To set a price for oneself whereby one becomes no longer a person but merely a cog! Are you co-conspirators in the current folly sweeping over nations, which, above all else, want to produce as much as possible and to be as rich as possible? Your concern ought to hold out to them a counter-reckoning: what vast sums of genuine inner value are being squandered on such a superficial external goal! (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 206).
Like other fields with a high degree of professionalism and lots of competition, academic philosophy exacts a lot of us. It requires we're willing to move practically anywhere, face painful dilemmas about family, finding jobs in the same area of your spouse, relocate multiple times, lose our savings yet again, and–hardest of all–lose our friends or opportunities to be close to parents and siblings. For those of us who are first-generation, or immigrant, or both, it also often requires we cut emotional ties with our friends and home environment. Even if we don't want to cut ties, it happens, almost inevitably. Or so is my experience.
But to what extent does academic philosophy require that you give up yourself? To what extent does it require the loss of authenticity?
I've been mulling over this especially after I read this moving piece of philosophical autobiography. The piece is written by Fabio, who ended his career as a philosopher after a two-year postdoctoral fellowship. He writes honestly about his struggles with academic philosophy,
Philosophy has always been a very personal affair. Well, not always. When it stopped being a personal affair, it also stopped being enjoyable. It became a performance. I realize that many of you are able to seamlessly weave personal involvement and academic performance together. For me, that’s always been impossible. I’m too slow, my thoughts too dim, and too prone to distraction to focus on one single problem. And when I do, I am unable to crystallize my involvement with such a problem to intelligible and coherent terms. And even if I manage that, I can at best produce a competent list of platitudes. When the inexpressible (not because mystical, but because too close to the bone for me to articulate onto the field of discourse) project of shaping (edifying, in both senses of the term) my own individuality — what I thought philosophy was about — became the public performance of puzzle-solving, that’s when I developed a rejection of philosophy.
My first response to this would be to say: but you don't need to choose! Philosophy can be so much more than puzzle-solving. Still, I think it's important to be honest and clear about the trade-offs involved. Philosophy written from the heart is, at least in my experience, more difficult to sell to a journal than philosophy that intervenes in some recent debate that you might have something useful to say about, but not really keeps you up at night.
Clearly, though, philosophers do prize honesty and authenticity–the voice of the person who seeks and is honest about it. The best philosophy is deeply personal. Augustine's Confessions, which wrestle with faith, grief, family, still resonate today, as do Descartes' or Al-Ghazali's skeptical doubts. We value Zhuangzi's playfulness and Mengzi's earnest optimism. To know such people, even across the ages, is like having valuable friends we can lean back on, and from whose works we can draw wisdom and insights now. We marvel at Fanon's raw insights into racial micro- and macro-aggressions and how his perplexity gives rise to deep philosophical insights. We read along with De Beauvoir's mixed feelings on her mother's death, more recently also Elizabeth Barnes' and Havi Carel's deeply personal insights on disability and long-term illness. We admire philosophers who can weave the personal and the professional.
Maybe there's a tension between two kinds of philosophy, as Martin Lenz speculates: "The first kind is what one might call a spiritual practice, building on exercises or forms of artistic expression and aiming at understanding oneself and others. The second kind is what one might call a theoretical endeavour, building on concepts and arguments and aiming at explaining the world." –maybe the problem is that we value the second one almost exclusively in professional academic contexts.
Maybe there is, as Ian Kidd says, just a difference between good philosophers and between people who are good at professional philosophy. Some people are good at both, but there is a tension between playing the game well, writing the sort of stuff that finds uptake in top journals, and between genuine, lasting philosophical insight. So the question then becomes: to what extent do you need to sacrifice yourself, your authenticity, to be good at academic philosophy?
It seems to me that professional job consultants, notably Karen Kelsky who has helped lots of people without good placement directors or network, say you cannot possibly be yourself to succeed in academia. She cautions that, on the job market, "yourself is the very last person you want to be". So we try to game the system, to jump through the multiple hoops (including, as Kelsky keeps on cautioning, not seeming girly if you are a woman–God forbid), that would give us the prized academic job. This felt tension between authenticity and being good at academic philosophy comes with a heavy price.
It makes us too invested in writing about things that we are not genuinely interested in and thus, as a result, other people will also be less interested in. We professionalize ourselves into triviality. The loss of authenticity comes with a loss of what we value. This is too high a price, and hence, when I was on the market for several years, I decided I didn't want to play that game. To give up yourself is to give up too much. This decision turned out well for me, but could've turned out otherwise. There are no guarantees either way.
But what is authenticity?
Many authors implicitly or explicitly assume an essentialist notion of authenticity. For example, Jennifer Morton in her Moving up without losing your way (2019, Princeton UP) discusses the ethical costs of social mobility. She discusses the well-known phenomenon of code-switching, where immigrants, ethnic minorities and first-generation students mould their way of acting so it is more in line with white, middle-class Americans in some situations. Morton writes "we should be wary of thinking of this issue as one concerning authenticity. If authenticity is thought of as staying true to one's childhood self or to a particular culture, then most education will be inauthentic'' (p. 81).
The problem with such essentialist notions of authenticity is that authenticity becomes static and only for a few people: people who tend to live where they grew up, not move social class etc. You see this ideal of authenticity in political discourse where the rooted white working class, or native-born are pitted against the rootless cosmopolitans. I think this is too narrow a reading of authenticity. What is happening here is not so much that code-switchers can't be true to some authentic childhood self, but that they need to develop multiple personae or roles that are in tension with each other.
Being authentic means to have an integrated self, and to be able to live in line with one's values.
Those values sometimes are rooted in one's upbringing and home environment. For example, Sam Lebens argues that being an observant Jew can be a decision that is due to a sense of rootedness. He acknowledges, through his faithful practice, the efforts of ancestors who have faced severe persecution for trying to keep their faith alive. But our upbringing need not define us. Take, for example, Jude the Obscure, a novel by Thomas Hardy which features a working-class English man who dreams to be a scholar. Although he works as a stone mason, his heart is in scholarly study. He teaches himself Latin and Greek in his spare time. Part of the great tragedy of this novel (surely one of the saddest stories in classic literature I've read) is that he ultimately abandons his dreams. For Jude, authenticity is Latin and Greek, and being a man of letters, in spite of his upbringing. Similarly, for some philosophers, puzzle solving is what they feel is valuable and they love doing. But not for everyone.
Finding your philosophical voice is very difficult–trying to negotiate that balance between writing things that are publishable and that are in line with your values is hard. It also comes with privilege. People already tenured or in a tenure-track position will find more opportunities, more ways of making this happen. I think especially those of us in such luxury positions should do more philosophy we value. Not purely out of self-interest, but also to shift the norms in the discipline. I am reminded of the Daoist ideal of wuwei or non-action, not the faking of coolness but the genuine not trying to try. Achieving this would mean, in a professional context, we don't write mainly to get things published in the right venues, but we write about the things we care about. As the things we care about get published (it will take multiple tries and perhaps also less traditionally valued venues), we can shift the norms and open up the realm of philosophical possibilities.
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