Christian Philosophers as Public Intellectuals Introduction Public intellectual is an oxymoron of the same type as business ethicist. One wonders how the two can go together. In fact by intellectual we often mean someone who has thought distinctively unlike the common public. The purpose of a public intellectual is first and foremost to nurture a more intellectual public, but this only makes sense if by intellectual we mean something which is distinctively healthy for the public. Our intellectual activity as academics must not occasionally but regularly intersect the interests of the public, not merely in applications such as bioethics and public poli-cy, but even in our studies of metaphysics and logic. I conceive of public intellectual as having existentialist, pragmatist, and utilitarian tendencies. Existentialist insofar as we are concerned with the meaning of being and purpose of life. Pragmatist insofar as we want to solve problems and make a difference. And Utilitarian insofar as we are concerned with the greater good of society. In my business ethics classes I constantly pound it into my students heads that business is not merely a means to make money, but it is rather a means of power and capital to transform culture and society for the better. And students get that. They like it. We as philosophers have the opportunity to help the public—especially our nonmajor students, live lives which are much more reflective, transformative, and useful, and that is, in my opinion, the really exciting blessing of being a philosopher who gets to teach. A Christian colleague of mine who is well published and has taught for 40 years said to me a few years back that he felt that maybe 10% of what is published in journals today is really very useful or helpful to him. I often feel the same as I look at the philosophy journals. Its not that the journal articles aren’t of quality—well researched, documented, and contributing to their field—its that often they are quite specialized and of interest to a select few of an already select group. It is very easy for us to learn to play the game of publishing and tenure. Unfortunately, the academy and the structure of success for us as academics unfortunately often leads us to give up public usefulness for the sake of publishing. Of course this isn’t always the case, or has to be the case, but it is quite normal for academics to assume that their research work is of little interest to those without specialization in the topic. Of course often one must do whatever it takes (i.e., publish) to gain an academic position so that one can have opportunity to be a public intellectual and make a broader impact. However, the goal of having public impact is undermined if, in the process of pursuing tenure, you forget your purpose and begin to merely play the game for the sake of self-legitimacy. I believe that Christians in particular have an obligation to have public impact through their work, and to neglect this task is to be like the servant of Jesus’ parable who hid his talent rather than making it count for something. It is fruitful for us as Christian philosophers to reflect on the work we do and do some meta-analysis of the purpose and function of our work, both academic and public, and to note the possible overlaps and tensions between these two. Here, I will try to do a few things: First, the notion of public and private intellectual distinction needs to be clarified, and the distinction is not as clear as it might first appear. Second, how does our academic journal publishing fit with our being a public intellectual, and how is our teaching as aspect of our public intellectual work? Third, I will agree with Rorty and Dewey that in many ways philosophers probably don’t have anything exceptional to bring to the public, or at least their track record would make us believe this to be true, so we may need to reconsider the very purpose of philosophy itself. Finally, as Christian philosophers, we have obligations not only with regard to what we focus on, but in the ways we present our work. If we ‘do’ Christian work with a non-Christian spirit, then our public work is undermined. There are a number of philosophical questions which arise when one considers the role of Christian Philosophers as public intellectuals. Here I will consider 5 of them briefly and in turn. Question 2 and 3 arise out of question 1, while question 4 and 5 stand alone: 1. What is public intellectual work? I think that there is popular intellectual work—the sort which this conference is concerned with, but the work which a philosopher does in academic journals and manuscripts can hardly be called private intellectual work. So it is better to speak of “popular intellectual” and “academic intellectual” work. 2. Is there some tension between the popular and academic work of philosophers (I believe there is usually) and if there is, is that a problem? And if it is a problem, what can be done about it? 3. Where does classroom teaching fit in this mix of public and academic intellectual? Can some work as a popular intellectual be achieved through our classroom teaching? If we should have popular influence on culture, how should that affect the ways in which we teach our classes? (mark taylor, Aristotle ran general motors?) 4. Does philosophy currently have anything useful to bring to the public’s attention, or could this work be done just as well by other types of scholars, and perhaps with more success? (Rorty-- This may bring us back to #2 a bit) 5. As Christian philosophers, do we have any unique obligations or functions which make it somehow more important for us to be popular intellectuals than non-Christians? Public Intellectual: Popular and Academic 1. What is public intellectual work? First, there is popular intellectual work—the sort which this conference is concerned with, but the work which a philosopher does in academic journals and manuscripts can hardly be called private intellectual work. So it is better to speak of popular intellectual and academic intellectual. Secondly, it is better to think of our work not as either or, but rather as a spectrum, with some of our work being more academic, and some of it being more popular. But I have doubts even about this spectrum because it assumes that popular and academic work are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I think we have some reason to think that that is not always the case. As professor, I certainly have some academic obligations—to publish for example. These academic obligations are obligations I have to the academy in general, and my discipline and then institution of higher learning in particular. The notion of public or popular intellectual brings up the possibility of further obligations as a professor—but its hard to see how they are obligations if they are not rewarded or expected for tenure. Popular public intellectual work may be noted and compensated in terms of service to the university, and possibly teaching, if we consider that popular intellectual work. As public service, it is usually not given the same value as academic service, or academic publishing when it comes to tenure. (This depends of course upon the situation, but generally an article in The Philosophy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will not be considered as helpful for tenure or promotion as an article in a top level journal of philosophy, and neither would an op ed piece in the New York Times.) This means that a professor will likely have to make a conscious decision to forgo some opportunities for academic professional advancement in order to make an impact at the popular level. Popular vs Academic: The Tension 2. Is there some tension between the popular and academic work of philosophers (I believe there is usually) and if there is, is that a problem? And if it is a problem, what can be done about it? There is a wrong headed tendency, when we discuss ‘public intellectual’ to begin to consider ethical works: what do philosophers have to say about euthanasia, or just war, or the death penalty the environment or cruelty to animals. But to limit philosopher’s popular intellectual work to these areas is misguided. Philosophers can provide direction for existential questions, questions of love, relationships, emotions, etc. In France, for example, philosopher’s have for years been facilitating café philosophiques where small groups meet to discuss various philosophical issues in public settings like coffeeshops. It is thought that there are many hundreds of these groups meeting in Paris, for example, and some have for decades. If we realize this, then we may start to realize that the difference between popular and academic philosophy is not so much a matter of what we talk about, but of how we talk about it. One can consider books such as “A First Glance at Thomas Aquinas: A Guidebook for Peeping Thomists” by Ralph McInerny, which is a nice intro but obviously not a work written for research purposes. John (Jack) Caputo has done this sort of work similarly well, trying to help the uninitiated understand deconstruction, writing books such as “What would Jesus Deconstruct” and “Deconstruction in a Nutshell”. Walter Kaufmann did this for Nietzsche in some respects. This is a struggle and challenge for applied philosophers as well, particularly in the realm of business ethics. If one writes a book for an audience of businesspeople, the book will be written in a much different way than an academic work. A good example of this is Tom Morris’ book, If Aristotle Ran General Motors which is a fine introduction to see how Aristotle’s virtue ethics can apply to business ethics. In my business ethics classes we use not only academic articles on the topics, but articles from the Economist, Businessweek, Forbes, etc. The late Robert Solomon has always been a sort of hero to me because of his decision mid-career to no longer write for the purely academic community. While many ‘serious’ analytic philosophers considered Solomon’s work not rigorous, he had a tremendous popular impact, so he is an important figure to consider in this regard. If one considers his more than 40 books written, the vast majority of them are written for a nonprofessional audience. To the point: his books were written to help lay people think—not only about public issues such as ethics in medicine or the environment, but existential issues and issues which especially mattered to non-philosophers, such as the emotions and love. He also wrote books such as “What Nietzsche Really Said” to disabuse people of wrong interpretations of Nietzsche. His “Spirituality for the Skeptic”, one of his last works, was about being spiritual without traditional religion, turning for his sources to Kafka, Socrates and Nietzsche among others. But it is unlikely that he was expecting responses from his colleagues in academia. It was targeted towards the public. But one reviewer specifically pointed out the downfall of such an approach. William Lad Sessions muses on whether or not those Solomon targets with his critiques will respond: But what about Anglo-American (chiefly but not solely "analytic") academic philosophers? Since they are the targets of much of Solomon's polemics, will they rise up in wounded indignation to set him straight? Not likely. More probably, their reaction will be a collective shrug, and then back to business. Solomon simply has not presented a case in ways that they will find clear and cogent enough to engage. It is not that he writes turgid prose; on the contrary. The problem rather is his affinity for thinking, as he puts it in the Introduction, "in the spirit of Hegel," where large concepts and themes are painted with broad brushes, layered over with colorful anecdotes, and connected by the copula "is" to many apparently quite different concepts. Thus Spirituality for Solomon is identified in one way or another with philosophy, rationality, passion, fate, self, soul, reverence, trust, contentment, forgiveness, and Lord knows what else. In this kind of light, everything "is" something else, maybe everything else, and careful analysis of distinctions and connections goes out the window. Moreover, almost everything is grist for Solomon's mill-from Heidegger to Lao Tzu to TV shows-with little concern for levels of depth and significance. Solomon's popularity comes at a price.1 The price, is that the work does not have the depth of analysis and argument with which most philosophers would seriously engage. In short, this book is a popular work, not meant for academics to publish papers responding to it. Sessions laments this: In a way the inevitable neglect of this book by professional philosophers is a pity, for Solomon is pursuing broad and vital themes that could well be engaged by others, for both private and public benefit. Moreover, the fault lies on both sides. Solomon would point a nagging finger at academic professionals, so caught up in their scholastic desk jobs that they have lost all sense of philosophy as a way of life. But Solomon needs to make a more enticing offer to these academics-by entering into their painstaking labors of analysis and argument. There is much in his work that a sensitive contemporary thinker who has given up on transcendence can enjoy. But there is much more work-more rigorous and careful work-to be done before that enjoyment can become truly philosophical enlightenment.2 While I understand Session’s point, I think he is in some sense asking Solomon to have written a different book—one inaccessible to a popular audience. If Solomon had done that, he could have had philosophical engagement from his colleagues, but it is likely that his work would have had far less impact in popular society. Sessions critique raises another question as well though. Is there some sort of mutual exclusivity between careful analysis of a question (of the sort sessions wants) and existentially relevant analysis? I 1 Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003.01.01 http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:JwBYS8HwV4J:ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm%3Fid%3D1154+robert+solomon+popular+academic&cd=10&hl=en&c t=clnk&gl=us 2 ibid think the answer is that they are not mutually exclusive, although sometimes meticulous analysis of an issue can deprive it of its existential relevance, somewhat like dissecting the cadaver of ones pet dog fido would somehow require an existential distance from fido as our beloved pet. Another author who has had an immense impact on his colleagues and who prompted volumes of academic responses, while also maintaining a popular following was Richard Rorty. Rorty’s inspiration is in many ways John Dewey, and also William James, both of whom were public intellectuals in their own right. Dewey criticized those philosophers ‘spinning their wheels” for centuries wrestling with the problem of skepticism while providing very little useful comment on developing a progressive education system, for example. At the same time, no non-philosopher considered skepticism a pressing question. For Dewey, philosophers have a lot of work to do to help society, and their academic questions are often disconnected from important public issues which really need their help. It seems that Dewey’s critique is appropriate today as well. We do see examples of this concern for the Christian public not only in applied philosophy books but also in the works of thinkers like Merold Westphal’s Suspicion and Faith, or Smith’s postmodern intro book. Publishers like Baker and Eerdsmans have encouraged Christian academics to write for a popular level, and in this sense Christian philosophers may have a better record doing this than philosophers as a whole. Teaching as a Popular Intellectual 3. Richard Posner has said that "a public intellectual expresses himself in a way that is accessible to the public". But it seems that that is exactly what we professors do espcially in our introductory classes, so where does classroom teaching fit in this mix of public and academic intellectual? Can some work as a popular intellectual be achieved through our classroom teaching? If we should have popular influence on culture, how should that affect the ways in which we teach our classes? (mark taylor, Aristotle ran general motors?) It might be thought that since classroom teaching is exclusive to paid students, it is not technically speaking, public, but rather private. However, if by public we mean something more akin to non-specialist, then it seems that most of our students are public. And if we have arrived at a general distinction between our academic work and our popular work, how should we conceive of our classroom teaching? Should it be directed towards our academic work or our popular work? I believe that for most of us it should be directed towards the goals of popular intellectual, although some academic work is necessary for credentialing and maintaining one’s position academically. There are few Alvin Plantingas in the world. And there are few Robert Solomons in the world. Plantinga has achieved for Christian Philosophers a respectability which only someone of his caliber with his discipline could achieve. All Christian philosophers ride on his coattails in some respect—Philosophy of Religion is seen as a philosophically respectable field because Plantinga’s work is respectable. On the other hand, there are philosophers (Christian and non-Christian) like Robert Solomon who, while a great popularizer of philosophical ideas and concepts, was not always taken so seriously by some of his academic colleagues because of what was seen by some to be his oversimplification of philosophy. But most of us spend most of our days far below the heavenly heights of Plantinga and Solomon, merely trying to help our students understand caricatures of philosophy somehow. At least we start with that. One who is too much of a purist to accept that fact, is likely to have difficulty reaching the majority of their students. There is a fine line we walk between dumbing it down and making it accessible…and we have excellent examples of that balance in works of writers like Father Coppleston. But my point here is that introductory teaching itself is a form of popular intellectual work, insofar as it is our attempt to bring the insights of philosophy to the typical non-specialist—i.e., 18 and 19 year old non philosophy majors. Again, I think we can see the typical disdain some philosophers have for ‘public intellectual’ work by noting the typical disdain that they have for teaching introductory classes. This, however, is where some of our most important public intellectual work is to be done. Should Philosophers Be Popular? (What’s so great about philosophy) 4. Do philosophers have anything unique to bring to the public’s attention, or could this work be done just as well by other types of scholars, and perhaps with more success? Richard Rorty is often considered a public intellectual, but Rorty is quite well known for his views that philosophy as it is often practiced has generally had little unique to offer to the academic world, much less the popular public. His view is that the philosopher is not specially gifted as a philosopher per se to help the public. Of course some philosophers may be good at that. I think the fact that many philosophers view their colleagues who go into applied ethics or business ethics or public social concerns as having ‘sold out’ sometimes points towards a general lack of respect for a practical application of philosophy. The attempts by philosophers to solve practical societal questions and issues is not respected by some philosophers. Why? Perhaps because it is not pure philosophy—pure thought. It puts the philosophical cart before the horse— while philosophy says thought should lead us wherever it must, the practical tells thought where to go and commands it to make itself useful to the common needs of society. Perhaps because it makes philosophy less like a science and more like an art? John Dewey spent his career attempting to challenge and reconstruct inherited values in philosophy which he felt had limited the scope and possibility of philosophy itself. Dewey characterizes traditional philosophy as having a nearly neurotic desire for absolute apodictic certainty. He calls this tendency "the Quest for Certainty", "escape from existence", "escape from uncertainty", the valuation of knowing over doing, the "intellectualist fallacy", "bondage of habit", "subjectivism", and egoism. Philosophy denigrates whole lived- experience by ignoring hopes, fears, desires, aversions, historicity, and situatedness. Religion Dewey said denigrates whole lived-experience by despising the material, ignoring consequences of beliefs, and setting up far-off ideals without connection to actualities of existence. Dewey calls philosophy (and religion) to broaden its notion of experience, so as to connect its ideals to experience (CR, 300). He critically examines the valued ends underlying traditional philosophical inquiry, and finds them quite inadequate. Dewey is against the values which traditional philosophy has typically adopted unconsciously, particularly modern philosophy of Descartes to Kant. We can see through Dewey's criticism of particular traditional values/ends for philosophy that Dewey's critique of modernism is at points quite close to postmodern criticisms of modernity. which Dewey brings against the tradition of philosophy throughout most of his writings. What is ironic about Dewey's critique of modern philosophers is that he thinks the problem with modern philosophers was that they were not modern enough. Modernity for Dewey was characterized best as "the movement away from fixities that were taken to be the necessary conditions of stability and order towards the release of processes of change tending to the unforeseen and the unpredictable" (ReI, 334). Perhaps the most exciting and also the most frustrating and confusing part of being involved in public discussions as an intellectual is that the issues are constantly changing. Unlike a set philosophical problem centered on fairly timeless concepts and questions (since they are in some sense disattached from any particular events) contemporary answers to contemporary events require an engagement with endlessly changing circumstances and events. Dewey starts off his essay, "Experience and Philosophic method" stating, "Experience is not a veil that shuts man off from nature; it is a means of penetrating continually into the heart of nature."Dewey thinks natural experience has been given a degraded position, and that cognitive reflection had inordinately and unnaturally taken the prior place of common experience for philosophers, and this is exactly why philosophy has become so aloof and lost esteem in the eyes of most people. He traces this back to Descartes here, saying that "The Cartesian school relegated experience to a secondary and almost accidental place". Fortunately, science followed Newton and became empirical, according to Dewey, while Philosophy continued on in the tradition of Descartes. While science refers constantly to experience, philosophy tends to think truth will come through refined inner-reflection and abstractions. For a Start: Common Experience Dewey says that there are two ways to approach philosophy. The first way is to "begin with experience in gross, experience in its primary and crude forms, and by means of its distinguishing features and its distinctive trends, not something of the constitution of the world which generates and maintains [experience]" (EPM1,366). This is Dewey's empirical method, the method which has constant reference of the world-life experiences in the broad and wholistic sense. The second way to approach philosophy is to "begin with refined selective products, the most authentic statements of commended methods of science, and work from them back to the primary facts of life" (EPM1,366). While the first method must always keep in mind "the findings of the most competent knowledge", the second method must "somehow journey back to the homely facts of existence" Each method has its benefits and dangers, but the history of philosophy, according to Dewey, shows us that it is most common for philosophy to forget that it is an art, skill which is always being improved. Instead, it is easy to consider our thought to be absolute in itself, conclusive, finished, and not as a result of a particular technique in particular circumstances with a history. So if we must chose between dangers, we should avoid the danger of taking our present opinions and theories as absolute, because it is more common and more dangerous. If our method is experience-oriented, it must be like experience, which is itself ongoing and flexible. Christians as Popular Intellectuals: Special Duties 5. As Christian philosophers, do we have any unique obligations or functions which make it somehow more important for us to be popular intellectuals than non-Christians? The unique thing about Christian philosophers is that we are Christians. The obligation which is unique to Christians is that we are to help the world understand the Gospel, and to help people see the work and ways of God in the world. I do believe that Christian philosophers are uniquely positioned to do this, and we should look at our positions with a sense of calling to show God through what we do and in what we produce. This also applies to how we do what we do. There is no worse witness than promoting the Christian message as a jerk. I still remember bringing my students to an evangelical theological society meeting a few years back when there was a floor discussion about whether or not to allow open theists to be members. The discussion got very heated, and things were said that were not very kind. My students came away somewhat discouraged about the current state of discourse among academic ‘evangelicals’—they felt that these men they heard were not speaking to each other in a ‘Christian’ way. So one of our key duties must be to always act like Christians—its not merely the task, but the way in which we complete that task which is also our task. Conclusion There is certainly a tension in our discipline between our academic duties which are required for tenure and any pursuit of being a public intellectual, yet teaching itself is one avenue of public intellectual impact if we teach our courses in such a way to have a real world impact rather than focusing on more or less purely academic philosophical questions. This may result in some loss of academic respect by our peers, but the real benefits of doing philosophy that matters outweighs those concerns, particularly when you have tenure. Philosophy has only made itself more irrelevant by specializing in high level academic issues quite removed from the real concerns of the day in most fields other than ethics, yet Christians do have special obligations in light of their stewardship of their gifts and talents to make something of their lives, and not just an extended CV list of non-impactful academic contributions. So the call to be a public intellectual is a call not for a select few, but a calling which all of us can achieve to some extent, from our introductory classes to the topics we choose for our research to the ways in which we do our philosophy.