respect and
may even lead to valuable discussions in Europe. Thus I routinely hear from
students who study abroad both astonishment at just how much they find
their foreign peers to ―know,‖ in the sense of sheer knowledge and depth of
knowledge, and regarding how much these peers ‗value‘ and enjoy learning
and knowing.
The primary difference
between studying philosophy
in Europe and studying
philosophy in the US is that in
the US we have neither the
luxury of the level of preuniversity
preparation nor the
overall breadth of European
culture…
In sum, the primary difference
between studying philosophy in
Europe and studying philosophy in the
US is that in the US we have neither
the luxury of the level of pre-university
preparation nor the overall breadth of
European culture in its both its
sensibility and its diversity. For many
(of course not all, but many) US college
students the first time they begin to do
serious academic work is when they
first arrive at university. But I think
the moral of the story here, is that one simply seek to find some time to
study abroad. And youth is for such journeys of broadening discovery.
Let me note, however, that the system there is changing and it does
seem as if Europe is collectively attempting its mighty best to become as
Americanized as possible (though one wonders whether the current
economic disaster on both the American and the European side may change
that trend), but there are still books to be read, journals to be read, the
encounter with other academic institutions and the traditions of the same
and despite recent changes, there remains (largely due to the secondary
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system, which if thinned or abbreviated is still impressive) a tradition or
culture of learning that is still well worth learning.
But if that is not enough for you, I have always maintained that the
only reason one ever has or will need to travel to Paris, for example, is the
simple promise of a cup of coffee. Just a cup of coffee: just sitting in a café
or standing at the bar. But once you get there, you might as well take a walk
along the Seine, and that means books and books and books again.
Mario Bunge, one of the many authors thinking about the „crisis of
philosophy,‟ wrote in Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for
Reconstruction that “all the philosophical schools are in ruins.” What
are your thoughts on Bunge‟s claim, and what are the political and
philosophical ramifications of the dialog of „crisis‟?
Here, I agree with Bunge, although and of course he is writing from the
analytic side in the philosophy of science and I too believe that things are as
bad from his point of view as they are from mine. On the other hand, we do
not of course agree as Bunge is strongly anti-hermeneutic.
For my own part, agreeing as I do agree that ―all‖ the schools of
philosophy are in ―ruins,‖ I also hold little hope that it is possible to
reconstruct or rebuild or start anew. Once one loses the teachers (and we
have lost them, not all but most), it is not just hard, it is impossible to
proceed with what deserves the name of philosophy. At the same time as I
say this, even if I mean only to say that most of the great minds are lost and
because those who take their place are not, just to say this politely, as great,
it is of course true that we still have to proceed as best we can.
The trouble as I see it is that those who now occupy positions of
prestige (here we are back to our original reference to standards and the
‗rigor‘ of the profession) are as newer scholars also are as mediocre as they
tend to be. For me, that only means that they are poorly trained and ill read,
and these, my younger colleagues, become angry examples of what
Nietzsche called Ressentiment if this is suggested, and I do suggest it.
If you want to know if this description of being poorly trained and ill
read applies to your professors, look around their house: how many books
do they have? I exclude the books in one‘s office as these, very physically,
very literally, are not the books one lives with.
Such bookish standards are all about what is meant when one talks
about formation as the French speak of it and Bildung as the Germans
speak of it. This is what Nietzsche meant when he talked about getting
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oneself an ―educator,‖ which is to say, doing what it takes (that means
reading and more reading) to acquire an ―education‖ or a ―culture,‖ and it
should go without saying that Nietzsche‘s standards were much higher than
mine could possibly be, just given my own inevitable limitations. This is
what Isaac Newton also meant when he talked about the giants of a past
intellectual formation. 35 It is simply mind-blowing what people once knew.
I would point out that, and I blame myself as well, although I did my
damndest, albeit without success, that it is today‘s professors who have
presided over the current state of the profession. Bunge himself is to blame;
I am to blame. Of course Bunge has had vastly more power and influence
than I have had (this is easy to claim because I have had almost no
influence), and his failures are for those reasons far more significant than
mine just because I am not as important as he is.
Let me put this in another manner: there is no doubt in my mind
that Bunge has read not a word written by continental philosophers of
science and certainly not a word I have written. 36 By contrast I have, of
course (of course I say: of course) read Bunge (and many, many others).
Analytic philosophers of science take themselves to be reading continental
philosophy of science if they read Foucault — just as analytic philosophers
take themselves to be continental if they read, say Heidegger or Nietzsche.
What they do not do is read those continental authors or even many analytic
authors who write on Foucault, Heidegger, Nietzsche. And yet by
discounting the broader array of philosophy and philosophical authors and
commentators, analytic philosophy has painted itself into its own smaller
and smaller corner.
What is most regrettable perhaps is that at this point there seems to
be no robust alternative. Thus it is that today in most departments of
philosophy there is no other style of philosophy than the analytic kind.
Analytic philosophy has had the power in the academy (and it takes the
power because it is a tradition of entitlement and not mutuality) and the
result of its dominion (and it has and still has dominion) has been an
impoverishment of philosophy.
I will say that had the only kind of philosophy being taught when I
was a student been philosophy of what is today the analytic or mainstream
variety, not only would I not have been able to become what I am but I
would not have bothered in the first or last place. 37 Life, after all, is short.
As a professor of philosophy in the academy, we presume your
responsibilities include research and publication and the education
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
and mentoring of students. How are these responsibilities related? Do
students benefit from faculty research? How do these academic
responsibilities relate to the work of the philosopher, per se? Does it
make any sense today to speak of the non-academic philosopher?
Let me answer this, your last question, by starting with the last part of your
question. I don‘t believe there are really many non-academic philosophers,
unless they are independently wealthy. The Spinozas and the
Schopenhauers have always been in short supply.
But that said, the comparison is misleading. The simple fact that
one does not have an academic appointment is itself irrelevant to one‘s
academic qualifications or what I was above calling a formation. Both
Spinoza and Schopenhauer were academically extraordinarily well qualified.
So I would need more clarification with regard to your last question to be
able to speak of it. Do you mean, for example, is one able to be a
philosopher with no academic background whatever? I am not sure. Can
one think thoughts that might interest one and perhaps be of interest to
others? Certainly. Would this count as philosophy? To pose the question is
already to make it over on the terms of the academy. And to this entire
question it would still remain to consider what is to be counted as
philosophy as there is a certain amount as it is indeed contested. So my
answer here is simply an institutional one. Intriguingly over the years, and
this is one of the perks (or more accurately said one of the downsides) of
being an editor, I have received a fair bit of mail from non-academics who
feel that they should be regarded as philosophers. It goes without saying
that they themselves were seeking approbation from an academic —
otherwise they would not have been writing to me to begin with.
The task of teaching, at least as I teach the traditional texts of
philosophy, keeps one in tune with both the field and the questions that are
called perennial because they are undying: they resist ultimate solution. I
think students benefit from faculty research just to the extent that that
research is in touch with the tradition: one studies not the current work of
any given professor active in a given research field, although one may find
this of use to form one‘s own work, but and much rather to learn from that
scholar how to approach extant scholarship and above all how to read the
texts of philosophy and to learn the problems of philosophy. For me, the two
simply go together.
To comment or respond to Babette Babich‘s interview, please
send an email to : editors@purlieujournal.com
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of Purlieu.
67

INTERVIEW: Babette Babich
Notes
1. In fact, this worry is related to Plato‘s concern, ‗who will guard the guards?‘
2. Babich, ―The Birth of kd lang‘s Hallelujah out of the ‗Spirit of Music‘: Performing Desire
and ‗Recording Consciousness‘ on Facebook and YouTube,‖ Perfect Sound Forever,
January 2012, forthcoming.
3. Interestingly enough this is the reason it is Nietzsche‘s sister, along with her co-editors,
and not Nietzsche who is the author of the infamous Will to Power published in
his name but not therefore under his authorship. I discuss this with reference to
Nietzsche and Heidegger in Babich, ―Le sort du Nachlass: le problème de l‘œuvre
posthume‖ In: Pascale Hummel, ed., Mélivres / Misbooks. Études sur l‟envers et
les travers du livre (Paris: Philogicum, 2009), pp. 123-140.
4. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: The Art of Sound (New York: da capo, 1936) but see also Adorno,
Currents of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory (Frankfurt am Main: Suhkamp,
2006).
5. I thank my student, the musician Carrie Gillespie, for bringing the sheer existence of this
journal to my attention in the context of a class I was teaching on Politics and
Technology in the department of Political Science at UCSD.
6. See Jaron Lanier ―The City is Built to Music,‖ chapter five in Lanier, you are not a gadget
(New York: Vintage, 2010), pp. 87ff.
7. Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (New York:
Spiegel & Grau, 2008), p. 44.
8. Chapter Three, Ibid., pp. 47ff.
9. Here I note that contemporary digital media scholars should go and rediscover what
Lacan says about television and not just by reading Žižek and then go back and
read not just Postman but Jerry Mander to boot.
10. There are several studies of this, of course. One useful and respectable because
insider‘s account, is David B. Resnick, The Price of Truth: How Money Affects the
Norms of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) another and more
popular account, not because of its authorship, the authors are similarly
academics like Resnik, as historians of science, Naoimi Oreskes and Erik M.
Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), but because the
target is not, say AIDS or cancer or physics research but (and only) big tobacco
and global warming. For a discussion dedicated to the role of journals and editors
whose ultimate editorial policy is to simply block publication, see Pilkey, Orrin H.,
and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can‟t
Predict the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 136 and
passim. Neither scientists nor engineers, as it turns out, are willing to revise a
good model once they have one, no matter whether it models reality or not, and
this recalcitrance was the inspiration for the Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis. For a nicely
theoretical discussion, see Philip Mirowski‘s The Effortless Economy of Science
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) as well as his earlier co-edited
collection with E.-M. Sent, Science Bought and Sold (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002). For a more general account, see Martin Walker, Dirty
Medicine (London: Slingshot Publications, 1993). And if one really doesn‘t mind
rocking the boat, see the arguments of the important but obviously controversial
molecular biologist, Peter Duesberg‘s popular or exoteric, Inventing the AIDS Virus
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1995), and for a perfect scientist‘s account, see
Duesberg, et al., ―The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics:
Recreational Drugs, Anti-Viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition,‖ J. Biosci., 28/4
(June, 2003): 383-412. See further Gordon Moran, Silencing Scientists and
Scholars in Other Fields: Power, Paradigm Controls, Peer Review, and Scholarly
Communication (Greenwich: Ablex Publishing, 1998).
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11. For a rare account using the tools of journalistic science, a science that has itself
recently been coopted by its sponsors, see David S. Bertolloti, Culture and
Technology (Bowling Green: Ohio University Press, 1984).
12. This is the still too-little adverted to point of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,
Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). I
say too little adverted to because this ―invisible‖ point has gone without remark
while the modest one, has captivated our attention. We are all of us the modest
witness in question, just as we are all cyborg. See too for a related discussion,
similarly insufficiently noted or discussed, but it is a glorious book and
recommend it to philosophers if only for the implications to be drawn by reading
the very first page, Lawrence Principe‘s The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his
Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
13. I should note the phenomenon, and it is a phenomenon, of publishing by printing press
on occasion and stamped wood cuts that constituted by Earl Nitschke‘s
extraordinary mailing of postcards and prints to a wide range of Nietzsche
scholars. As editor, I have characterized this as I feature his work in recent issue
of New Nietzsche Studies, as dynamic performance art, as an art event: corelevant
here would be Nietzsche‘s own description of a letter as being akin to an
unannounced visit, shaking one up, disturbing, affecting one. The internet wishes
it could be so effective. And Earl Nitschke is particularly good at this as a
professor of industrial art and design. Thus publishing as noted at the outset with
reference to writing on the wall, has many means. Postcard art is one of them.
14. Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (New York:
Anchor Books, 1996), pp. 199ff.
15. Add to this the literality of the humanities faculty and one finds that humanities‘ faculty
members tend go along with rather than protesting such cuts. By contrast,
science faculty, less literate perhaps, certainly unused to taking orders from
librarians, often protest to high heaven when anyone proposes to cut their
subscriptions. It goes without saying that the difference in costs between
humanities subscriptions and science subscriptions are mind boggling, which
means that relatively little is gained from the complicity of the humanities
professors.
16. Heidegger, Parmenides, trans André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1992), p. 85.
17. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault
(Cambridge: Wiley, 1995) and Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A
Commentary to Hugh‟s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
18. Aaron Swartz apparently broke into a restricted area at MIT and downloaded millions of
articles from JSTOR.
19. This is an old habit, reducing Nietzsche to Emerson or Lange or Wagner as one‘s
personal inclinations prefer. Nietzsche himself found it fairly useless
philosophically speaking and spoke instead not of the originality of the Greek but
their genial qualities as masters of what he called ―the art of fruitful learning.‖
Anyone can pick up anything, the challenge is to make something of it, to ―take
up the spear from where another has left it and‖ — and this is what is hard —
―throw it further.‖ See his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.
20. Marcus Aurelius chides himself on the bootlessness of this, the original bookish idée
fixe in his Meditations.
21. The technology in question depends upon keeping inherently bodily issues in mind,
hence it would be profitably explored by means of phenomenology (and Ihde
should be quick to notice this aspect). The captcha website defines a captcha ―as
a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests
that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.‖ See ―CAPTCHA:
Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically,‖ http://www.captcha.net/.
Accessed 8:56, Pacific time. Albeit from NYC, but my computer does not know
this.
22. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 86.
23. Of the few people who ever read the essay, a subset that regrettably (in my view as I
would have welcomed the resultant dialogue) includes no one who writes on the
topic.
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INTERVIEW: Babette Babich
24. My essay, ―On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche‘s Lying Truth,
Heidegger‘s Speaking Language, and Philosophy‖ in Carlos G. Prado, ed., A House
Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus/Humanity Books. 2003), pp. 63-103 goes back quite a bit as an
initial version of it was originally written for a conference I organized in Dubrovnik
in 1991 just before the ―war(s)‖ that dismantled Yugoslavia and what had been
other countries of the time (countries to be sure that were themselves drawn,
borderwise, following the previous world war(s)). It was revised and published four
years after that as ―Against Analysis, Beyond Postmodernism‖ in the collection I
edited (together with Debra B. Bergoffen and Simon V. Glynn, eds.), Continental
and Postmodern Perspectives in the Philosophy of Science (Avebury. Aldershot, UK/
Brookfield, USA. 1995), pp. 31-54.
25. I have a book on this topic, forthcoming in French, where the distinction and the divide
is similarly problematic: Babich, La fin de la pensée. Sur la différence et la
politique de la désunion entre philosophie analytique et philosophie continentale.
26. Thus Aquinas cites Aristotle‘s de Anima on the matter of such distinctions:
scientiae dividuntur quemadmodum et res, ut dicitur in III de anima. Sed philosophia est de
ente; est enim cognitio entis, ut dicit Dionysius in epistula ad Polycarpum. Cum ergo
ens primo dividatur per potentiam et actum, per unum et multa, per substantiam et
accidens, videtur quod per huiusmodi deberent partes philosophiae distingui.‖
Aquinas, Librum Boetii de Trinitate Expositio (Quest. 5. Art. 1.)
In addition, we remember Descartes‘ identification of the ―clear and distinct‖ as the
distinctive characteristic of what might (ultimately, promissorily) be known with
certainty. In an article on this topic, Robert Sokolowski notes that the entire
impetus of Aristotle‘s characterization of his predecessors depended upon
distinguishing their lack of distinctive distinguishing. Sokolowski cites Aristotle‘s
Metaphysics 1.7 988a180-b15, noting as he does that Aristotle‘s own method
proceeds by ‗clarifying‘ what his predecessors confusedly knew. See Sokolowski,
―The Method of Philosophy: Making Distinctions,‖ The Review of Metaphysics, Vol.
51, No. 3 (Mar., 1998): 515-532. Prior to Sokowlowski, see too Hannah Arendt‘s
letter entitled ―Distinctions‖ which she sent to New York Review of Books, Volume
13, Number 12 (January 1, 1970) in reply to a review published on her book, Men
in Dark Times. Although by her own self-assessment, a political theorist rather
than a philosopher, Arendt draws upon her clearly philosophical background to
argue against her reviewer that
the point at issue is not the past but tradition, and the distinction between them: Tradition
orders the past, hands it down (tradere), interprets it, omits, selects, and
emphasizes according to a system of pre-established beliefs. Tradition is a mental
construct and as such always subject to critical examination. If I say that no
tradition can claim validity today, I do not say that the past is dead but that we
have no reliable guide through it any more, from which it follows that tradition
itself has become a part of the past.‖ Ibid.
27. I have written of course a good deal about this and I am happy to note that there is an
increasingly interest in the topic – indeed Günther Abel and Helmut Heit
organized a conference during the summer of 2010 on the theme of ―Nietzsches
Wissenschaftsphilosophie/Nietzsche‘s Philosophy of Science.‖ A full three day,
international conference and that, intriguingly enough, would not be the only
such conference recently organized on Nietzsche science. Quite independently of
such conferences, I myself begin a recent overview essay on the philosophy of
science as such with an extended reference to Nietzsche in Babich, ―Towards a
Critical Philosophy of Science: Continental Beginnings and Bugbears, Whigs and
Waterbears,‖ International Journal of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 24, No. 4
(December 2010): 343-391.
28. See the first few sections of Babich, ―Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science.‖
29. See ― ‗Hacker‘s Challenge‘ James Garvey interviews P.M. S. Hacker,‖ TPM, The
Philosopher‟s Magazine, Issue 51 ( October 25, 2010).
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
30. Sally Haslanger, a professor of philosophy at MIT foregrounds this theme in her
―Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone),‖
Hypatia, 23/ 2 (2008): 210-223. That this hostile (sometimes politely called
‗chilly‘) ―culture‖ has an ideological, political, and economic basis is clear. See just
for a start, though data is notoriously difficult to collect, Miriam Solomon and
John Clarke ―The CSW Jobs for Philosophers Employment Study,‖ APA
Newsletter: Feminism and Philosophy, 8/2 (Spring 2009): 3-6. The reach of these
reflections can be fairly extensive: see Londa Schiebinger and Shannon K.
Gilmartin, ―Housework is an Academic Issue,‖ Academe, Vol. 96, No. 1 January-
February 2010 as well as in a European context, Louise Morley, Quality and
Power in Higher Education (Society for Research into Higher Education: McGraw
Hill, 2003). For those who think that political issues are foreign to questions of
discourse analysis in the academy, see Troemel-Ploetz, ―Selling the Apolitical,‖
Discourse Society, 2/4(1991): 489-502.
31. I am sure that Michael Wreen, who argues nicely that fallacies typically regarded are
only qualifiedly so, would be comparably enlightening on the matter of this
traditional informal fallacy. I cite Wreen and others in Babich, ―Towards a Critical
Philosophy of Science.‖
32. I have elsewhere observed that some of the limitations of Peter Kingsley‘s recent work
on the presocratic tradition corresponded to his apparent limited knowledge of
Nietzsche, owing to the constraints inherent in classical studies, but not less to
the limitations of the analytic tendencies that dominate departments of
philosophy.
33. See further David Jenneman, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2007) or Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: A Political Biography trans. Stewart Spencer
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
34. This is Jennerman‘s point which he takes up from Jäger and others as well. I discuss
this in the initial sections of Babich, ―Adorno on Science and Nihilism, Animals,
and Jews,‖ Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue
canadienne de philosophie continentale, Vol. 14, No. 1, (2011): 110-145.
35. Read Principe‘s book just for the philosophical frisson of the first few pages, and read
the rest for its own sake (not to mention for useful bits on Newton).
36. Being unread is, of course, what it means to be non-influential, that is why I discussed
the elusive quality of the readerly public above.
37. There is also what one may call a boredom quotient that matters (to me) in philosophy.
Bunge has that in spades, Nietzsche rather less of it.
71

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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
Dr. Iain Thomson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Graduate Director at the
University of New Mexico and a leading expert on the thought of Martin Heidegger, education,
and technology. His first book, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of
Education, has been described as “the deepest and the most illuminating account of the
relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics yet offered” and his newest book,
Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later
philosophy.
Paideia does not consist in merely pouring knowledge into the
unprepared soul as if it were some container held out empty
and waiting. On the contrary, real education lays hold of the
soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by first of all
leading us to the place of our essential being and accustoming
us to it.
~ Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Teaching on Truth.” 1
As I have shown elsewhere, Heidegger’s philosophy of education is a
philosophy of transformation, one profoundly concerned with both personal
and historical transformation. 2 In this necessarily condensed presentation, I
want to work up to the moment in which these two dimensions intersect,
such that personal and historical transformation come together to
illuminate, motivate, and facilitate one another. I call this doubly
transformative moment the pedagogical truth event. In such events, we
achieve a revolutionary return to the self that shows us how to step beyond
our nihilistic late-modernity into a genuinely meaningful postmodern
understanding of being. To begin to explain this doubly-transformative event
(which is all I can hope to do here), I shall briefly sketch its personal and
historical dimensions and their intersection.
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Thomson | Pedagological Truth Event After Heidegger
On the level of personal transformation, Heidegger‘s ontological
understanding of education is centrally concerned with that paradoxical
question at the heart of the ―perfectionist‖ tradition: How do we become
what we are? ―Becoming what we are‖ means discovering the ground of
which we already stand, without having realized it. What we are,
ontologically, is a world-disclosing being (a Dasein or ―being-here‖), that is, a
being who implicitly participates in the making-intelligible of its world (by
―unconcealing the concealed,‖ or ―worlding the earth,‖ in Heidegger‘s
language). To realize such world-disclosure means both (1) to recognize the
implicit role we always-already play in constituting our intelligible worlds
and also (2) to cultivate and develop our implicit skills for ―poietic‖ worlddisclosure,
that is, for discerning and creatively developing the possibilities
that continually emerge at the dynamic intersection between self and world,
human being and being itself. In Heidegger‘s early work, to realize what we
already are is to be transformed by coming full-circle back to ourselves, an
existential odyssey of departure and return I have called the revolutionary
return to ourselves. In his later work the emphasis shifts, and Heidegger
suggests a more complex account of how this transformative return to the
self takes place. It is this later vision that I shall briefly reconstruct here,
since it is more carefully attuned to the historical dimension of historical
intelligibility. 3
For Heidegger, that we each play a role in constituting our
intelligible worlds never meant that we can freely determine how things
show up for us, making cruelty look kind, ugliness beautiful, or frenzy
relaxing by force of will or rational argument (pace widespread caricatures of
―existential voluntarism‖). He begins by acknowledging discursivity, the fact
that the subconscious processes through which we render reality intelligible
to ourselves dictate that even our sensory uptake of that reality is selective
(as we can see by comparing our sense of smell with a dog‘s, or our
comparatively impoverished visual acuity with a hawk‘s), and that the
subconscious processes of attention to and conceptualization of this
selectively-gathered perceptual information work to filter and organize it yet
further (as we can see by comparing our sensitivity to shades of color with
those of a skilled artist, or our taste of wine with that of an expert oenophile,
or even our experience of the same film while in drastically different moods).
As this suggests, our intelligible world, even in its greatest richness, is a
slice of a slice of a slice of reality at best. 4 Yes, this helps explain why the
text does not mean the same thing for the expert teacher as it does for the
novice student, but that is only an important instance of the more general
truth that the way the world shows up for one expert teacher is not simply
the way it shows up for another—let alone the way it has always shown up
or will always show up for all human or other world-disclosing beings.
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
When Heidegger contrasts the different historical worlds of the
ancient Greeks, medieval Christians, and modern Westerners, his primary
concern is not with gender, class, or cultural differences, but rather with a
pervasive phenomenological difference in the way the world shows up that is
still more fundamental. His focus is on the way Western humanity‘s
understanding of being—our most basic sense of what it means to be—gets
constituted, focused, transmitted, and transformed. In his view, this ―history
of being‖ changes drastically over time and yet is neither a constantly
shifting medium we can alter at will nor an unchanging monolith over which
human beings have no influence. Heidegger‘s understanding of ontological
historicity—of the way in which our basic sense of reality changes with
time—occupies a middle ground between the poles of voluntaristic
constructivism and quietistic fatalism, and for him historical intelligibility is
neither a formless Heraclitean flux (pace Derrida) nor an unbroken
Parmenidean unity (pace Rorty). Instead, according to Heidegger‘s
punctuated equilibrium view of historicity (which I call ontological
epochality), our changing understanding of being takes shape as a series of
three drastically different but internally unified and relatively coherent
historical ―epochs,‖ the ancient, medieval, and modern. (The ancient and
modern epochs further divided into the Presocratic and the Platonic, as well
as the modern and later modern ages, for a total of five ages in the Western
―history of being,‖ five overlapping yet distinguishable historical
constellations of intelligibility.) 5 In each of these ―epochs,‖ the overwhelming
floodwaters of being are temporarily dammed so that an island of historical
intelligibility can arise out of the river of time. Ontotheologies are what
build, undermine, and rebuild these dams. But how?
Ontotheologies focus and disseminate our basic sense of what it
means to be. Our fundamental understanding of the being of entities—that
is, of what and how all entities are—gets shaped historically by the
ontotheological tradition running from Plato to Nietzsche. Grasping the
entire intelligible order by uncovering both its innermost ―ontological‖ core
and its outermost ―theological‖ expression, ontotheologies link these
antipodal perspectives together so as to ground an historical age‘s sense of
reality from the inside-out and the outside-in simultaneously.
Ontotheologies doubly anchor an epoch‘s historical understanding of being
when they succeed in grasping reality from both extremes at once,
temporarily establishing both its microscopic depths and ultimate telescopic
expression. Thus, to take the most important example, the sense of reality
unifying our own late-modern age is rooted in the ontotheology first
articulated by Nietzsche. Universalizing insights already discovered by Adam
Smith and Charles Darwin in the domains of economics and biology,
Nietzsche recognized that for us reality is ultimately nothing but competing
forces coming-together and breaking-apart with no end beyond the maximal
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Thomson | Pedagological Truth Event After Heidegger
growth that perpetuates these underlying forces themselves. This is
precisely what Heidegger discerns as Nietzsche‘s ―unthought‖ ontotheology,
his understanding of the being of entities as ―eternally recurring will-topower.‖
As long as we cannot think beneath or beyond such ontotheologies,
they come to function like self-fulfilling prophecies—owing to what I have
called ontological holism. Everything intelligible is in some way, so when
ontotheologies reshape our sense of ―Is-ness‖ itself, they thereby catalyze a
transformation in our sense of what it means for anything to be, including
ourselves. These ontotheologies implicitly reshape our sense of what and
how all things are, like lenses we do not ordinarily see but, instead, see
through. The problem is that Nietzsche‘s ontotheology of eternally recurring
will-to-power inaugurates what Heidegger famously calls the ―technological‖
understanding of being, or ―enframing‖ (Gestell). As we late-moderns come to
understand the being of all entities as nothing but forces seeking their own
self-perpetuating growth, we tend to treat all things—even ourselves and
each other—as intrinsically-meaningless ―resources‖ (Bestand) standing by
merely to be optimized, enhanced, and ordered for maximally flexible use.
As I argued in my book, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and
the Politics of Education, the ongoing reduction of education to the empty
optimization imperative—―Get the most for the least!‖—has to be understood
not simply as a result of capitalist corporatization or bureaucratic
routinization but much more deeply, in terms of the nihilistic technological
ontotheology underlying all of these phenomena. When all entities are
implicitly understood and so treated as nothing but intrinsicallymeaningless
resources to be optimized, it is not surprising that education
becomes increasingly corporatized, instrumentalized, and technologized; nor
is it surprising that students come to see education merely as a way to ―Get
the most out of their potentials‖ (where that typically means maximizing
their financial prospects), or that indolence and dishonesty become rampant
(since the optimization imperative makes cutting-corners and even cheating
seem rational if students can get away with it; for, they mistakenly
conclude, what better way to optimize—to get more for less—than to get a
diploma while doing as little work as possible?). Seen in the light of our
technological ontotheology, it is not surprising that plagiarism is becoming a
growing problem (along with a whole burgeoning culture of theft), since the
techno-utopian mantra, ―information wants to be free,‖ though literally false
(since information does not have any desires) is not a bad diagnosis of the
basic problem with our technological understanding of being, which
increasingly reduces reality to nothing but ―information‖ (dichotomous
binaries) seeking ever more efficient means of circulation (and so naturally
shorn of such obsolete rituals as authorship). Nor is it surprising that the
administrative bureaucracy becomes a self-regulating system pursuing its
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Purlieu | Special Edition | Fall 2011
own self-optimizing growth in the name of increasing ―efficiency,‖ that is, of
regulating and maximizing the input/output ratios of the university as a
system (often under the alibi of the pursuit of an excoriated ―excellence‖).
These serious problems afflicting education are deeply entrenched
in the metaphysical substructure of our historical self-understanding, and
so need to be diagnosed and treated at that level. This means we need to
become aware of the subtle and often unnoticed impact of our late-modern,
technological ontotheology so that we can learn to resist and transcend it.
The larger question, then, is how we might transcend our late-modern,
technological ontotheology and so inaugurate a postmodern understanding
of being, and how education can help us make that historical transition. The
educational key to making this transformative transition from our nihilistic
modern understanding of being to a genuinely meaningful postmodernity,
Heidegger suggests, is to learn to practice the phenomenological
comportment he calls ―dwelling‖ (or ―releasement to things‖). To put it much
too briefly, to learn to dwell is to become attuned to the phenomenological
―presencing‖ (Anwesen) whereby ―being as such‖ manifests itself. ―Being as
such‖ is one of the later Heidegger‘s names for that conceptuallyinexhaustible
dimension of intelligibility which all metaphysics‘ different
ontotheological ways of understanding the being of entities partly capture
but never exhaust, the recognition of which can help lead us beyond our
current ontotheology. For, if we can learn from the great poets and artists to
become comportmentally attuned to the dynamic phenomenological
presencing that both precedes and exceeds all conceptualization, then we
too can come to understand and experience entities as being richer in
meaning than we are capable of doing justice to conceptually, rather than
taking them as intrinsically-meaningless resources awaiting optimization.
Such experiences can become microcosms of, as well as inspiration for, the
revolution beyond our underlying ontotheology that we need in order to
transcend the nihilism of late-modern enframing and set our world on a
different, more meaningful path.
In order to understand the drastically different ways of comporting
ourselves toward things that Heidegger contrasts—namely, the active
receptivity of poetic dwelling, on the one hand, and the obtuse domination of
technological enframing, on the other—it helps to think about the difference
between these poetic and technological modes of revealing in terms of the
ancient Greek distinction between poiesis and technê. Just think, on the one
hand, of a poetic shepherding into being which respects the natural
potentialities of the matters with which it works, just as Michelangelo (who,
let us recall, worked in a marble quarry) legendarily claimed he simply set
his ―David‖ free from a particularly rich piece of marble (after studying it
carefully for a month); or, less hyperbolically, as a skillful woodworker
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notices the inherent qualities of particular pieces of wood—attending to
subtleties of shape and grain, different shades of color, weight, and
hardness—while deciding what might be built from that wood (or whether to
build from it at all). Then contrast, on the other hand, a technological
making which imposes a predetermined form on matter without paying heed
to any intrinsic potentialities, the way an industrial factory indiscriminately
grinds wood into woodchips in order to paste them back together into
straight particle board, which can then be used flexibly and efficiently to
construct a maximal variety of useful objects. Now, in the same terms, think
about the difference between an educational approach that helps students
identify and cultivate their own unique talents and intrinsic skills and
capacities in order to help them meet their generation‘s emerging needs (and
thereby encourages teachers to come into their own as teachers), as opposed
to an approach that treats students merely as raw materials, ―human
resources,‖ and seeks to remake them so that they can pursue whatever
society currently deems to be the most ―valuable‖ career path. 6
In each case, it helps to think about how one responds to the
resistances one encounters: Does one seek to flatten-out and overcome them
or, instead, to cultivate that which resists one‘s will and so help bring it to
its own fruition? While many late-moderns continue to believe (with
Nietzsche) that all meaning comes from us (as the result of our various
―value positings‖), Heidegger is committed to the more phenomenologically
accurate view that, at least with respect to that which most matters to us—
the paradigm case being love—what we most care about is in fact not
entirely up to us, not simply within our power to control, and this is a
crucial part of what makes it so important. Indeed, the primary
phenomenological lesson Heidegger drew from art is that when things are
approached with openness and respect, they push back against us, making
subtle but undeniable claims on us, and we need to learn to acknowledge
and respond creatively to these claims if we do not want to deny the source
of genuine meaning in the world. For, only meanings which are at least
partly independent of us and so not entirely within our control—not simply
up to us to bestow and rescind at will—can provide us with the kind of
touchstones around which we can build meaningful lives and loves.
Heidegger drew this lesson from poetry, but it is profoundly applicable to
education, where it helps us understand what I have called the pedagogical
truth event.
Heidegger calls such an enduringly meaningful encounter an ―event
of enowning‖ (Ereignis). In such momentous events, we find ourselves
coming into our own (as world-disclosers) precisely by creatively enabling
things to come into their own, just as Michelangelo came into his own as a
sculptor by creatively responding to the veins and fissures in that particular
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piece of marble so as to bring forth his ―David‖; or as a woodworker comes
into her own as a woodworker by responding creatively to the subtle weight,
color, and grain of an individual piece of wood in order to make something
out of it (or to leave it be); or as, in the pedagogical truth event, a teacher
comes into his or her own as a teacher by learning to recognize and cultivate
the particular talents and capacities of each individual student, thereby
enabling these students to come into their own. In all such cases, a poetic
openness to what pushes back against our pre-existing plans and designs
helps disclose a texture of inherent meanings, affordances, significations,
and solicitations, a texture Heidegger teaches us to discover ―all around
us‖—not only in nature, our workshops, and classrooms but even in our
lives as a whole. 7 For, we truly learn to ―make something‖ out of our lives
not when we try to impose an artificial shape on them but, rather, when we
learn to discern and develop creatively that which ―pushes back‖ in all the
ways mentioned here, and many more.
Here we can glimpse the importance of ―the pedagogical truth event‖
for understanding mentorship. We can use ―mentorship‖ to name a crucial
aspect of ontological education, namely, the teacher‘s helping the student to
identify and develop his or her distinctive talents and capacities, ideally so
as to help students respond to their sense of the most pressing issues of
their time and generation. To some that might sound like a task burdened
with duties, but in fact it‘s amazing how little it can take. Just ―as an
inconspicuous tap of the sculptor‘s chisel imparts a different form to the
figure‖ (as Heidegger put it), so a few simple but true words that recognize
and respond to something inchoate but meaningful in a student‘s work can
have a profound impact, encouraging students to continue to develop the
skills and abilities that make them distinctive, since it is such development
that leads to a fulfilling life, as the perfectionist tradition teaches us. Nor is
this some wholly altruistic or other-directed action; on the contrary,
teachers come into their own as teachers by helping students recognize and
cultivate their distinctive skills and abilities in a meaningful way. In so
doing, teachers and students help being itself to come into its own as well,
as always informing yet never being exhausted by our poietic discernment
and creative development of its possibilities. 8 Here the teacher is only the
foremost learner, dedicated to learning in public in order to show by
example that learning means discerning and developing ontological
possibilities, thereby helping students develop their own sensitivities to the
texture of the texts in which they live as well as their abilities for creative
world-disclosure. This means being ready to let go of one‘s lesson plan when
the opportunity to nurture a potentially important discussions arises, and
also that it is advantageous not just to teach new figures and emerging
movements, but to do so while also teaching the same great texts repeatedly,
since the dedicated re-reading of such texts allows one to discover
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something new in them every time. That experience of learning to see
something where previously one saw nothing is absolutely central to the
education philosophy of the pedagogical truth event. For, all genuine
meaning derives from and requires this skill of learning to discern and
disclose the inchoate possibilities of things. 9
If intelligibility can be thought of as composed of ―texts‖ that we
continually read and interpret (as Derrida‘s famous aperçu, ―there is nothing
outside the text,‖ suggests), then we can hear Heidegger as reminding us
that we need to learn to recognize and respond to the texture of these
ubiquitous texts. This texture of meanings independent of our wills can be
more or less subtle, but by dissolving all being into becoming, the current of
Nietzschean technologization tends to sweep right past it and can even
threaten to wash it away, as in the case of particle board and, much more
―dangerously,‖ Heidegger suggests, in the technological reengineering of
human beings, even in its seemingly milder form of educational enframing,
in which poetic discernment of genuine possibilities get eclipsed and
overwritten by empty technological optimization. Nonetheless, Heidegger
remains hopeful that once we learn to discern this technological current, we
can also learn to cultivate a ―free relation to technology‖ in which it becomes
possible to use even technological devices themselves to resist
technologization, the nihilistic obviation of any meaning independent of the
will. In fact, we are already doing this, for example, when we use a camera,
microscope, telescope, or even glasses to help bring out something
meaningful that we might not otherwise have seen, when we use a
synthesizer or computer to compose a new kind of music that helps us
develop and share our sense of what is most significant to us, when we use
a word processor to help bring out what is really there in the texts that
matter to us and the philosophical issues that most concern us, or even
when we use a highly technologized university to teach the art of slow and
careful reading that is dedicated to helping teacher and students learn to
discern and develop such will-independent meanings together.
To put the larger point that emerges here in philosophical terms,
what the later Heidegger suggests is a fundamental ontological pluralism (or
plural realism). We need to be sensitive enough to meanings independent of
the will to be able to ―cut reality at the joints,‖ but because those joints
provide us with more of a suggestive outline than a final design, there will in
most cases be more than one way of disclosing the genuine hints we are
offered. 10 This means, for example, that, just as a talented artisan can make
more than one thing from a single piece of wood, so there was also more
than one form slumbering in the veins of the marble from which
Michelangelo ―released‖ his David. And, for the same reasons, there will
usually be more than one right answer to the existential question of what we
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should each do with our lives. That helps explain the persistent recurrence
of the question in education, since it can never be settled once and for all,
and why those looking for the one right answer never seem finally to find
it. 11 Like the neo-Aristotelian view of ―open resoluteness‖ (Ent-schlossenheit)
that Heidegger developed in Being and Time, his later view of the active
receptivity of ―releasement‖ (Gelassenheit) suggests a kind of ethical and
aesthetic phronêsis or practical wisdom. The guiding idea here is that,
rather than getting hung up looking for the one right answer—and, when we
finally despair of finding it, rebounding back to the relativistic view that no
answer is better than any other (or concluding nihilistically that intrinsic
meanings are an obsolete myth, thereby ignoring the multiple suggestions
nature offers us or overwriting these hints with our own preconceived ideas
rather than seeking to develop them creatively)—educators should instead
cultivate the recognition that in most situations there will be more than one
right answer to questions of what to do or how best to go on.
The leading hermeneutic principle to follow pedagogically is thus
that there is more than one inherent meaning to be found in things. For, if
being is conceptually inexhaustible, capable of yielding meaning again and
again, then the intrinsic meanings of things must be plural (or essentially
polysemic), however paradoxical such a doctrine of ontological pluralism
might now seem, given our current obsession with formal systems capable
of securing monosemic exactitude. Indeed, to understand the being of the
entities we encounter in a postmodern way is to no longer preconceive
everything we experience as modern objects to be controlled or as latemodern
resources to be optimized, but instead to learn to discern and
creatively develop the independent meanings, solicitations, and affordances
of things, staying open to the multiple suggestions things offer us, to the
point of dedicating ourselves—as teachers and as human beings—to
bringing forth such hints creatively and responsibly into the world.
To comment or respond to Iain Thomson‘s essay, please send
an email to : editors@purlieujournal.com
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of Purlieu.
Notes
1. See Heidegger, Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 167;
Gesamtausgabe Vol. 9: Wegmarken, F.-W. von Herrmann, ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: V.
Klostermann, 1976), p. 217. (Volumes of Heidegger‘s Gesamtausgabe referred to
hereafter as ―GA‖ plus the volume number.) I explain and discuss this crucial
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passage in detail in Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of
Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Ch. 4, esp. pp. 155-
81.
2. For some of the hermeneutical evidence and philosophical arguments establishing that
Heidegger‘s ontological thinking about education forms one of the deepest
undercurrents running through his philosophy, both early and late, see Thomson,
―Heidegger‘s Perfectionist Philosophy of Education in Being and Time,‖ Continental
Philosophy Review 37:4 (2004), pp. 439-467; and Thomson, Heidegger on
Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education.
3. For a presentation of his earlier, Being and Time, view and its main differences from his
later understanding, see ―Heidegger‘s Perfectionist Philosophy of Education in
Being and Time‖ and Heidegger on Ontotheology, Chs. 3-4.
4. I discuss Heidegger‘s heroic embrace of the tragic truth that the known floats atop the
unknown like the tip of an iceberg above a deep dark sea in Heidegger, Art, and
Postmodernity, Ch. 3.
5. I explain these views in detail in Heidegger on Ontotheology, Ch. 1, and in Heidegger, Art,
and Postmodernity, Ch. 1.
6. I develop these suggestions in detail in Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the
Politics of Education, esp. Chs. 2 and 4. As I suggest there, a genuinely vocational
education would be perfectionist, cultivating and developing essential capacities,
not empty and instrumentalizing.
7. Heidegger seeks to teach us ―to listen out into the undetermined‖ for a ―coming [which]
essentially occurs all around us and at all times‖ (Country Path Conversations, B.
Davis, trans [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010], p. 147/GA77, pp.
226-7). Kenneth Maly describes the tripartite ―enowning‖ at the heart of the
phenomenon of Ereignis in terms that cleave closely to Heidegger‘s own: ―Things
emerge into their own, into what is own to them; humans come into their own as
they respond to the owning dynamic in being as emergence; being as emergence
enowns Dasein—all these dynamics belong to the matter said in ‗enowning.‘‖
(Heidegger‟s Possibility: Language, Emergence—Saying Be-ing [Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2008], p. 174). As Maly suggests, there is a third dimension of
enowning in which being too comes into its own; that happens, I show in
Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, when Dasein and the being of entities come
into their own together in such a way that being itself is disclosed in its essential
plenitude or polysemy—and this is the crucial postmodern moment.
8. That such crucial pedagogical ―events‖ are what most deeply matters educationally,
rather than the mere transmission of information, helps explain why teachers are
more important than topics. Different teachers have different styles and interests,
and different styles and interests disclose some students‘ distinctive skills and
capacities better than others, so students should be encouraged to find the
teachers whose teaching styles and interests speak to them, calling them to put
their most into a class rather than just trying to get a good grade.
9. This is one of the central theses of Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity.
10. Heidegger‘s ―The Origin of the Work of Art‖ suggests that intelligibility contains a
complex texture of edges, lines, and breaks, a ―rift-structure‖ that forms an openended
―basic design‖ or ―outline sketch‖ to which we need to learn to be creatively
receptive in order to bring at least one of the potentially inexhaustible forms
slumbering in the earth into the light of the world.
11. I develop this view in ―Heidegger‘s Perfectionist Philosophy of Education in Being and
Time.‖
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