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“Confessions of an ex philosopher”

Brian Leiter

This is making the rounds on social media, and is certainly a gripping read.   The author does underestimate–maybe accurate to his own experience, or maybe because he wasn't very good at teaching either–the impact that teaching philosophy can have on students.  Probably the main contribution most academic philosophers make is through teaching rather than writing, and I would rate that as rather more important than fixing a boat (what "Fabio," the author, now does).  Be that as it may, it's worth a look.   But who is he referring to here (the author has worked mainly in Europe, but with a strong interest it appears in American philosophers like Sellars and Brandom):

I’ve smiled and nodded, and bit my tongue when treated like a shoe-shine boy. But dude, I really don’t give a shit that you’ve published 10 books on German Idealism with a prestigious university press — you’re still an asshole and in other circumstances I’d have told you in no uncertain terms where to shove that USB drive of yours (suspiciously specific, I know).

ADDENDUM:  I have had it confirmed that the preceding refers to Robert Pippin, who is indeed unusually vain, even by academic standards.

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16 responses to ““Confessions of an ex philosopher””

  1. Daniel Kaufman

    Agree with you entirely about teaching vs. research. It's because I love writing as much as teaching that I have moved into more public intellectual style work, where the reach — and potentially impact — is greater.

    I am sympathetic to some of what the author says. But the fact that he never enjoyed doing philosophy should have been a red flag. Being a professor is not the sort of job one should ever take out of financial or other necessity. One only should do it if one feels called to it. Put another way, a person may find him or herself in a position where he/she has to take a job delivering pizzas or working minimum wage. One never finds oneself in a position where one has to take a job teaching and doing research in philosophy.

    So part of this seems to be a matter of not following his own feelings, regarding the subject/profession. But part of it also seems to involve a misimpression not just of the "greatness" of others in the discipline but of his own insufficiency. Throughout, I get the sense of a person far too critical of him/herself and far to impressed by others. Then again, this is not always consistently communicated — sometimes he/she seems to say the opposite, so I may be wrong here.

    What I dislike about the piece is the generalization from his/her own case to that of others. The author doesn't know me or my students. The author has no idea what sort of impact I, my teaching, or my work has had on others. The author hasn't an inkling of what I seek to get out of the teaching of and writing on philosophy and thus, has no conception of what would or wouldn't make me satisfied. So, while I admire the writing here and the honesty, I really have no use for the lashing out at others whom the author doesn't know and with whose experiences he has no understanding. "Speak for yourself" is what I would say, if I could meet him/her.

    Then, I'd probably buy us both another round.

    Reply
  2. Skef

    I suppose the comments are open to foster discussion about who the author is referring to. But on your more general point: If academic philosophers make their main contribution through teaching, do they make any more of a contribution than do all the adjuncts, on average? Certainly ratings entities such as U.S. News/WR don't seem to think so. All the hierarchy is driven by the work, so if the work is BS so is the hierarchy.

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  3. Steven Hales

    Boredom, the intentional exposure of oneself as a fraud, the bitter self-description and then stepping away from it, the sense of an indeterminate character—his confession reminded me of Dostoevsky's Underground Man.

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  4. Brian Leiter

    I don't see that USNWR evaluates "the work." But let's not pursue this further! I am genuinely curious who is alluded to in the bit I quote.

    Reply
  5. Mark Capustin

    I agree with what Daniel Kaufman says about the author's assessment of himself and others, though self-deprecating comments are sometimes disingenuous, made to illicit praise.

    As an ex philosopher myself, I was interested in reading this article and seeing if any of it resonated with my own experience. It did not. We had completely different sets of circumstances – I finished my PhD while various personal and family circumstances made it difficult to be a productive scholar. I did, however, teach for several years and only stopped doing so because being an adjunct is not financially viable (I work for a big 4 accounting firm now, so I've landed on my feet as far as a career goes). All the while, I loved philosophy, thoroughly enjoyed teaching (I was quite good at it, if my student evaluations are to be believed), and enjoyed my interactions with other philosophers. Like any profession, there are people who are difficult to like for various reasons, but I was lucky enough to not have to have much to do with any of them. I always felt like the philosophers I interacted with treated me with respect and were generous with their time and their wisdom. I left the profession not by choice, so it's a bit difficult for me to get my head into the space of someone who leaves because they simply don't like it. But that a perfectly appropriate choice to make to be true to oneself. But, as Daniel Kaufman mentions, that doesn't warrant the broad generalizations about the value or impact of what others are accomplishing.

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  6. Charles Pigden

    Except that he does not think there is anything wrong with his liver.

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  7. Anon

    Andrew Bowie?

    Reply
  8. Former Grad Student

    I have nothing to add as to whom the author is referring, but I'm not sure on what scale this person is judging the contributions of philosophers to society (which is surely a too-often-used vague metric on its own account). Having walked away after the M.A. phase, I'm not sure what it is the author thinks the alternatives are for contributing. I'm in tech now and where before I may have written a paper "read by twelve other people," success for me is now rated on a scale from making an app that breaks a state election (bad) to making an app that encourages the spread of lies and breaks democratic societies (good?).

    When the author describes doing something you kind of hate and then sending out a bunch of job applications, it is not a surprise that they are just stepping out of academia: every white collar job that I know of works like this now. Hell, some jobs that don't even PAY work like this now. The most respect I ever gained for philosophy as a profession was stepping away for as long as I have to see that it's the "profession" bit and not the "philosophy" bit that gives it the lion's share of the character which the author laments.

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  9. Part-timer

    Same, honestly. I'm a part-time grad student, and I work part-time in an, I wanna say, fairly important role for an NGO, but the impact of my work is close to 0. Perhaps in the NGO world, if you do lobbying, you may have an impact, but generally speaking, it's not gonna be your ideas, but the ones of your board or members that you lobby for.

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  10. Thomas Richard Elliott

    The author makes some good points, but anyone who says "The truth is that I have never enjoyed doing philosophy" isn't likely the best source of information on the pros and cons of pursuing an academic career in philosophy.

    There are musicians who, having pursued a professional career, reveal that the grind has led them from a love of music to something bordering on hatred. Such is the problem in a world in which there are few positions for professional musicians — and professional philosophers.

    E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/music/the-juilliard-effect-ten-years-later.html

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  11. PhDStudent

    My guess on who he might be referring to, only from context and the "10 books" comment, is a philosopher the beginning of whose surname is much like the main character of _Great Expectations_, who teaches in the windy city. But that's pure speculation on my part.

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  12. gbc

    In our age, with the "darkest parts of the American psyche" on open display perhaps an increased engagement with public issues might improve the morale of those engaged in the hard grind of academia.

    I was at a 1 day conference last year in which some folks were willing to spend time fighting the forces of what Isaac Asimov used to call the "Armies of the Night". This is especially relevant, given the alarmingly high belief in absurd notions among their fellow citizens.

    It shouldn't be impossible to allow grad students to spend a few hours–and get paid for–engaging with the wider community (e.g. on reddit threads, youtube channels, deconstructing the modus operandi of "world-historic" simpletons who seem to belong on the set of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Nurse Ratched would have my eternal thanks for making sure they don't skip on their meds at "medication time"). Professors can oversee and participate as they see fit.

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  13. gbc

    Oops, looks like links disappeared in above comment. Here they are standalone:



     (psyche)

    https://art.utexas.edu/event/aliens-atlantis-aryanism-fake-news-archaeology-heritage (conference)

    https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2017/10/11/paranormal-america-2017 (absurd notions)

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve (simpleton)

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  14. Anonymous

    My guess is Michael Forster at University of Chicago.

    https://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/forster

    Not that I know him or anything about. Maybe he is the nicest guy in the world, and me making the suggestion is absurd.He just kind of fits the academic details of the story.

    “Fabian,” the author mentions Wimsatt (dominant in his home university Chicago but maybe less so elsewhere). He mentions philosophizing about Malick movies, which reminded me of a Robert Pippin essay I just read about The Thin Red Line, and Pippin is also at Chicago. He also mentions psychoanalysis IIRC and Lear is at Chicago. It all fits.

    And Forster has about 10 books, many of which are about German Idealism, judging by the titles.

    Anyway, I hope I’m wrong but this weirdly personal detective story challenge interested me too much to not try my hand.

    BL COMMENT: Definitely not Forster, as (1) he's not like this, and (2) he doesn't use a USB drive. (Only about half his books are related to Hegel as well.) But the details above do suggest another candidate.

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  15. gbc

    Here's Nathan Robinson's take on why academics in our times–unlike those in the "low, dishonest decade"–don't have much of an incentive to engage with the wider public:



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  16. Charles Pigden

    Much of Fabio’s post explains why *he* was unhappy with philosophy and why he (rightly) decided to leave it. As autobiography this is fine, but he also makes some general complaints about why Philosophy is unrewarding as a profession, not just for him but supposedly for the rest of us. The trouble is that most of these general complaints don’t really generalize. Most of *his* students may not ‘give a damn about [the] subject, and [may] do their best to get that passing grade with the minimum amount of effort necessary’ but this isn’t true of mine. Like many another I get a real kick out of teaching and this is largely due to the raised hands with the searching questions and the clever objections. ‘Conference attendees [may] sleep through *his* talks, and ask unrelated questions to score their own prestige points’ but they don’t sleep through mine and the questions I get are usually on-topic and sharp. ‘Far too many academics [may be] spoiled and self-important assholes’ in his experience but this is not true of mine. Such self-important assholes undoubtedly exist, perhaps more so in America with it celebrity culture, but most of the philosophers I have met including most of the big names, have been reasonably decent human beings. *He* may loathe conferences and post-conference mingling, but by and large I find them highly enjoyable, including dinner and drinks. But though Fabio may be trying to infect others with his own unhappiness [‘If you are happy, keep doing what you do (are you happy though?)’], he does suggest at least *one* genuine cause for unhappiness in the life of a professional philosopher, though he does it in a rather nasty way:

    I can tell you: most of what you do is supremely useless work. The overwhelming majority of your papers and your book reviews — invariably published in niche journals — will be read maybe by a dozen people … You are not propelling forward the intellectual development of the human species. You’re wasting your life and energies droning away on projects that interest maybe a handful of people worldwide, and that very often have no intrinsic value, if not that of contributing to the reproduction of an abhorrent and rapacious system of academic publishing.

    There is a real problem with Philosophy as a profession, suggested though not fully developed by Fabio, namely that it is a winner-takes-all-economy as defined by Frank and Cook’s book The Winner Take-All Society (1995). A fortunate few are attended to but most people’s papers go largely unread. The rewards in terms of fame and attention are distributed in a concave sided pyramid with a very wide shallow base and a narrow lofty steeple. Most papers are hardly read or cited at all whilst a lucky few have tens or even hundreds of citations. This means that the vast majority of professional philosophers will never achieve their heart’s desire which is to make *and to be recognised as making* a significant contribute to the (international) philosophical debate. This is not (in the main) due to the moral failings of famous philosophers who wantonly disregard the young and struggling but to scholastic acts between consenting adults, scholastic acts of which the young and struggling are equally guilty. As I say, what most of us want, in our heart of hearts, is to be, and to be recognized as being, gifted philosophers who make a major contribution to the discipline. But this is an ambition that most of us will never achieve. Why? Well, precisely *because* of this shared ambition (as well as institutional incentives) books and articles pour off the presses at a rate that no single individual can possibly keep up with. The attention that we can pay to others is finite. Ditto the attention that others can pay to us. There just isn’t world enough and time to read more than a fraction of what might be relevant and even good. (And the problem is compounded if you happen to have wide interests.) So when it comes to what we buy with the currency of attention we all have to be viciously selective, especially as reading a philosophy paper, and still more a book, represents a sizeable investment in terms of time and effort. Nobody wants to waste their time on a dud. We are all like the buyer in the airport bookstore who wants a good book to entertain herself on a long-haul flight. She doesn’t not want to be bored on the flight across the Pacific (since that would make a bad thing worse) so she plumps for the latest Kay Scarpetta novel from Patricia Cornwell. And this is not because she thinks that there aren’t better books in the same genre but because she does not have time to do a search and because she knows that Patricia Cornwell is a reliable purveyor of the right kind of literary product. As it is with thrillers, so it is with Philosophy. A few top names get the lion’s share of the attention and citations, whilst a great many people not very much less talented (or maybe even more so), languish in relative obscurity. We tend to read papers by names that we recognize or which have been recommended to us by people that we trust or admire, because then we can be reasonably confident that we won’t be wasting our time. Furthermore there is a tendency to read the paper that everybody is talking about even if you privately think that there are better papers in the offing, simply because everybody is talking about it and you don’t want to sound like an ignoramus.
    All this does not mean that you are in direct competition with your colleague down the corridor. On the contrary, her fame can contribute to yours and vice versa if you cite her in your successful paper and she cites you in hers. The competition is rather at the collective level. If somebody somewhere is reading one of your papers then somebody somewhere else is not getting read. When it comes to attention and fame, philosophy at large is a limited-sum game.
    Thus it is more or less inevitable that most of us won’t get what we really want.. Philosophy as a profession is an unhappiness machine, unless a) you get lucky and make your way into the spire or b) you give up your heart’s desire. We are collectively being slapped down by the back of the invisible hand.

    NB This adapted from a post in the Philosopher’s Cocoon.

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