Against THE LITERATURE : A plea for philosophical arrogance

I got a paper rejected today- desk reject. There are a number of things it could be [it was by no means the greatest paper], but my guess is that the editor didn’t like a specific feature of my writing that usually attracts the most ire- I kind of just divebomb in, say what I think then fuck off. I make no claim that this is a noble approach in academia generally- it’s just the way it is: I’m not especially interested in Engaging With The Literature except insofar as it is necessary to avoid plagiarism or make my case directly. Though I make no claims for divebombing in with ideas as a general approach to academia I do want to defend it specifically as a an approach to philosophy.

It’s not that I’m an uncurious soul who is only interested in speaking not listening. I read an awful lot- to be honest this is something I take great pride in- I try to read a paper a day and attend departmental seminars and the like voraciously. But I tend to read very unsystematically. I’m not really interested in being a world-leading expert on punishment, theft, desire or any of the sorts of things I write on. I’m interested in being a philosopher, which I take, generally, to imply having a lot of different views about a lot of topics. I see it as a bit of a dive-bombing type activity.

There is increasingly a view in philosophy that there is something very wrong with my attitude - and who knows, maybe they’re right and I am wrong. It started in the philosophy of science, which has moved from being about, say, the abstract logic underlying the very idea of a theory to being about the concept of preformation in 18th-century accounts of botanical germination. It has spread throughout philosophy generally- this idea of THE LITERATURE- a vast body of research you must master before you can write on your sub-sub-sub-specialty. The problem with old analytic philosophy, on this view, is that it didn’t involve enough content-specific expertise.

My honors supervisor Paul Griffiths once told me that scientists generally really don’t like it when someone tries to publish a clever explanation of existing data without adding anything hard to the table- a new theorem, a mathematical model, or, best of all, a new experiment. Papers that amount to ‘I’ve had a jolly clever idea’ aren’t well-liked. Paul seemed to think this was a good thing- and something that separated science from pre-scientific activities. Clever ideas might come and go- any old idiot can have a clever idea- but data and theorems are forever. It’s not just science- other disciplines have their own equivalents. For historians, it’s the archives - proving that you’ve done your time in them. For anthropologists it's fieldwork, and so on and so forth. Now, in philosophy, it is increasingly showing that you have deeply engaged with THE LITERATURE- much more so than was expected of our predecessors.

I don’t know to what extent this specific-expertise focus is generally speaking a healthy attitude in academia. As I said at the start, I make no judgment on that. What I want to say though is that is good to have at least one discipline which is, well, shit-talking. Which is a bunch of people sitting around throwing ideas and seeing what sticks. The fireside chat made large, or the people who wander around the city and ambush good citizens and ask them to explain what justice is. This conception of philosophy seems to be increasingly replaced with another one based on domain expertise and the mastery of micro-fashions. Dot your i’s, cross your t’s and read THE LITERATURE on X.

There’s a kind of arrogance in my preferred approach- divebombing in with ideas-, to be sure, but there’s also a kind of backhanded humility. It’s not that you think you have the answers, it’s just that you’ve got ideas you need to get out and, weirdly I think, there’s a kind of higher sense in which it’s an indifference to you whether history ultimately judges them true or not. They’re an attempt. The ideal- difficult to reach in practice- is a love for the truth that becomes so powerful that there’s no particular sense that your ideas have any portion of ownership in truth- you’re just pleased to be here, to be part of this collective enterprise. That free-flowing almost child-like creativity is philosophy’s special contribution to humanity’s search for knowledge- our place in the intellectual division of labor is precisely to be the locus where ‘expertise’ to the extent it exists at all is in the general handling of concepts, not specific domains.

Philosophy is not a subject matter, it’s not even a methodology, it’s a kind of attitude that bridges precision and speculation. A conjuration. I’m pretty sure it was Bertrand Russell who said something like: "Philosophy is the art of starting with something so trivial that it seems scarcely worth mentioning and deriving something so bizarre no one will believe it." I think having a space for this kind of creative freedom to drag ideas out of nothing in academia is very important because, pretty obviously, there are certain kinds of ideas and facts that are best discovered in the free-wheeling constellations of my preferred type of philosophical argument rather than the more modern approach of filling in THE LITERATURE. I’m an analytic philosopher but I should be clear that this extends to other kinds of philosophy as well- there are insights, things that are best seen for example, within Continental philosophy.

I’ve got no doubt this attitude of something-from-nothing can be taken to extremes. Wittgenstein basically read no philosophy and wasn’t even really educated in the subject. He swept into the room and set a lot of the agenda of 20th-century philosophy- but this is an unusual feat, driven in part by unusual timing- and certainly not a healthy one to try to emulate. Someone once said that philosophy is perpetually hoping for the next wunderkind genius (invariably imagined as white and male) to storm in and set the agenda for the next hundred years. In addition to being far too focused on the individual this isn’t a realistic attitude, nor is it healthy when it comes to the intellectual roots of scholarship. Most successful philosophers, from Kant to Nietzsche were enormously well-read. Even Socrates seems to have been broadly informed for his time. But there is a difference between being studious (good and appropriate to philosophy), and being hyper-specialized and deferential to existing games- intellectual and social.

In addition to this attitude I’m defending being very much démodé, I’m concerned it’s not made for the modern academy. There are too few spots and too many competitors for them. In such an environment, deliverables become very important, and it’s hard to make “good at writing fireside chats” into a deliverable- not just because it’s hard to measure, but because in the desperate environment of publish or perish, someone who wants to get by just on chopping and assembling ideas and arguments from the ether, somewhat de novo, can seem frivolous, arrogant and lazy- deadwood. I think those charges are unfair. This stuff is serious, difficult, and offered in a spirit of profound uncertainty. but more to the point- you’ll miss it when it’s, and we’ll all miss out on a lot when it’s gone.

In conclusion, yes to reading, no to THE LITERATURE.