A Failure of Becoming a Philosophy Lecturer - The State of Academic Philosophy through the Eyes of a "Philosopher"

Henry Thoreau wrote more than 150 years ago that

"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."

Today I realized that, again, that the academic life is not for me. It is strange how you yearn for something when you do not have it but when you get it you all of a sudden do not want it. For many years, I was a teacher's assistant (TA) and I always thought things like "I would do something different"; "Why did he/she do it like that?"; and so on. I never really thought about actually teaching a module; I always daydreamed.

I finish the module I am teaching this week.

To keep it short: it failed spectacularly. And this is not something negative or something bad; I knew it would happen. The academic system is a broken system; however, if you cannot conform to that broken system, it will chew you and spit you out.

When we read the quote by Thoreau carefully, two different things emerge: the practitioner and the theoretician. The former practices, the latter theorizes. This is obviously an oversimplification, but the premise is that the one cannot be the other. A philosopher, in this quote, is not a philosophy professor (or lecturer). Teaching is therefore somewhat antithetical to praxis or practicing.

It is well known, even as Thoreau states, that, amongst other traditions, the Greeks practiced their philosophies. If an Ancient Greek philosopher could not practice their specific philosophy, they disregarded it as bad philosophy.

But can you practice academic philosophy?

That is, is there any worth in philosophy that takes the following format:

"Published philosophical papers often take the form ‘A rebuttal of Smith's attack on Jones’s defense of Brown’s interpretation of Parker’s repudiation of White’s thesis on Jackson’s philosophy of X’ (where X is some celebrated dead philosopher, usually Wittgenstein)."

This particular passage comes from a philosophical counselor Lou Marinoff. He is one of the few "academic" philosophers who are very critical of "theoretical" philosophy, as you can see in the above quote. But this is true, to some extent. We have various philosophy professors (or lecturers) who are not philosophers!

Philosophy has become a specific type of science. It has for a long disregarded the most important question that the Ancient philosophers knew was important: "How might one live?" More specifically, they all knew the worth of wisdom, practical knowledge, the stuff that you cannot gain from academic articles and books but by living philosophically.

However, one needs to be careful not to bite the hand that feeds you, as the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci states in his review of Marinoff's book on Amazon. But this gets to the heart of the problem that Socrates and Plato dealt with: when does the practice of philosophy become sophistry? When you get paid for philosophizing? When you do it to mislead others? When you cannot practice your philosophy (i.e., it is merely theoretical and not practical)?

After only four months of teaching philosophy, I have seen the process engulfing one. I know I am as they would say in my home language "Nat agter die ore", or directly translated to as "wet behind the ears", meaning I have not experienced anything yet. I am too young to make such claims by now. But I am sure every philosophy student (or other student as well) will have similar stories: lecturers are not teachers and they have become somewhat complacent in their positions. I stumbled upon this post this morning about this very problem on reddit, see the comments if you are interested in this story. So many of the commentators state the same thing: lecturers merely rehash their same notes year after year. They are not living their philosophies.

This statement is obviously oversimplified, but being "this side" of the fence now for a while, I have come to realize how much time one spends doing work that really does not add worth to the world, and how the system essentially creates these docile lecturers (in philosophy) because the students want to spoon-fed and get very angry when you dare give them bad grades.

In a very short sentence: the academy is not conducive to radical new ideas.

To end with one last example, I have sent an article to a very small journal. It has been almost 8 months now and it is still in the reviewing process. It might still be rejected. How can ideas and new concepts be created in this slow and tedious process? Even these people who regulate these things are not very happy with, for example, ChatGPT and the AI revolution in our midst. Rather than teach the students to effectively use these tools, these people want to ban and get rid of them wholesale. Is this environment conducive to spaces for learning and the creation of new concepts and ideas and ways of thinking? Or are these merely old lions trying to defend their territory?

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I am not sure who originally said this, but one needs to write a letter for someone who you are angry at and then wait three days before you send it. Maybe I should have waited before penning these ideas down. But it is rather cathartic to write it in a post and send it into the void of the internet. I hope you somewhat gained something from it! Happy reading, stay well.

The photographs are my own, taken with my iPhone. The musings, unless stated otherwise or hyperlinked, are my own.