Subject/Object

Just came across an essay by Martha C. Nussbaum about the teaching of philosophy in general, and particularly the classical philosophers. Some quotations reminded me why I got such a distaste for philosophy as a discipline when I decided against advanced study after my undergraduate degree:

But there is also, I believe, a job for a public philosophy to perform: the job that Plato and Aristotle and Seneca tried to perform in their own day. The job, that is, of clarifying thinking on matters of public urgency through one’s own thought and writing. And this is a job that American professors of philosophy perform far too seldom nowadays, and have not performed well since the time of John Dewey and William James…. Nonetheless, part of the blame must also rest with academic philosophy itself, which too often speaks a jargon-laden language and doesn’t learn how to write in a way that would engage a non-specialist.

The first thing that can be said is that the choice between pursuing one’s own work and writing for the general public need not be seen so exclusively and so tragically. For in fact the general public is hungry for philosophical work addressing ethical and political issues — so long as this work is written by someone who sounds like a person. There is little excuse for the horrible quality of writing in philosophical journals. It is lazy and often, even in its air of precision, imprecise. It is perfectly possible to write something intelligible, and even moving, that a college-educated member of the general public can read with interest.

I wasn’t willing, or wasn’t able from the perspective of graduate schools I guess, to do philosophy in this way. And I wasn’t able to ignore works from history, politics, sociology etc which bring important answers to philosophical discussions. Becoming a librarian was not a step backwards from academics. For me it was a step into a world without distinctions between Humanities and Social Sciences, or between disciplines.

They say that one must first become a specialist before becoming a generalist, which is why all the most distinguished thinkers become distinguished in their own area before branching out. But I was not ready for that kind of obsession for 5 or more years to the detriment of all my other reading interests.

Here is a somewhat dark picture of the group of us who participated in the National Summit on Library Human Resources.

I am on the far right. We are sitting in a revolving restaurant at the top of the hotel in Ottawa.