Against two-tier philosophy
I have been meaning to write something about my health. The short version: it's not good. I've been trying to come to terms with it, but I currently lack the words to adequately express it. Maybe in a future post.
Today I want to write about a common conceptualization of philosophy. I was reminded of this by a recent blogpost by Colin McGinn, who argues that he has been cancelled unfairly, and that the world thereby got to miss out on his great philosophical gifts. He offers a kind of It's a Wonderful Life thought experiment where we have to imagine the course of philosophy without his major contributions, and then another thought experiment.
Suppose your top ten philosophers had all been cancelled: removed from pedagogical employment, prevented from publishing, and generally shunned … No Plato, no Socrates (who was rather drastically cancelled), no Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant (you can make your own list). Philosophy would have had a very different history. These luminaries might or might not have been guilty of this or that (e.g., blasphemous speech); the thought experiment is more piquant if we suppose they were not but that the spirit of the times required it. Do you think that would be a bad thing?
The remaining ones, the cancellers, are of course second-rate philosophers. This piece reiterates several ideas many of us hold: our discipline is polarized into the important philosophers who have interesting things to say and then everyone else--the second-rank--whose thoughts don't really matter.
As a mentor to grad students specifically, I've pushed back against this mindset. I tell my students: you as a writer matter, what you have to say matters. Don't write what you feel others think matters, write about what you think matters.
Students who believe in two-tier philosophy try to jump through the hoops they hope will lift them up into the category of hirable, important philosophers: trendy topics, prestigious journals, prestigious programs. For some, doing all this is a natural fit. But for most philosophers, it's not. Yet, they think what they say has no inherent value and only can attain value insofar as it emulates what the successful philosophers do. This is a guaranteed recipe for unoriginal, mediocre thought, for epicycle philosophy. You cannot find your own strengths and interests this way. (see this piece by Alex Douglas on why architecture got boring, intriguingly peer review might also play a role there).
The picture of philosophy as first-tier and second-tier is unhistorical. I'm currently researching seventeenth-century philosophy, and names pop up of people that are almost never mentioned in undergrad or even grad seminars: Pierre Bayle, John Toland, Anna Maria van Schurman, so many others. They absolutely helped shape philosophical thought. For every Spinoza there's a Johannes Bouwmeester, Lodewijck Meyer, Francis van den Enden, Quaker philosophers and their pamphlets, and more. Spinoza is an interesting example because he is so often portrayed as an utterly solitary thinker, but we can find various influences in his thinking very easily, including of how e.g., a figure such as van Blijenbergh compelled Spinoza to articulate his thoughts on evil clearly. The picture of isolated geniuses who stand like lone beacons in the history of philosophy is woefully inept.
All our philosophical writings are gifts we bestow on the philosophical community and the world at large. In the attention economy, some people will get far more attention and credit for their writing than others.
The world doesn't need McGinn's philosophical thought, anymore than it does mine, or anyone else's. All we can do is cultivate professional spaces where people get reasonable opportunities and chances, and where we encourage writers to feel that they matter, their point of view matters, and they can be their best selves.
May you continue to be ever so kind to yourself, Helen. Thank you for checking in with us.
What a strange comment from McGinn, which presupposes that we're not already living in a lesser universe, wherein a great deal of ancient thought was lost or destroyed, and where plenty of other excellent thought simply failed to be selected as essential canon for students in X scholarly tradition. Moreover, there's a highly silo'd view of the Self built into the notion that any person is truly singular in their philosophical discourse, such that it could not have been meaningfully advanced without them--as if their discourse wasn't in strong part shaped by environmental factors that also affected their peers and the overall "mood" of an era, and could thus have found other champions advancing similar positions instead.
(A more pedestrian example of this comes from computer engineering. Quite a few people were tinkering with new tech in the 1950s and 1960s, excitedly swapping ideas and prototypes; the "geniuses" we were taught to covet were simply a few among that number of hard workers and hustlers who got properly financed or lucked out with their investments and local networks.)
This isn't to say that the people we recognize as critical figures in our canon don't matter, but it's an unfortunate misapplication of the history of philosophy to define our essentialness as humans in relation to so fickle a process of collective memory. The work of deep thinking may not sustain us socially through even a single lifetime, let alone through further generations, but it's a mode of being that sustains our sense of being, while we're here as brief witnesses to the cosmos at all.
That has to be enough.
it strikes me as rather egotistical to assume that one’s ideas are so unique that no one else could ever think of them. I think that throughout history, similar ideas have likely surfaced multiple times—like how many animals independently evolved the ability to fly. I see a tension here: on one hand, valuing one’s own writing and perspective as meaningful; on the other, inflating those ideas to the point where being “cancelled” is framed as a loss for an entire field. to imagine oneself as irreplaceable in the ongoing process of advancing human thought overlooks the collective nature of knowledge and creativity.