As I mentioned in the last post, Devon and I are reading through Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and by chance I happened to stumble onto a discussion of one of the most famous passages from the book while reading Slavoj Zizek’s How to Read Lacan (the title is a misnomer, I learned nothing about how to read Lacan, but there were some good jokes and interesting observations in there nevertheless). Quoting Lacan, Zizek says:

“As you know, the father Karamzov’s son Ivan leads the latter into those audactious avenues taken by the thought of the clutivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn’t exist…–If God doesn’t exist, the father says, then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naive notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day.”

The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed is not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. ‘If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited’ means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions that sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted — this this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants: his acts are redeemed in advance, since they express the divine will…)

pg. 92, How to Read Lacan

I’m really intrigued by this inversion in part because the supplementary thesis strikes me as hitting on something correct–if one is convinced that one is doing God’s will, then there’s nothing that can’t be justified. This goes for any idea or institution that can play the God role here: if you’re acting on behalf of the people’s will, the glorious revolution, the Reich, or the nation, then, likewise, you are justified in killing, torturing, and imprisoning indefinitely. We in the US know as much based on what we have done and continue to do in the name of protecting the freest nation in the world (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the border prisons, etc.).

But what about the inverted thesis itself? Is there anything true to the claim that if God doesn’t exists that nothing is permitted? I think there is. Dostoyevsky’s main concern in the non-inverted thesis is, I believe, that without a central source of moral authority there would be no source of authority, and, consequently, nothing would be forbidden. The kernel of truth in the inverted thesis is that there being no central source of authority does not entail that there would be no source of authority whatsoever. The fact that there’s no central source is compatible with, for example, there being a plurality of sources of such authority. At its limit, every single person is such a source and the demands and constraints that each person makes on others comes with the moral authority that God himself is thought to have imposed.

One place where Zizek/Lacan agree with Dostoyevsky is that in such a situation the individual can be such a source of moral authority. Where they part is that the latter sees this as a horrifying liberty in the sense that to be one’s source of moral authority is to permit oneself to do anything. This, of course, takes us back to the truth of the supplementary thesis: if anything that is God’s will is justified and if I myself have the authority of God, then anything that is my will is also justified. By contrast, the former two see the same step as a horrifying constraint. But why? I think it’s because they’re sensitive to the fact that even in a situation like this we would extrapolate from the authority we take ourselves to have to the authority that everyone else also has (a rather Kantian move), such that the authority of others would also enter into our considerations. The elimination of a single God would result in as many Gods as there are people, each of which would have the same moral authority as everyone else. In other words, the death of God doesn’t really eliminate him, but only multiplies him (as the old gang slogan goes: “Crips/Bloods don’t die, we multiply”).

The problem here, it should be clear, is partially an epistemic one. When God is around, despite his perpetual game of hide-and-go-seek, we are presented with some clear rules, some clear tasks, and some well-known institutions that tell us how to live. Those institutions and God himself are always watching, it’s true, but we have a more or less clear idea of how to satisfy them and stay in the clear. At least in theory we have a way of figuring out what we need to know so we can structure our lives accordingly and then move along. When God or any central moral authority disappears from the scene and everyone becomes a source of moral authority, one is faced with a seemingly insurmountable epistemic task of figuring out what is permitted and what is forbidden. One is then forced to continually monitor oneself and bring in the eye of the other in an effort to imagine the many Gods that might object to what one is doing–and there’s always the possibility that one has missed something… This, I believe, is what Lacan means when he says that neurotics show us that if God doesn’t exist then nothing is permitted since the neurotic is someone who is obsessed with feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety. And who could blame them if they truly do think that every one of their thoughts, actions, beliefs, and expressions is subject to innumerable judgments by uncountable Gods!

Now, I don’t want to overstate the importance of this observation nor do I want to imply that I think in some way we would be better off if we believed in a central moral authority. Whatever it is that I’m trying to work through here it’s not a lamentation for a simpler time in which people believed in God–my atheism hasn’t been affected by these considerations and I think anyone who is affected by them in this way was probably a true believer all along. Rather, I merely think that there’s something accurate about our psychology that’s captured by the interplay between these competing theses and that tells us about how we think about the world.

Let me bring this down to earth with a rather pedestrian example. There’s quite a substantial amount of people who have made it into a lifestyle to criticize ‘cancel culture’ (and an equally substantial amount of people who have done the same to defend it). Apart from those people are, I assume, an large group who don’t know where they stand on the benefits or harms of ‘canceling’ people but who feel some amorphous anxiety around it. I think at least part of that anxiety is a result of the dialectic that’s been highlighted: there appears to be no central authority to which we can appeal to with respect to what’s permissible and what is forbidden, but instead a multiplicity of sources that have a certain equal moral authority and which are always watching. This appears to them, I think, as the same insurmountable epistemic problem that we saw earlier: if there’s a central authority then one can learn how to live so as to forget about that authority and move along; if there is no central authority, then one must always monitor oneself to prevent transgression and life becomes a never-ending neurotic fixation (“Am I doing as much as I can to prevent animal suffering?”; “Were my intentions in having that conversation pure or did I have an alternative aim?”; “Did I think about this person in a way that exemplifies a moral failure?” etc.).

I say it appears to them as such because in many cases there is no such epistemic problem. There’s no fundamental epistemic problem with the claim that people shouldn’t say racist things, that the police shouldn’t kill people, that being transphobic causes massive amounts of harm, etc. Nobody should use what I’ve said so far to conclude that there is no legitimate basis for why people are ‘canceled’ or that it’s somehow always unjustified to do so. I believe in the majority of cases, perhaps, ‘canceling’ people serves to highlight some very important concerns that haven’t been taken seriously in the past. Nor should this be read as a defense of people who experience the kind of neurotic anxiety that is unearthed when we act as though God is dead (regardless of whether he is or not). But I do think we can understand those people and that anxiety a little better, and maybe learn about how a decentralized morality of the kind that we engage in now can work (if indeed it can, as I hope it can).

I’ll leave with one final parting thought. Namely, that we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that it can’t work. It strikes me as true that when push comes to shove and some of the issues I’ve brought out here have come to the front there is always a retreat to a central authority whether that authority be God, the People, the Nation, Reason, Nature, or morality itself. I think we still very much have an urge to centralize and to appeal to something beyond ourselves and to return to the supplementary thesis that allows us to do anything at all if only because we’re doing God’s/the People’s/Morality’s will. Maybe this is a permanent feature of our psychology, maybe it’s something we can change. I’m not sure.

Recently, my partner Devon and I decided to have a little book club during quarantine and to read The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. She’s never read it and I’ve only read it from cover to cover once, many years ago when I was in high school. Nevertheless, the book made such a strong impression on me that I still consider it the greatest novel ever written–or, in any case, the greatest novel ever written that has been read by me.

On starting this time around I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s essay on the multi-volume biography of Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank. The essay is partially a review of the latest volume in the series, partially a reflection on what makes Dostoevsky worth reading in general, and partially an indictment of modern literature. With regards to the latter two, Wallace’s central claim is that what makes Dostoevsky great is not only his genius, but also his courage–the courage to really grapple with ideological issues that matter to being a person. By contrast, our contemporary authors not only seem averse to taking such issues seriously, but are also rendered unable to do so by the intellectual milieu in which we find ourselves. After presenting a paradigmatically Dostoevskyan serious passage from The Idiot, he says:

Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile. Maybe, if the novelist was really major, a dry bit of mockery in The New Yorker. The novelist would be (and this is our own age’s
truest vision of hell) laughed out of town.

This “vision of hell” is one in which we, as producers of literature (and, I presume, insofar as we are also consumers of it, too) are so cynical, so trapped beneath layers of nihilism and irony, that any earnest attempt to tackle such serious topics are met with derision and condescension. This is a feature of the sociology of writing: our books cannot have characters that directly address the heady topics that matter to being a person because our authors cannot be people who produce such characters if they are to continue to be taken seriously as authors. As Wallace suggests, this is partly due to the legacy of Modernism which made it the case that “Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.” To produce literature of Dostoevsky’s kind post Modernity is to be a historical anachronism, to be seen as a less-than-fully developed as a writer, as out of fashion, and as quaint or naive as would be a person who attempted to seriously write a modern day Homeric Epic.

In light of this, “writers have to either make jokes of [the serious topics] or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.” Wallace, of course, himself does this shit fully self aware of what he’s doing though it’s hard to tell if he’s also being ironic in doing so. If he is, it’s a bitter kind of irony that laments the limitations that he himself has to face as a writer. He wants to address these topics, he recognizes their importance, but he is aware that if they are to be addressed it must be done indirectly, through, once again, formal tricks rather than genuine engagement.

I don’t know enough about contemporary literature to know if Wallace is ultimately correct about this. However, there is something about the earnestness and eagerness of Dostoevsky’s characters that seems to belong to a former era and which would appear too romantic, too blunt, too moralizing in a contemporary setting. It seems incredibly difficult to hold in mind both the contemporary moment and to imagine that in such a moment there could be people who really do take things seriously in the way the characters do. How could one both be concerned with what it means to truly have faith and at the same time live in a world in which we are told that the things that matter are what (until recently at least) the big wet president might tweet? The mind reels. And not because the latter didn’t or doesn’t matter–the effects of those tweets were very, very real–but because they seem so divorced from the former. The very notion of taking these concepts seriously seems silly and unattainable if seriousness itself has taken such a farcical form. How can one even attempt to face the eternal questions if the day-to-day ones seems profoundly puzzling? In that respect Wallace is right to point to the raised eyebrow and wry smile that is likely to accompany such an effort as a dismissive and condescending one which also signals a condemnation of hubris by the one giving it. There are no more Tolstoys or Dostoevskys–there are no Kants, Marxes, or Hegels–and you think you could be one? Stick to the minutia. Try to get at least something small right.

In that respect Wallace is also right to point to Dostoevsky’s courage because it really would be a mark of courage to take on such a task today.

In another respect, however, and in light of what has been said already, I think Wallace is too one sided in his assessment here. Part of what prevents authors from being able to write about such things is not simply the sociology of writing, but the broader world of which it is a sociology. It’s important to note that Dostoevsky’s discussions of the heaviest topics are always put into the mouths of his characters and developed through their conversations with each other–they are not the kinds of direct exposition that Wallace himself puts in asterisks in the essay. It makes sense for the characters to say the kind of things that they say because it makes sense for there to be characters who take such things seriously. In other words, Dostoevsky as a writer is able to write about these things because we–and presumably his contemporary audience–can imagine such people really grappling with those issues. Wallace is right that Dostoevsky’s books are ideological; they are such because his characters are ideological and because they represent people who grapple and struggle with their ideologies in order to make sense of their lives. It is in that context that they appear as truly captivating and full characters.

I’m not sure that in the present moment (and at the moment that Wallace was writing) we are, generally speaking, still such people. This is not to say that we are not ideological–our generation is no more immune to ideology than any previous one and the cogs and gears of our particular capitalist mode of ideology continue to spin at breakneck speed. But it is to suggest that we are not self-consciously ideological in the way that leads us to truly grapple with the questions that are presented before us. We believe things, but do not see ourselves as bound by such beliefs in any way that matters–not in a way that could cause significant prolonged suffering or strife because we have committed to believing in them. As such, if we were to encounter such characters in today’s setting (rather than as a relic of the past) we would find them hard to understand and alienating. And this, I think, is as much a fact about us as it is about the vision of hell that contemporary writers have to live with.

Before I get too carried away, let me say, dear reader, that in passing general judgment on all of us as I have in the previous paragraph, I do not mean to suggest that there are no exceptions to this judgment, either in writing or in vivo. There are people who do take things seriously precisely in the way Dostoevsky’s characters would and for whom the questions that they grapple with are very much pressing ones, and I’m sure there are writers who write of these people as well. Some may even be taken Seriously by others. But, on the whole, I do think that the majority of people are not like this and that perhaps this is to our detriment.

Let me also say that I do not count myself among the Serious people. This reflection serves as much as a confessional to and a condemnation of my own inability to grapple with the questions that truly matter. To say this is perhaps more embarrassing than it normally would be given my pretensions at being a philosopher, who by definition is supposed to be preoccupied with such matters. (Notice that I can’t even bring myself to treat what I’ve spent the last decade of my life’s work as anything other than a pretension! How silly it seems to take it as anything other than that! How could anyone working in the field do otherwise? What hubris!) But it’s true and it doesn’t do any good to pretend otherwise.

The questions that remain are whether it is possible to be otherwise–to live earnestly and authentically with a self-conscious ideology–and whether it would be good to do so. I don’t know the answer to either question.

Every one of us is going to die, and, for the majority of us, this is going to be a bad thing. There may be some people for whom death would be a good thing, and others whose deaths would be a good thing for us, but, on the whole, I take it as a bit of common sense that death is a bad thing.

Nevertheless, some of us will have better deaths than others, and given that each one of us is guaranteed to die, it seems in our best interest to have a good of a death as possible. But what does it take to have a good death?

Part of this question can be answered by thinking about what it means to have a bad death. Here we can point to a multiplicity of factors that seem important. Some such factors involve our bodily integrity and psychological wellbeing: we don’t want to die a prolonged, painful death, nor do we want to die afraid or completely unaware of where we are or what’s happening.

Other factors, however, involve considerations about our values. For example, we don’t want to die having forgotten about the things or people that mattered in our lives. This is true even if we know that we won’t realize that we’ve forgotten or if we know that forgetting such things won’t be disturbing to us. I take it this is part of what makes the final stages of dementia so disturbing to those who observe them. Not being bothered by the fact that one can’t remember the face of one’s child seems to make that death worse rather than better, and there are few people (if any) who both love their children and would choose to die in this way.

Not only do we want to remember the good things that have happened in our lives, but we also want to be remembered for the good things that we helped bring about. Part of why so many of us don’t want to die alone is, I believe, because to die surrounded by loved ones is to die knowing that one was worthy of being loved and that one will continue to be loved at least for a while. If it matters to us that we’re loved while we’re alive, it seems to also matter to us that we’re loved while we’re dying and after we’ve died.

Likewise, it seems to matter to us that we die in a way that aligns with what we valued in life, or, at the very least, that we don’t die in a way that goes against what we valued. The revolutionary who dies betraying the revolution does not have a good death; the one who dies in service of it arguably does. Similarly, we tend to think that there are cases in which it would be better to die without compromising certain values rather than continue to live having done so (Sophocles’ Ajax is one example; Sartre’s Garcin is another, though for slightly different reasons).

Finally, it seems to make a difference to how we evaluate its quality whether our death is arbitrary or senseless. As it relates to the last point, whether a death is senseless seems to at least sometimes be a factor of whether one died in a way that is relevant to what one valued in life–the death of a Resistance fighter in Nazi France may be regrettable, but because the cause for which the life was given was not senseless, so the death itself also does not appear senseless. The contrast is clear to see when compared with the death of someone trampled during a Black Friday sale or a person who’s killed by a falling tree during a storm.

[There is related sense in which a death can be arbitrary or senseless that has more to do with whether or not it is expected. We do not necessarily think that the death of our very elderly relatives (late 80’s and 90’s, for example) is senseless because we partially expect that it’s simply a matter of course that people of that age die. This is not to say that their deaths do not affect us, and we might think that it’s senseless or arbitrary that they should die rather than someone else of a similar age. But we don’t tend to think that this kind of arbitrariness makes their death worse. By contrast, our intuitions on the matter are radically different when we talk about the death of a child or very young person. There, we can rarely muster any semblance in which the death makes sense or doesn’t appear arbitrary and I think it’s partially due to the fact that we simply don’t expect such people to die.

There are other cases in which deaths seem senseless because although they are expected we have a sense that they could have been avoided. One might think of wartime deaths as such.]

It also seems right to say that all things being equal, the addition of one or more of these factors to another makes a difference to the goodness or badness of the death. All things being equal, a death that is painful and arbitrary is worse than a death that is only arbitrary, and one that is painful, arbitrary, and goes against what the person valued in life is worse than the other two.

How things play out in middling cases is more complicated: for example, all other things being equal, is a painful death better or worse than a lonely death? Is a death accompanied with extreme dementia better or worse than a death accompanied with extreme fear but done for a cause that is in line with one’s value? I don’t know that there’s an easy or straightforward answer to those questions. My suspicion is that our intuitions on the matter will depend on how these features are related to questions about what the person valued in life and those, in turn, will be a matter of what we think is valuable in life.

Consider, for example, the question of whether it is better or worse to die a painful death than a lonely (but painless) one. If we consider the death in question to be that of a miserly misanthrope who never derived an ounce of happiness from the company of others, then it makes sense to say that the better death for him is the lonely and painless one since, all things considered, we can imagine that the loneliness wouldn’t be a source of distress for him. Pain, on the other hand, is by definition something that is distressing to anyone who experiences it, so, given the choice between one kind of death that is not distressing and another that is, it’s better to pick the former rather than the latter.

Nevertheless, we might still think that despite the fact that a lonely death would be better for him given the kind of life he’s lived, it still doesn’t constitute a good death tout-court since we might hold that the kind of life that would lead to that kind of death being good one is itself not a good one. To put the matter another way, certain courses of action may be preferable if one finds oneself in certain terrible situations that would not be preferable at all if one had never been in that situation in the first place.

Note, this is not to say that there are cases in which it’s good that one dies in pain, but rather that there might be cases, given how one has structured one’s life, in which it would be preferable to die painfully, but not alone rather than the other way around. In such cases what would make one death better than another is not that pain becomes a ‘good-making’ feature for that person where it’s not for another, but that dying alone would simply be much worse than dying in pain and, hence, that dying in pain would be better.

The same considerations can be extended to the second question. Namely, given how committed one is to a certain cause, it might be preferable to die for something one believes in while extremely afraid than to die without fear without having any commitments to anything whatsoever. Where we land on that question will be a matter of what kind of life we can imagine the person having and what they valued during it–a person who valued much of anything (if there are indeed such people) other than being distressed might find a death without fear to be preferable to one with it. Nevertheless, even if we accept that this is the case we might still wonder whether having such a good death is worth it if its goodness is only contingent on having a bad life.

I don’t mean for these arguments to be decisive in settling all difficult cases on the subject. There may be some cases in which the grounds for preferring one kind of death over another have nothing to do with the kind of life one has lived or what one has valued in life. There may simply be just horrible ways to die regardless of any such considerations–the agony of dying of rabies, for example, seems to have everything to do with how awful the process is and not with anything about what matters in life (the appeal to the fact that we value not being in agony goes some way here, but it feels like it’s one thought too many). Likewise, just because I’ve pointed out that in some terrible situations one way of dying may be preferable to another doesn’t show that those preferable choices are good. Given the option between a cup of poison and old, moldy bread, it’s preferable to eat the moldy bread, but that shouldn’t make us think for a second that it’s good to eat moldy bread. Likewise, the fact that it might be preferable to die in pain than to die alone shouldn’t make us think that there’s something good about dying in pain (I made this point above, but I’m repeating it so that I’m not misunderstood).

Nevertheless, the fact that the arguments are not decisive with respect to some of the hard cases does not mean that there isn’t something important in general about the connection between what makes for a good death and how one has lived. The simple point is that, I believe, in very many cases what counts as a good death and whether one will be able to have a good death is a function of whether one has had a good life.

If one has not lived a good life, as our misanthrope above has not, then what makes his death good will be limited in certain ways. It could not, for example, be a reflection of how much he is loved or how much he will be missed. If he valued nothing but his own comfort and well-being, then his death cannot be good in the sense that it constitutes a commitment to anything else that might be of value. He might still be able to have a death that is not as bad as it can possibly be if, for example, he avoids dying painfully or under extreme duress, but this doesn’t mean that it will be an unequivocally good death. Indeed, it might be possible that given certain kinds of lives the avenues to such a death are simply closed off (aside: the promise of salvation at one’s deathbed by Christianity leaves always leaves open one such avenue–that this is actually open is something I’ve always been skeptical of, but then again, I’ve never been a believer).

What should we say about the person who has lived a generally good life? Does it follow that if some avenues for a good death are closed off by having a certain kind of bad life that things are better off for the person who has lived well? Sadly, I don’t think that it does. In the first place, it’s not clear that an increase in possible paths towards a good death necessarily translates into a higher probability that one will end on one of those paths. Indeed, if it’s true that one has an unqualifiedly good death only by reaching the end of those paths–i.e. if one achieves a good death not only by valuing certain things, but by having their death constitute an affirmation of those values–then perhaps this only multiples the ways one can fail to have a good death.

Perhaps more troubling, and somewhat related, is the fact that many people think that what makes being dead bad is the fact that death deprives us of whatever is good in life. Thus, it seems to follow that the better our lives go, the more good things death deprives us of and the worse it is for us. If that’s true, then perhaps we can still achieve a good death, but only at the expense of our being dead being much, much worse.

Ain’t that some shit?

Indulge me in this extended analogy: a good philosopher is like a good map-maker.

A good map-maker, quite obviously, makes good maps and good maps have certain general features. In the first place, all maps are simplified representations of reality. No map is a true one-to-one representation of reality–such a map, as Borges reminds us, would be entirely useless. Given this first feature, every map has to be selective in what it represents. A good map only includes representations of those features or landmarks that are necessary for achieving the goal of getting around. It does not include minutiae that would make that task difficult, nor does it represent landmarks that are irrelevant. Third, it represents the relevant landmarks in such a way that they are easily recognizable by someone reading the map–there is sufficient similarity between the representation of the Eiffel Tower and the real thing so that one can know when they’ve encountered it in travelling around Paris. Finally, a good map doesn’t just represent the various landmarks, roads, subway stops, but also shows the (spatial) relations that hold between them. We know where Grand Central Station stands in relation to the Penn Station and other stops and that knowledge allows us to understand how we need to get to where we want to go.

The same four features apply in good philosophy. A good philosopher attempts to present the truth in their work, but does not attempt to represent all of reality through it (though perhaps great philosophers manage to do something close to it through their entire oeuvre). Instead, they focus only on certain slices of reality, selectively chosen for specific purposes, which are usually presented as central questions or puzzles to be solved. To do this, they describe different concepts or ideas that help orient us, focusing our attention on only those that are relevant for solving the puzzle or answering the central question. If they do this well, they are able to describe these concepts clearly so that we can recognize and understand them even if we haven’t ‘seen’ them before. And, finally, they not only describe these concepts, but also show us the relation between them, helping us see how one is or is not connected to another.

We want to know what it takes to live a good life. The good philosopher draws our attention to those features of the world that matters to achieving that goal–to happiness, to virtue, to art, to beauty, to value, to excellence; they describe them in such a way that we can orient ourselves with respect to each and recognize them with relation to our goal. Even if we don’t know what virtue is, the good philosopher is able to lead us to find it is by describing something else that we do know about (e.g. happiness), and showing us how it is related to the new unfamiliar thing. Finally, they allow us to see how and why all the things described help us to find the good life.

We can extend this analogy further to point out some ways in which one might fail to be a good philosopher. They might make a ‘map’ in which more than what is necessary is represented–they may rely on a superabundance of concepts or of very specific minute and irrelevant ones that makes the drawing of relations between the important ones difficult or obscure. The poor philosopher might pick the right ‘landmarks’ but describe them so poorly as to not be recognizable by people who encounter them (obtuse, obscure, or unnecessarily technical language does much of the work here; bizarre intuitions, etc.). They might describe everything well, but may fail to show how what is described is relevant to solving the central problem at hand. The perfect theory of reasons may be nice, but if we want to know how to live the good life and can’t see the connection between that theory and the question that concerns us, then it makes little difference. Or, they might describe the relevant concepts very well but fail to show us how they relate to one another (some of Wittgenstein’s philosophy feels this way to me at times–don’t kill me).

Tragically, we may also have ‘maps’ that were perfectly good at one time, but which no longer bear any resemblance to the city in which we find ourselves (perhaps some ancient philosophy of science or political philosophy is such). Or we may have simply forgotten why we wanted to get to Central Park but continue to judge each map on whether it takes us there (e.g. cottage industries, fads, the philosophy that spins out of central figures, etc.).

Likewise, it’s possible to have a fantastic map that isn’t treated as such because we don’t yet realize the purpose for which it is to be used. I suspect much of the history of philosophy is filled the scraps of such maps.

These are, of course, just general rules of thumb that are subject to exceptions. Many of the truly great philosophers have been able to violate them one way or another and nevertheless remain great. Sometimes I think this is because the central puzzles they raise are so interesting that other aspects fall to the side; sometimes it’s because the way they describe things is truly revolutionary; sometimes because they show relations that we never suspected, etc.

The motivation for this piece is purely personal and highly speculative but is the result of some very concrete circumstances that have been weighing on me for quite a while and which, I believe have a broader scope than my own feelings at the moment. Nevertheless, I’ve restrained myself to speaking strictly from a first-person perspective and make no official presumptions that my position is one that has bearing outside of its narrow scope. As such, the reader should beware that this piece is more self-indulgent than normal and fairly rambling.

The central question that interests me is that of what happens when one finds oneself alienated from a project to which one has devoted a considerable amount of time and energy and through which one has come to understand their own place in the world. For me, this is the project of being an academic philosopher.

How I got wrapped up in this project is, like many such projects that one commits to, quite unclear. I remember that at some point in my early days as an undergraduate I decided that I wanted to pursue philosophy seriously and make a career out of it. Just when that happened and on what grounds I decided to do this, I admit, I have forgotten. The best I can make of it is that I remember finding philosophy more challenging and invigorating than any other subject I had encountered, and thinking that the work being done was important and admirable. Why this vague memory should sustain me through one failed attempt at going to grad school, a master’s degree, and a PhD program is beyond me but I suspect similar stories can be told about other similar projects. I suspect that for many of us, the pursuits of such projects never starts with a clear view of where they’ll end up or how they’ll be possible to complete, but rather with a naive commitment to its fulfillment that eventually becomes a force of habit that we can’t break without feeling that something terribly important would be lost. As I tell my students occasionally when they ask me why I decided to do philosophy, I find myself living with the decisions of a person who I no longer remember for reasons that were never quite clear.

The genetic analysis here does nothing to change the fact that I do find myself living with these decisions, nor does it change the fact that they have given me certain reasons to structure and follow a certain path. That is to say that even if I were to find some long-lost diary which spelled out my initial thinking and judged the reasoning there to be incredibly poor, it wouldn’t change the fact that now, in my fifth year of my PhD I have come to live a certain life that simply wouldn’t make sense outside of this context. All this is to say that the solution to the problem that bothers me isn’t to be found in some initial mistake. Something more must be said.

In the current context, the fact of the matter is that it is becoming more unlikely that a future in the profession is likely to develop. Part of this is due to external circumstances. The political and economic circumstances developing around the COVID-19 epidemic make it unlikely that the university system will have much space for the amount of academics that have been trained within it. Given how universities in the United States are funded and the risky games they have played in modeling themselves after businesses, accepting decades-long cuts to state and federal funding, I just don’t see there being an expansion of jobs in the next decade (at the earliest). Rather, I expect that there will be significant austerity measures that will be taken specifically against the humanities. While I do have some friends who are optimistic that this will be balanced out as professors retire, or who cite the fact that graduate enrollment increases during recessions, I remain skeptical. I simply don’t believe that the vacated positions will be preserved and kept open for younger candidates, nor do I think that the increase in graduate enrollment will spur further expansions of positions. Rather, I suspect that the field will constrict and that the existing faculty will be asked to do more with less.

This is not to say that there will be a complete closing of the humanities just yet. There will still be positions available, but these will be fewer than normal and will drive competition among the candidates to increase such that only the most brilliant, dedicated, and productive scholars will be considered. Those familiar with the process have already seen how the 2008 recession affected application portfolios. The changes that resulted from that recession proved themselves to be permanent and I see no reason to think that this recession will be different (unless, of course, a political, social, and economic revolution occurs that serves to heavily subsidize the academy and its labor. While this is possible, I’m not holding my breath). In short, the crunch that will be the result of this will leave room for geniuses in the field, but probably not much more room for people who are not.

This brings in the other factor that I think is at play. I don’t believe that I’m a genius, nor do I think I have the fortitude of spirit to, say, manage three publications in the next two years. I don’t say this to be modest, but rather as a bit of self-reflective honesty. I’m a clear thinker and a good writer, but at this stage in my development I don’t have the brilliant streaks that would allow me to revolutionize the field. There may be others who have believe they have these streaks, but I have yet to meet them. In any case, if there are people who genuinely have them, they will be fine.

A bigger worry for me is that there may be other people who equally don’t have these streaks of genius, but who through sheer force of will and fortitude are able to achieve what they set out to do. There may indeed be people who are able to spend ten hours a day, every day, reading and writing without being fatigued or worn down, but as I mentioned, I don’t think I’m that kind of person. (Here, perhaps, the origin of that motivation to pursue this kind of life might matter–maybe the spark of inspiration that initially brought them to the discipline still burns bright. But again, I believe if there are such people, they are few and far between)

Along with these two factors is the further fact that in the past five years my understanding of the value of philosophy has shifted quite significantly. I still think the work is incredibly important and I still find myself to be challenged and inspired by reading and writing, but there are certain questions that have come to loom closer to my mind. Namely, I see myself now as much more politically oriented and motivated, which has brought my thinking to spheres that appear much broader and more important than the comparably narrower way of thinking that I’ve had in the past decade. I find myself deeply troubled about the reluctance that academic philosophers have to actually be political and engaged in a world that doesn’t start and stop at the gates of the university.

I also find myself deeply frustrated by the fact that even in their work, philosophers don’t see anything like a full and unified project that goes beyond a single, clearly defined, narrow problem. Writers will spend pages and pages on minutiae, bring criticisms to specific issues, then publish criticisms of those criticisms and pat themselves on the back for contributing to the field while failing to incorporate this dialectic into anything broader. It all feels like noticing and analyzing different parts of a car engine without understanding the car itself or the function that the engine serves.

This should not be seen as an attack on the grounds of the impracticality of philosophy, nor do I think that the value of philosophical thinking must be brought down to some concrete particular that must be addressed. Even when philosophers do address practical concerns they seem so divorced from what they’re writing about in terms of how they live. That is, modern academic philosophy seems to be what is done as separate from life, much in the same way that one might go to work at a factory and crank out widgets only to return home and then switch to an entirely different mode of living.

My frustration shouldn’t be seen as an indictment of any individual philosopher either. I understand the pressures and incentives that generate this kind of behavior and attitude and I don’t blame people for following them. This, I believe is another unfortunate result of the neoliberalisation of the academy in which the publish-or-perish model of merit operates. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t see philosophers as different from other kinds of workers with respect to their livelihood. However, I am frustrated–perhaps at myself–for thinking that things would and should be different here.

My frustration should also not be taken as applying to everyone equally. I’m sure that there are wonderful scholars who are currently doing precisely what I wish would be done. Rather, it’s a general impression. Nor do I intend to imply that I am somehow different in this respect–the little work I’ve done is just as myopic and narrow as anyone else’s (and probably much worse for other reasons!). So, I’m not coming from a position of moral or intellectual superiority. I hope that’s clear.

But let’s return to the problem at hand which can now be put in the form that I’m aware of all these things–the internal and external factors that are at play in making it likely that my project will come to an end–and yet, find myself with the same reasons and life that I’ve had so far.

To put it another way, I find myself realizing that I have certain reasons to be such-and-such a way which find their grounds in who I am (from the inside, as it were), and some very good reasons to think that this is not possible which also find their grounds in who I am (internally and externally, given that despite my psychology I still live in a recession and still have to feed myself).

This raises the rather uninteresting question of which reasons are supposed to be decisive here. The question is uninteresting to me because I think that the obvious answer is both: think hard about which ones are more pressing and go with those. One might say, for example, that this is a bit of bad luck (intrinsic or extrinsic whatever may be the case) and that I should just go with what would make me happiest or whatever. This is fine, but again, uninteresting.

The more interesting question is how one is supposed to live in light of following either of these reasons. In either case something of a great loss seems to be on the line: on the one hand, “making my peace” with not being able to pursue my project leaves me without a basis for which to make sense of what I’m doing. My life loses structure which must be replaced with something else–something towards which my energies are directed and towards which I’m striving. On the other hand, continuing to pursue what may very well be a lost cause (either because of the political and economic conditions or because of my own shortcomings) would preserve this structure, but would itself seem to lack any substance and would be haunted by perpetual doubt and anxiety. One side of me takes the latter solution to be untenable in the long run; another side of me takes the former to be psychologically dangerous. Life is not impossible with either route, but both represents certain real risks that seem incredibly pertinent.

Let’s turn to the route of “making one’s peace” and losing the project. Not only do I take this to be dangerous, but I’m also not sure that it’s the correct one. Despite my thoughts to the contrary earlier, I’m not certain that it’s impossible for me to continue my project of being a philosopher and I’m not sure that my thinking about the matter isn’t a result of reacting to some deep-seated anxiety. That is, I’m not sure that I’m actually incapable of climbing the mountain, or if I’m so scared to climb it that I would retreat to anything that tells me that I shouldn’t. I believe every graduate student who is familiar with the concept of impostor syndrome is familiar with this thought–could we be sabotaging ourselves by not believing and hoping against hope? Perhaps if I could become a different person who wouldn’t be anxious, everything would be okay…

At the same time, a similar problem presents itself from the other direction as well: could the urge to hope against hope simply be another anxiety stemming from the fact that, once again, to be left without a structure, without a project, is to be left without a way to make sense of one’s life?

In this light, the problem of competing reasons reveals itself to be a problem of competing anxieties and complexes. What a horrible and suffocating light it is! Are there people in this condition who possess such-transparency and such honesty that they can look inside and truly say “there is no danger or living reactively for me! I am not pushed by worries or anxieties!”? Where are they? From where do they get this unquestioning confidence?

But maybe I’m being too hard on myself. One could see the problem I’m facing as a problem of growth. A kind person might say that I have grown to be a different person from the person that I was ten, five, or even three years ago, and that the tension that I’m feeling is that of growing out of a certain stage of life and into another. This growth would not be that of superiority–I haven’t transcended academic philosophy–and it may very well be the growth that is compatible with both the internal and external conditions described earlier. That is, it could be a growth of coming to know oneself better and coming to terms with that. Such transitions are by their nature anxiety producing, so it’s not surprising that they take this form. One simply needs to learn to accept the person who one is becoming and all will be fine.

Looking at the problem in this light is much more comforting, but I think it pushes the problem elsewhere. Namely, it assumes that growth of this kind is, at the end of the day, something good–it is not something that should be pushed away or rejected, but, at the very least, tolerated and eventually accepted as an inevitability.

But that’s not something that I can honestly accept. Behind it lies the suspicion that not all growth is good, and that the person who one becomes is not always the person who one should have become or who one should make one’s peace with. It seems just as possible that there are ways that people ‘grow’ that reflect their worst characteristics and that if what I’m experiencing is growth, then its source may very well be laziness, indolence, self-centeredness, and incompetence.

I think if I could remove the doubt that this is the case and if I could know that such a transformation would indeed be a good one, then I would feel much better. But I don’t know how to remove it. Nor do I know the standard by which I would judge whether it is successful or not. Should it be judged from the perspective of the person who started the project? Should it be judged from the perspective of the person who I am to become? In both cases there’s a bias to be deceptive, to look away, to read one’s history differently and inaccurately. And why should either one of these perspectives be favored over the other? Why should the person who I no longer remember be the judge of what I become?–how suffocating! And why should the person I become be the arbiter of whether what they’ve become is worthwhile?–how cruel!

I really don’t know how to solve this problem but I believe it must be solved if there’s anything like a happy life for me in the future. Maybe I’m looking at the matter too naively, or too closely. If so, drop a comment below.