The place for philosophy
Three humiliations later
I keep coming back to the question of what philosophy is for. I am “of” the domain after all, trained in it and more often than not, beholden to the often comical liability that entails being professionally and socially bound by its intellectual wanderings.
I’m especially curious about how this lands at moments like these when the value or purpose of philosophy becomes a hot topic for debate like it has over last year’s AI-needs-philosophers-storytellers-humanities-industrial-complex churn. Whether it’s Anthropic announcing new philosophy hires or Jennifer Frey describing to Ross Douthat how philosophy can attend to AI, or candid exposes in more small scale corners of the internet among intellectuals calling for a new Deep Springs optimized for the age of AI from historian Nils Gilman, or even fellow travelers such as editor George Macbeth negotiating theory’s value from the art perspective for e-flux.
It’s times like these that I go back to Danielle Macbeth’s 2017 article entitled “The Place of Philosophy.“ In it, she argues that the field’s wavering position in the world is a result of trying to locate how it makes claims within the broader ambit of knowledge production practices which have outpaced it be they the foundational logic found in mathematics or the evidentiary rigor produced by the sciences.
This, for Macbeth, means dissociating the two historical projects that have been central to Western philosophy: a project concerning an absolute conception of reality, which has largely proved inadequate in the face of current scientific understanding, and a project concerning how this shows up in our everyday experience we share with all rational beings with our biological form of life.
In this sense, philosophy becomes the task of discovering how we articulate those oblique connections between sensation and mind which could give us agency or meaning. It doesn’t try to compete with math or the sciences, and perhaps even has a chance at giving us a few insights into the why and how of our lives.
At the same time we can see philosophy being outpaced by math and science as a sort of Freudian humiliation. And perhaps now, with the advent of thinking machines at the very same that academia is crumbling, it would be easy to chalk up the discursive urgency to being implicitly threatened by a couple more potential humiliations which, I would argue, can be avoided if we take Macbeth’s reframing to heart.
Freud famously proposed that Western thought had suffered two great narcissistic humiliations: first with Copernicus, who displaced the earth from the center of the cosmos; then Darwin, who displaced the human from the center of the natural world. Freud added his own contribution as a third when revealing that humans were driven by hidden desires lingering in their subconscious. At each stage the autonomous individual human was made to see the limitations of their agency or importance as they subsequently came to terms with the outer and inner dynamics that truly ruled them.
In less grandiose terms, it feels like philosophy is having to grapple with its own limitations on its promise to seek truth or carry knowledge.
The first humiliation is the one Danielle Macbeth outlined in 2017 which felt particularly acute since 2020 in my own corner of the philosophical world where continental philosophy is queen and often associates with art biennials and political activism that took careful strides to explain how and why certain social ills have come to shape our thinking and our world.
Reality simply proved more vexing and frankly weirder than the concept laden world these philosophers tried to describe as the sequence between COVID, the invasions of Ukraine and levelling of Gaza, emergent online psyops and “-gates”, trade wars and tradwives, multitrillion preprofit IPOs and gamestop. These made such overly simplistic schema for social ideas and concepts feel naive — a point which was elegantly laid out by George Macbeth’s recent article on e-flux.
A second humiliation, however, seems imminent on the level of social utility, following on from the first humiliation of being outpaced by science and mathematics, to question the core of what we think philosophical thinking even does for our societies. Here we see a two-fold unwinding with questions of institutional legitimacy compounded by increasingly capable thinking machines.
Historian Nils Gilman, writing for Persuasion and in his own Substack, traces it back to Clark Kerr’s 1963 terming of the “multiversity” — an institution that had stopped being a community of scholars united by a shared ideal because it has been transformed instead into a loose coalition of competing interests. He describes a political shift from liberal arts to vocational credentialism in the US university system which transferred cost onto individual students while defunding the parts of the institution that didn’t produce monetizable outputs. Last year’s remarkably thorough missive from metascience writer Ben Reinhardt “Unbundling the University” carries a similar sentiment. For him, universities have accumulated a near-monopoly on so many societal roles simultaneously acting as credentialing agencies, research labs, think tanks, vocational training centers such that their incentives are now misaligned for almost all of them. For both, work that is slow, non-commercial, and hard to justify in output terms finds itself without a natural institutional home and this is a result of public and political sentiment galvanizing around social utility.
Into this already-strained structure comes AI. Philosophy professor Jennifer Frey, in a recent interview for the NYT with Ross Douthat, states that most humanities proponents are arguing that philosophy is now needed to supply whatever “soft skills” AI cannot replicate. She calls this approach, which she notes is made by tech leaders and university deans alike, a move that “denatures and destroys the thing it’s supposed to be promoting.” Her point about the utilitarian pressure on higher education, and especially on philosophy, means retooling philosophy as supplementary training for an AI economy and has little do with saving it as something valuable in and of itself which I’m frankly sympathetic too. The question now being how that is benchmarked, articulated, and, most of all, how we create buy-in from a general public on this point when it’s hard to see the utility in clear terms.
In all of these cases, it’s evident that those of us within philosophy are losing sway with broader publics about the usefulness or purpose of philosophy and are spilling a lot of ink trying to salvage its future. But I would argue that this has more to do with thinking about philosophy as a domain of knowledge rather than a a series of strategies for navigating our experience and “realizing” our knowledge base in the post-Pittsburghian way I hold near and dear.
And in fact, if we take this training in method and strategy — of navigating and negotiating knowledge philosophically — then the empirical case for this is less contested than the culture-war noise around it suggests. Philosophy professor Angel Pinillos, writing in his Substack, points out that the most direct evidence humanities education develops thinking has been generated every semester in every classroom for decades comes from his grading of student work, which has consistently demonstrated the improvement in reading and writing benchmarks from philosophical training. Points which are also corroborated by research he points to here and here.
It is in this context that I find myself returning, yet again, to Danielle Macbeth’s argument about the place of philosophy. Not because it resolves the current crisis — it predates much of it — but because it provides the right level of diagnosis, humiliation and all. It names what philosophy’s actual domain is with enough latitude and confidence to to let us ask, seriously, how it fits together within the broader mix of methodological and technological changes to knowledge production underway. Similarly, it is positioned quite well in a shifting landscape of philosophy where non-human experiences and ways of thinking need to be accounted for in radical new ways, and how this will imbue our own sense of mammalian experience into something stranger than we can anticipate.
Certainly this means giving up many of the intellectual fetishes of philosophy types who too often cling onto books they’ve read or specific claims as if they are gospel or the rote liturgies of “close readings” and the like which make philosophy into some drôle detective game. And the same goes for naive young men who think they can become sages after reading Marcus Aurelius once.
Philosophy, in all forms, always performed best as a way of navigating knowledge and sense, of hanging things together in the broadest possible sense of the term and trying to make sense of it.