Crispin Wright and his elitist implicature

Speranza

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During Summer 2011 Crispin Wright (NIP Director and Professor at NYU) walked The Pennine Way, 268 miles along the "backbone of England" from the Derbyshire peak District to the Scottish Borders.

His aim was to raise money to support graduate students from elsewhere to visit the Northern Institute of Philosophy and to support Northern Institute of Philosophy graduate students to visit other institutions.

This is in line with a general mission of the Institute to support early career philosophers to develop their interests and skills through collaboration and philosophical interactions.

The costs of such visits and exchanges are seldom adequately provided for in the budgets of grant giving authorities, and philosophy departments, even when in principle willing to support research-related travel by graduate students, are less and less able to do so.

We hope to build a Trust Fund at NIP to enable us to provide such support as a part of the regular working routine of the Institute.

Each night of the journey, Crispin answered — or anyway addressed — a philosophical (or not) question chosen by the benefactors.

Below is a sample of one of Crispin's responses, given on day DAY FOURTEEN after walking from Alston to Slaggyford.

“Should philosophy be funded, even if funding it holds forth almost no prospect of improving the lives of ordinary people? If so, why?”

"There are a number of ingredient questions here. One is whether philosophy has any value, – for presumably it should not be funded if it hasn’t. Another is whether the kind of value that philosophy has, or ought to have, depends upon its being appreciated as valuable in the way in which the value of a good joke, perhaps, depends upon its being appreciated as funny. A third is whether it is really true that money spent on funding philosophy has little or no chance of improving the lives of ‘ordinary people’. And a fourth is whether the kind of value that philosophy possesses – if any – is worth funding, given the multitude of pressing demands on scarce resources. Finally there is the question whether, even if it is good that some money be spent on philosophy, it is appropriate that it be public money, or whether the matter should be left to concerned individuals and charities.

So, not a simple question. But matters become still more complex when we ask what we are understanding by ‘philosophy’. I don’t have in mind a distinction between different broad schools of philosophy – say Maoist, or Zen, or Continental, or Analytical – or different areas of philosophy, (though I suppose somebody might think that philosophy of language is worth funding but analytical metaphysics is not ☺.) But we do need to distinguish the teaching of philosophy, the products of philosophy, the process of philosophical research, philosophical conversation, debate and interaction, and outreach – the cultivation of philosophical awareness, and interest, in the wider community.

One thing that I think is clear straight away is that, contrary to what one might first assume, philosophical process is a very large part of the value of philosophy. Suppose it became possible to program computers to take over most of the projects of philosophical research currently being pursued in academia, and to produce articles and books about the issues matching the standards of the better contemporary work. Few would feel, “Well good, we can leave all that to the machines now, and get on with other things”. The quality of its research products is of course an important component in the value of philosophy, but it is crucial that these products be attained by human beings, and strongly preferable that they be attained by a shared process in which there is conversation and mutual understanding of why what results results, of the conceptual pressures and constraints that shape it. It isn’t even true that a good product is a necessary condition of a good philosophical process: an excellent philosophical seminar does not need to result in a blueprint for a research paper.

If this is right, then we should give a qualified endorsement to the analogy with the good joke. A good philosophical process will be one which, necessarily, is appreciated as such by its participants, as interesting, eye-opening, inspiring, and perhaps importantly revisionary. So now the overarching question begins to look something like this: should funds be invested in promoting this kind of activity even if it stands no prospect of improving the lives of the ‘ordinary folk’ who don’t participate in it? Setting aside the elitist implicature that those who do participate are somehow extraordinary, the answer seems to me pretty obvious. If it is a good for those who participate, then in a pluralist and civilized society, participation should be encouraged, and its scope should be widened as far as possible. And now the issue starts to take on essentially the same kind of contour that the corresponding question takes with, say, the performing arts, and sport. It is good that people be trained to participate, to the best of their ability. It is good that those who have the capacity to excel at the highest level be supported to do so. It is good that as many as possible be brought into position where they can appreciate and value such excellence. And it is not good, of course, if such excellence becomes the province of a few, highly trained individuals performing, as it were, behind closed doors.

It is in this last respect that philosophy is especially vulnerable. World class sprinting, or football, can excite people who cannot sprint, or do not know how to kick a ball. Great orchestral music can, to a point, be appreciated by the musically untrained, though there are many different levels of appreciation of musical performance and those who know something of the history of music, who can read a musical score, or who can play an instrument, will literally hear, and enjoy, much more. But in philosophy, as indeed in chess, it can seem that there is no corresponding scale of partial levels of appreciation. An inexperienced chess player will derive no entertainment from observing a game at grandmaster level. And when even graduate students can struggle to follow an exchange between philosophers in the top echelon of the profession, there isn’t likely to be much of interest there to the philosophically untrained.

But I think this merely qualifies the point I am making, rather than defeats it. In the former Soviet Union – and I dare say in Russia still – chess did have the status of a popular sport. There was a culture of chess playing, and training, from an early age, that was quite unmatched anywhere else. And the general level of chess understanding in the population at large was such that the exploits of the great champions – Petrosian, Tal, Botvinnik, Spassky, and the rest – were appreciated in much the way that the skills of top footballers used to be appreciated in the days when almost every kid knew how to trap, shield, pass or run with a football, or a tin can, through long hours of practice in the streets.

Although there is a glint in my eye as I write this, I am not seriously suggesting that we should work towards a culture where analytic philosophy has the same place in the hearts of the citizenry at large as chess had in the former Soviet Union. But I am perfectly serious when I say that the full value of philosophy – as both activity and research discipline – does depend upon the existence of the equivalent of a ‘grass roots’, a culture of philosophical education and awareness contrasting utterly with the narrowing of the subject to an academic specialism, whose movements and preoccupations have absolutely no impact on the thought even of other academics and intellectuals, let alone the population at large, which professional philosophers have largely been content to tolerate almost since I first took an interest in the subject. In doing this they have been allowing the branch to wither on which they sit. Even cosmologists have done a better job of communicating to the public at large something of the general nature of their subject and the present state of its major issues than philosophers.

So of course philosophy should be funded, but only because it belongs to the kind of value that the subject has that the style of thinking it involves, and its preoccupations, is capable of communication to, and beneficial impact upon, the lives of the population in general. In essence, the reasons why philosophy should be funded are more or less the same as those (non-instrumental) reasons why education generally should be funded. But a sea change is needed in the attitudes of philosophers themselves who have, for the most part, too long been content to bury their heads in their teaching and research and to ignore their obligations as wider communicators. When those obligations have come to be more widely met, the title question will no longer seem terribly controversial.

I haven’t touched on the matter of who should fund philosophy. That's another, quite complex discussion in itself."

Other questions rambled:

1.Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. What do you think this means?
2.Are you thinking what I am thinking?
3.Epistemology, Metaphysics, Semantics: are any of the branches of philosophy mentioned more fundamental than the others?
4.What, to your mind, have been the most interesting philosophical ideas in the last 50 years?
5.Have you ever had a radical change of mind about some philosophical topic? What made you change your mind?
6.Who is your philosophical hero and why?
7.Does god exist? Why/why not?
8.Apparently, you're a big football fan. What is it that you like in football?
9.What do you think is the hardest philosophical question?
10.What are numbers?
11.What do you think is the most important thing that you learnt from your teachers?
12.What do you take to be your biggest philosophical achievement?
13.Why are there so few women doing analytic philosophy?
14.What can philosophy achieve?
15.You founded two philosophical research centres? Why?
16.Have you ever had a radical change of mind about some philosophical topic? Which one? What made you change your mind?
17.How should we conceive of truth in philosophy?
18.If scientists explain the world and how things work, what do philosophers do?
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19.What is philosophy?
20.Has being a philosopher had an impact on how you approach life?

For more information on Wright’s Philosophical Ramblings.