My application to join PEN American Center as a 'professional member' was approved. I had been worried they might reject it, since I remain, at least with respect to who pays my salary and what my daily responsibilities looks like, an academic philosopher, but I basically told them that professional philosophers have no conception of a shared avocation that binds them together with their homologues in Azerbaijan and Rwanda, and that for that reason, more than any other, I'm looking to change crowds.
Here is what I wrote, in part:
"Over the past few years I have been drifting gradually away from my academic community (I am a professional philosopher), towards the community of people who define themselves as writers. The reasons for this shift are various, but I will focus on one. Philosophers are in the end extremely provincial, belonging to national traditions with little sense of the existence of a global community of kindred souls. The further one ventures from the Anglo-American and Western European world, the harder it is for professional philosophers to recognize a shared vocation with the people they encounter. Writers by contrast are sharply aware of the global scope of their work, and are capable of sincere solidarity with one another that transcends state and tradition.
"I have on occasion signed petitions, initiated or supported by PEN, in support of persecuted writers and journalists throughout the world. It has recently come to seem to me that my support of such causes might be more useful if I were not simply speaking as a lone voice, but as a member of an organization committed to them. I'll admit that the recent debates about Charlie Hebdo among American writers, in which I participated from my perch in France, helped to bring into clear relief for me how important global solidarity is and why it is best, for me, to pursue this as a writer (rather than as, say, an academic or an activist). But the Charlie Hebdo affair was a crisis in the proper sense: it did not really bring about anything new, but only made plain the cleavages that were already there, both among American writers, and between me and my supposed community of academics who, by contrast with the majority of members of the American chapter of PEN, could not even begin to grasp how important it is to stand against the persecution of satirists everywhere. I take it that this is because they do not understand how important satire is. I expect writers to be somewhat more advanced in this regard."
Earlier, in October of last year, long before I had considered joining PEN, I wrote to a friend:
"Increasingly I have trouble thinking of myself as part of the community of American philosophers, and not only because I live and work in Europe, but also because its members seem fundamentally incapable of understanding what it is to be a philosopher as something more than being able to rattle off the same list of American (and sometimes British, Canadian, and Australian) names, departments, and annual events, or being able to formulate an opinion on Brian Leiter. How different American philosophers are, in this regard, from writers or artists, or, in a somewhat different way, natural scientists, who are all ready and eager to recognize an Albanian or Iranian, say, as one of their own, so long as that person is a self-identified practitioner of the same ancient craft!
"Why is there no philosophical equivalent of PEN? Why are the annual APA meetings treated as being of such tremendous cosmic significance, while the various modest attempts at global philosophical encounter, such as the World Philosophical Congress, are scoffed at by American philosophers as if they were John Bolton at the United Nations? In the end it's because the people who attend the World Philosophical Congress wear cheap suits and have big moustaches and seem, by American parochial standards, to be generally out of it. But again, in the case of, say, literature or art, there is an underlying shared something that the American and the Albanian practitioners of the ancient craft love, and that they recognize as shared. This shared something takes them beyond the differences of costume and idiom. Is there a comparable something that American philosophers love? I'm beginning to have my doubts."
I am still reeling from the time I wrote a piece for the New York Times 'Stone' series about the need to pay attention to the ethical and metaphysical commitments of, e.g., hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers throughout the world, if we are truly committed to increasing the diversity of, and promoting inclusiveness within, academic philosophy. The response? I was accused on the Feminist Philosophers blog of 'mansplaining'. Elsewhere, many supposed that I had attempted a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of inclusiveness: for them, it was self-evident that people from different demographic sectors of one and the same society must be included in the project of philosophy, but the idea that people from different societies should be included too struck them as no less self-evidently absurd. This, for me, more than any other, was the moment I thought to myself: Never mind. I'm done here.
I'm not leaving philosophy, but I am leaving behind, to the extent possible, the professional organizations and networks that do not permit me to live out my philosophical commitment to cosmopolitanism. It seems to me, from what I have been able to discern so far, that for complicated historical reasons it is 'writers', and not 'philosophers', who have better cherished and preserved this ideal.
Most Professional Philosophers seem to treat philosophy as an end unto itself. You are the first I've come across in decades who understands that the goal of philosophy is to examine and understand the world - that philosophic methods are just a tool for that purpose, much as each science has it's own toolset.
There are quite a number of writers I'd love to share a bottle of wine with as we discussed the world. You're the first philosopher that I'd like to meet. I agree with your idea of putting yourself in the writing camp. You are an excellent writer, partly by philosophic training but - I suspect - mostly by intuition and personal taste and sense of values.
You have the intellectual capacity to realize the limits of pure intellectualism and will do more good and gain more satisfaction as a philosophical writer than a writing philosopher.
"Of all that I hold Possible,
only this I Know:
My wisdom only takes me
where my folly wants to go."
Posted by: RayS | May 15, 2015 at 12:08 AM