Academic Philosophy Is Beyond Boring But Is It Beyond Saving?

The Insufferable Boringness of Philosophy

I almost became an academic philosopher. I spent two years getting my Master's degree in philosophy and six years in a philosophy PhD program before eventually dropping out halfway through writing my dissertation.

I can't tell you how many lectures, talks, and colloquia I have sat through while being bored out of my mind, doodling on my scratch paper, wondering how it's even possible for someone to talk for an hour about this tiniest little detail within a detail within a detail. Let alone write a book about it or spend one's entire life publishing iteration upon iteration of tiny details.

And it's not that I don't find philosophical questions interesting. I have always been drawn to philosophy and still find myself fascinated by classic philosophical questions. I believe in the power and usefulness of philosophy and will always consider myself a philosopher. I am not ashamed to be a philosopher. I love philosophy. I wouldn't have spent 8 years in grad school studying it obsessively if I didn't have a deep an burning love of philosophy.

But I must admit that even I find most of philosophy very boring in the sense of it being tedious, dense, technical, and just a slog to get through. Especially if that slog is 50 pages or even 300 pages. And so much of the philosophy being published today is technical for the sake of being technical. Rather than bringing the reader towards greater clarity the prose is written to obfuscate through needless jargon and technicality.

At the end of the day academic philosophy is a fundamentally boring profession. If I found the majority of philosophy talks I ever attended dry and boring I can only imagine how the average person would feel sitting through an academic talk about esoteric details only the professional philosopher cares about. It can be mind-numbing.

But don't get me wrong: the best talks I have ever gone to in academia have been from philosophers as well. So there are some real gems.

Maybe I am just the weird one who finds academic philosophy boring. But somehow I get the sense that if the average person actually went and read top academic philosophy journals they would be closer to my view of things. Most philosophy is written in such a way that can only be read and appreciated by other professional philosophers. It's pretty much a pure example of the ivory tower.

You might say that about other disciplines too - why single out philosophy for being boring?

Is Boringness Unique to Philosophy?

Some might say that all of academia is boring and inaccessible to lay people and by necessity it involves technical detail that makes it difficult for the average person to understand. The average person would probably also be bored sitting through a talk on organic chemistry as they would a talk on metaphysics.

But the difference is that organic chemistry and other fields of science have technological outputs that are useful to the average person regardless of whether they themselves ever learn about philosophy. You don't need to understand a lecture on computer science to enjoy Facebook on your laptop. And yes, some philosophical ideas have turned into engineering reality in profound ways, but for the most part there is a reason that science is associated with what Carl Craver calls "maker's knowledge" - the fundamental know-how that allows scientists and engineers to just go out and make things that work to change the world.

I am also not saying that the only value of a field of inquiry relates to its usefulness to the average person. Pure research is a good thing even if it's not obvious what the potential use is. But as someone who has been to many academic philosophy conferences there is something distinctively useless about the "pure research" of philosophy distinct from say, pure research in computer science or physics.

Philosophy departments are easy to fund: they just need access to a laptop, a library system, pencils, pens, printer, whiteboards, and booze. Why? Because their job is largely conceptual in nature. Deleuze thought the essential function of philosophy was concept creation. I tend to agree. Philosophy happens when you, e.g., make a distinction that no one has made before that brings greater insight into how a dialectical debate can be resolved. Or when you just come up with an argument, concept, or thought experiment like David Chalmer's "Hard Problem of Consciousness" or John Searle's "The Chinese Room".

These arguments and others like them have both gone on to influence many scientists and thinkers in their attempts at building artificial intelligence.

But the primary "output" of academic philosophy is incredibly technical journal articles arguing about things in such a way as to be relevant to almost no one except professional philosophers. Seriously, there is an incredible output that is being read by practically no one. There are over 40,000 papers indexed about metaphysics. The vast majority of that will be read carefully and appreciated by only a handful of people.

Which is not to say academic philosophy performs no essential purpose. In fact I've argued that there are four main fruits of philosophy.

But I do believe that at a fundamental level the primary output of professional philosophy is being wasted insofar as almost nobody is reading these journal articles and books that people spend years writing. The average philosophy paper is the product of intense, rigorous, deeply hard work yet is read and cited by like 3 people, one of which is the person who wrote it.

In other words, a tremendous resource of brilliant minds is being wasted, trapped behind academic pay walls and serving no essential purpose except to pad resumes and boost reputations within the field of philosophy. Imagine if that energy was redirected elsewhere?

Philosophy is not beyond saving

Academic philosophy is in need of a seismic shift in how it conceptilizes its public utility. Otherwise the trend of philosophy departments closing will likely continue. Philosophers sometimes have a hard time convincing non-philosophers the value of philosophy.

But while I think that philosophy departments themselves are still essential to a healthy citizenship I also believe that philosophers should be doing more to take their work beyond the halls of academia.

The future of philosophy lies in public philosophy i.e. philosophy created in a way that is accessible to people who haven't been through six years of advanced level graduate courses in philosophy. The more we can get philosophy into social media, op eds, high school classrooms, blogs, magazines, etc., the healthier philosophy will be as a discipline.

Philosophy is a tremendously valuable resource because critical thinking is sorely needed in our "post-Truth" era of "truthiness" as Colbert called it.

There are already a considerable number of philosophers active with blogging. These philosophers are not just summarizing academic philosophy for a public audience but some are actually doing cutting edge research on the blogs themselves.

Some of my favorite philosophy blogs are:

Phil percs
The Splintered Brain
Conscious Entities

There are many others but honestly I'm not super active in the blog world anymore. Philpercs has a good blogroll.

The Future of Philosophy

I can imagine this process of doing public philosophy already exemplified in the philosophical blogosphere accelerated through sites like steemit.

How many bloggers out there would spend their energy writing original philosophical work of high quality for steemit if they knew they could be rewarded for it? And once it's in the blockchain they don't have to worry about establishing the authenticity of their writing. Steemit's SEO advantage also serves as a strong incentive for academic philosophers to start blogging with Steemit. Their work will be read by way more people than on their traditional blog.

If you really thought your work as a philosopher mattered, wouldn't you want as many people as possible thinking about what you have to say?

Blogging won't save philosophy entirely

Even though public philosophy is the future of philosophy it still won't save philosophy from its stagnancy. The problem is that many of the questions philosophers grapple with are very close to being nonsense. I say that in the nicest Wittgenstenian way. But maybe it's just my distaste. After all, I did drop out. But I don't think I'm alone in thinking that there some avenues of philosophical argumentation are incredibly esoteric to a fault.

In order to save itself philosophy needs to either hope the general public will somehow eventually see the light and understand the service philosophers provide....which I don't think is going to happen, or it needs to make public philosophy a more pressing goal and provide incentive structures for philosophers to do work that isn't going to land behind an academic paywall read by no one.

a steemit original
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