WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY IN THIS PRESENT CENTURY?
It’s expressive of the general culture of this century: tidy, perfect, technical, formulaic, and inhuman. Academic philosophers in the 1990s got away with more eccentricity and pizzazz because proper blind peer review hadn’t become as ubiquitous as it is today. But in this century, we’ve all worked out how to hack the system of peer review, and career pressure requires us to do so. We all know that you have the highest chance of getting a publication through if you put a thin veneer of originality on an affirmation of the conventional wisdom. You don’t know who your reviewers will be, so to win the numbers game you have to aim for someone pretty closed-minded (since most people are) and attached to pretty standard ways of thinking (since most people are). One classic move is to criticise a “standard story” that nobody actually believes in, thus affecting an appearance of subversiveness without really challenging any standards.
The philosophy we mass produce in this century is thus the same old ideas but expressed in ever more standardised and technically perfect ways—the philosophical equivalent of Disney remakes. The system also filters out all idiosyncrasies of thought and expression, so that all articles end up having the homogenous artificial flawlessness of heavily-edited Instagram posts. This too is very much in keeping with our age: we’re starting to forget what natural human faces look like and what natural human thought sounds like.
Our era is one of technologically-enhanced perfectionism and worry-wartism: everything is regulated, controlled, and monitored until the life is squeezed out of it.
In fact, I find that the mainstream philosophy of an era always expresses the spiritual character of that era. Our era is one of technologically-enhanced perfectionism and worry-wartism: everything is regulated, controlled, and monitored until the life is squeezed out of it. We’ve lost the ability to cope with anything inhomogeneous or unexpected. Your favourite TV programme is always showing at the precise moment you want it. Any item you want can be ordered to your home, and if it’s not there by the next day a little online robot pops up to receive your complaint and issue a refund. The academic publishing industry flourishes, because we are apparently so afraid of substandard philosophy passing before our delicate eyes that we provide free labour and hand over vast sums of money to predatory publishing houses to do nothing but certify our own writing as fit for reading. And now we have AI to churn out an endless supply of the characterless, meaningless perfection we crave.
This is all a vicious circle. The more we build a world that never defies our expectations, the more paranoid and intolerant we become towards anything nonstandard, entombing ourselves within a fortress of regulations to ensure that nothing can ever challenge or surprise us. We live lives of algorithmic predictability and spiritual stasis. That’s how I see philosophy today. As with the rest of our culture, the craving for control and tractability snuffs out the vital human spark. Lately I’ve started trying to rattle the bars of this cage, but my hope is that I might teach people who learn how to escape from it.
HOW MIGHT A PHILOSOPHER TODAY RATTLE THE BARS, ESCAPE THE CAGE AND CULTIVATE IDIOSYNCRASIES OF THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION?
I say that I only rattle the bars, because I’m very much bound into this system. I’m an outraged monkey, hooting and making a fuss but not intelligent enough to plot an escape. I also like being fed by the zookeeper. We all do. Being a philosophy lecturer is such a wonderful job. Naturally, people will do whatever is required to get one of these jobs. Currently, what is required is churning out peer-reviewed publications. We’ve made that the condition sine qua non forgetting selected for any decent post. That is to say, we require successful candidates to have donated thousands of hours of free labour to predatory profit-seeking publishing houses while fitting their ideas around narrow factory standards. We want you broken by the system before we even look at you.
My colleagues will no doubt reply that if any department tried to defect from this arrangement they’d quickly be eliminated from the game. Decisions on research funding are also made on the basis of peer-reviewed publications. If departments started diversifying into hiring people who weren’t superstars in that game—people with other, more unique, idiosyncratic qualities—then they’d soon lose out in the competition for scarce funding. But who makes decisions on research funding? Us, again. This is a blandemic of our own making (I’ve taken the term “blandemic” from the architect Thomas Heatherwick). We point to the oppressiveness of the system to justify the narrowness of our minds, yet the oppressiveness is a product of our narrowness.
Philosophical greatness is real and palpable, but it’s a matter of defying standards, not meeting them.
All I can do at the moment is challenge those who really believe in the system. I think many academic philosophers, at all levels, genuinely believe that the narrow standards our system imposes on thinking are objective measures of excellence. In UK academia, we use the term “quality-related research funding”. It refers to funding approved by endless grey committees, as though they’re expertly detecting some real property of Quality—as if they’ve all been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (not that they would have funded it). The idea that this gigantic apparatus of gatekeeping and box-ticking could make research more successful on some objective measure, and enough to justify the unfathomably vast cost, hasn’t been borne out even in the natural sciences. This is argued well by the psychologist Adam Mastroianni. And there the idea of objective standards is at least plausible. But in philosophy I’m astonished that people even get as far as imagining that there might be measurable objective standards for a giant bureaucracy to target in the first place.
What I love about the Zhuangzi is that it demolishes all belief in such objective standards, not by constructing some clever argument but by example. It defies every standard and expectation—of its own context but of ours as well. And yet it is so undeniably great. Once you see its greatness, you can look at other great philosophical works and see how they too would fail most of the quality-control tests we now demand of everyone.
WHAT MAKES FOR A GREAT PHILOSOPHER?
Philosophical greatness is real and palpable, but it’s a matter of defying standards, not meeting them. Philosophy should be helping with what Rabindranath Tagore called “the conflict between all the ugly complexities inseparable from giant organizations of commerce and state and the natural instincts of man crying for simplicity and beauty and fulness of leisure”. Philosophy isn’t supposed to take the side of the ugly complexities. Bureaucratised philosophy should be one of those silly jokes, like screen doors on a submarine or an ashtray on a motorbike. What we’ve brought about is a multimillion-dollar global industry of actually building the joke product. I just hope that some future generation might get the joke rather than being it.
Western standards will no longer be the measure of all things.
I think this will happen as new cultural perspectives seep into academic philosophy. The vigilant autoimmune system of peer-review is working hard to keep those out—sometimes by simply rejecting them, sometimes by recolonising them so that they only appear in a form reconstructed to fit familiar norms. “Get yourself into my navel”, the journals effectively say, “and then I will gaze at you”. But more and more genuinely different perspectives will slip through our defences. Once philosophers encounter a wider range of perspectives, the narrowness and arbitrariness of the standards we’ve internalised for decades will be fully exposed. They’ll lose their hold over our minds. We’ll all be deinstitutionalised.
Funding councils are convinced that AI will define our immediate future. They’re so convinced that they’re not even looking at other possibilities, firing themselves up in a spiral of confirmation bias and betting everything they have on a single idea. But I think the radical change that will define our immediate future is this: Western standards will no longer be the measure of all things. It’s hard to even imagine the impact that will have, and few philosophers in the West are really trying (of course they can’t get funding to do so, unless they somehow make it about AI). Still, I’d put my money on that change shaking things up far more than any expensive, energy-sucking stochastic parrot.
WE WERE PARTICULARLY STRUCK BY THE WAY YOUR NEW BOOK AGAINST IDENTITY MANAGES TO ACHIEVE THIS KIND OF FRESH CROSS-TRADITIONAL ANALYSIS YOU SPEAK OF WITH SUCH CLARITY, AND NUANCE! COULD YOU TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT it and what MOVED YOU TO WRITE it?
Thank you for the kind words about my book. Its grand thesis is drawn from Zhuangzi, Spinoza, and René Girard—three thinkers who were far apart in historical context but, if I’m right, shared the same idea. It is that we don’t each have an innate, individual identity—the existentialists were right about that—but rather acquire our identity by emulating others, usually unconsciously. You have a self, but you copied it from somebody else, who copied their self from somebody else in turn. You might think that this leads to infinite regress, but it’s important that what we are copying in every case is only an appearance. Nobody actually has a true self deep inside; what is really inside each of us is only the capacity to take on infinite forms.
I wanted to suggest that this is a universal message, so I tried to draw on a range of sources and examples that might speak to a wider audience than just Western intellectuals. I don’t know how well I really succeeded at that, being limited in my own heritage and experience to the West and Asia. But the cross-cultural comparison was important for reaching the central idea, since ultimately it challenges our sense of reality as fundamentally structured by an Aristotelian Law of Identity. The Zhuangzi was written outside the sphere of influence of that Aristotelian dogma, so you get an entirely different image of the world. Nothing really has a distinct and definite form. It was the unrecognised scholar Ellen Marie Chen who helped me to see this the most; I am in praise of In Praise of Nothing, her self-published book. I believe that Spinoza shared this very different vision but lacked the vocabulary to express it directly, since he was working within a philosophical tradition shaped from very early on by the Law of Identity. Very few in the Western tradition were willing to countenance suspending that law—not even the Neoplatonists, though they came close. Much comparative philosophy today uses Western ideas to analyse and interpret “non-Western” philosophies. I found it fruitful in this case to go in the other direction.
WHAT WERE YOU HOPING TO DEMONSTRATE ABOUT PHILOSOPHY BY TAKING THIS APPROACH?
My views on philosophical method are informed by this thesis that identity and imitation are inextricably linked. This applies to philosophy also, which is why I see much of contemporary philosophy as resting on a lie of spontaneous self-generation. The only way to develop a philosophy, no less than an identity, is to copy it from somebody else. All philosophy is history of philosophy.
When we get fixated on a single model, this becomes a dangerous trap. This is what has happened with analytic philosophy in my view; it resembles nothing so much as David Hume pulling various faces in a mirror. We can liberate ourselves from a fixed and restrictive identity, not by some impossible act of self-creation, but by opening ourselves up to the widest possible variety of influences. Santayana has the famous line about being doomed to repeat the past if we don’t understand it. I agree with Kuang-Ming Wu, who writes: “to neglect history is to be condemned not to repeat it in ourselves; we are babblingly lost in the barrenness of contemporary ignorance”. That barrenness is ultimately just the repetition of some particular narrow segment of the past. Luckily, the past is vast and multifarious, and as long as we keep an unprejudiced eye on its full richness, we’ll never run out of new models to follow and, thus, new directions to pursue.
The only way to develop a philosophy, no less than an identity, is to copy it from somebody else. All philosophy is history of philosophy.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, historians chopped the historical record of philosophy to fit a political narrative about Greek origins and European cultural supremacy. They filled the archive boxes from which, to this day, undergraduates are still taught. Philosophers excuse themselves for not working harder to fix the story by saying that the past doesn’t matter anyway. When people start saying that the past doesn’t matter, you know that the motor of history has got jammed. But it’s easy to get things moving again; there is a whole world of unheard voices and unsought inspiration waiting to inject freshness and novelty into philosophers, if only they can overcome their delusions of originality.
WHY HAS SO LITTLE POST-COLONIAL REFLECTION BEEN DONE BY MAINSTREAM ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY?
It’s a surprising history. The world experienced a period of decolonisation and globalisation following the Second World War. Academic philosophy seemed to go in the opposite direction. Just as the world was opening, the Global North closed the doors of academic philosophy to the rest of the world. Joel Katzav and Krist Vaesen tell a story about The Philosophical Review, the top-ranked philosophy journal today. It was becoming quite pluralistic up to 1948, publishing work in classical pragmatism, process philosophy, and idealism alongside analytic philosophy. It regularly published papers on Asian philosophy by Asian authors. After 1948 there is a sudden narrowing to an exclusive analytic focus, and everything becomes much more Anglo (though the journal diversifies in other ways, e.g. publishing more women).
Why this happened is a complex story. But why wasn’t it reflected upon more? Analytic philosophy, to repeat, generally views itself in an ahistorical cultural vacuum. It presents itself as studying problems of universal interest, for which there are just better and worse “tools” (a beloved metaphor). It sees itself as picking the best tools for the job and not caring where they come from. Questions about Western bias and the silencing of colonised traditions therefore couldn’t properly arise for a long time. You can’t underestimate the extent of this thoughtlessness. My heritage is bound up with stories of colonialism and intercultural interaction in Australia and Asia, yet I didn’t connect this with philosophy until fairly late in my studies.
In addition, some of the most famous postcolonial work—think of figures like Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said—was steeped in the “Continental” tradition, which analytic philosophy rejected as a matter of principle. For example, leading analytic philosophers protested when Cambridge proposed to award an honorary doctorate to Jacques Derrida. Spending time and effort to block somebody from receiving a purely symbolic honour is pretty heavy; it would be hypocritical to then take seriously any postcolonial work that takes Derrida seriously.
Fearing the mockery of scientists, professional philosophers became keen to assure everyone that they eschewed not only religion but anything “spooky” or redolent of “mysticism”.
Another factor, which doesn’t get discussed so often, is the effect of secularism. If you look at the Hibbert Lectures, you have Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Rabindranath Tagore giving lectures in consecutive years (1929, 1930). After that, you don’t have anyone from the Global South (unless you count Rustum Roy, who was born in India but lived in the US). But notice also that the Hibbert Lectures stopped in 1989 and were only reinstated in 2003. This reflects, I think, a general loss of social prestige attached to speculation on matters related to religion. Academic philosophers, by and large, wanted to be scientifically respectable, which generally meant being secular and naturalistic. Meanwhile organised religion is about dogma rather than speculation. This closed off one of the official channels by which figures like Radakrishnan—highly original thinkers grounded in traditions that are filed under “religion” according to Western categories—could reach academic audiences in the Global North.
It also became much harder for philosophers with diverse interests to be taken seriously. May Sinclair’s A Defence of Idealism (1917) draws some inspiration from the 15th-century mystical poet Kabir, who lived at a fascinating contact point between Hinduism and Islam. Nobody now teaches May Sinclair as a philosopher, despite the recent investments in recovering the work of early 20th-century philosophy women philosophers.
The tragedy is that just as the Anglosphere could have been opening its eyes to the full richness of global thought-cultures, through an explosion of communication technology and empowerment of hitherto suppressed voices, Anglo philosophy instead became more culturally parochial. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence that decolonisation happened simultaneously with academic philosophy developing a real inferiority complex towards natural science. Fearing the mockery of scientists, professional philosophers became keen to assure everyone that they eschewed not only religion but anything “spooky” or redolent of “mysticism”. Since no other philosophical tradition is similarly secular and positivistic according to the Western model, this meant that professional philosophy effectively closed its doors to the world in the middle of the 20th-century. No more Kabir or Radakrishnan, just logic, strict empiricism, and the analysis of “natural language”, which of course means English as spoken by university graduates.
What brought the shift from religiously informed philosophy to the secular philosophy we see practiced today in mainstream academia?
I think that our current experiment of philosophising without the support of a religion is historically unprecedented. Scholars can debate whether early Buddhism or Confucianism count as religion, but there is certainly a notion of a spiritual path and a special kind of vision or mental cultivation required to follow it. Older philosophies are religious in many senses. Aristotle’s cosmos is saturated with teleology, although Greek philosophy of course became much more religious with Plotinus, just in time to be co-opted by the Christian Church Fathers. There is also more than a hint of providence in ch.4 of the Mozi (fa yi 法儀). You could say that religion is the hidden breath of philosophy in the ancient world, and even more so in the thousand years between the ancient and the modern.
This doesn’t go away in the modern period. Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas” have a distinct flavour of private revelation or natural grace about them. The Cartesian method is largely about quieting the hyperactive will, with its habit of rushing to judgement, and allowing the illumination of a non-deceiving God to shine through. Modern philosophy never really escaped the medieval project of fi des quarens intellectum—faith seeking understanding. It was simply a question of where to place faith. Empiricists had a peculiar faith—a faith in themselves—a faith that they had correctly analysed and categorised their sense experiences. Hume in particular refused to ground this faith in any religious notion, and later the Absolute Idealists had no trouble demolishing it. They had an easy time showing that our sensations aren’t neatly packaged into a Meccano-like structure of impressions and ideas. They then sought to build up philosophy on a firmer foundation. But what shored up this foundation for them was again a conception that I would call religious: they took certain elements in experience to be definitive of reality, but this is because the experience in question turned out to be not that of the individual subject but rather of Absolute Spirit. The way to truth is not to hone our own meagre faculties but to open ourselves up to the Absolute.
[...] this is all philosophy studies: a sort of auto-anthropology or Big Book of Our Intuitions.
With the advent of analytic philosophy we have, in my view, the first truly secular philosophy—no doubt this is why analytic philosophers honour Hume as an ancestor. No longer does faith seek understanding. Instead, we have something more like understanding seeking understanding, which I think is as circular as it sounds. There is a line at the end of Gilles Deleuze’s book on Hume, which has always stayed with me: “Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what there is”. This seems to perfectly characterise contemporary philosophy. What we are doing is making various philosophical judgements and taking them to be justified. Whatever can be established by observation and experiment belongs to the sciences, so all that can determine whether a philosophical doctrine is justified is whether in practice “we” take it as justified. There is nothing external to justify this practice, but nor is it grounded on a special act of faith. It is just “what we do”, and this is all philosophy studies: a sort of auto-anthropology or Big Book of Our Intuitions. You are welcome to object that you don’t follow this practice—that you don’t have these intuitions or justify beliefs in these ways. But then you’re just excluding yourself from the club. Contemporary philosophy doesn’t then refute you; it just leaves you out of the conversation.
Analytic philosophy established institutional hegemony when it got the backing of the US military-industrial complex. My friend Christoph Schuringa has written an excellent book on this, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy. He explains how analytic philosophy pushed all other traditions out of the departments and journals only when Western governments started to pour money into academic research, in a race for technological and ideological supremacy over the Soviet Union. Universities received unprecedented funding, but it came with strings attached. Governments wanted ideas that would help them to achieve strategic dominance, to optimise their systems, and, of course, to supply them with propaganda. Analytic philosophy won the contest for state backing, being associated with computer science, neoclassical economics, game theory, and other intellectual initiatives of strategic interest (philosophers even started mimicking the language of Pentagon analysts: “reflective equilibrium”, “success condition”, “theoretical costs and benefits”, etc.). Now it mattered a great deal that you lined up with what analytic philosophers were calling “our” intuitions. The ones saying “we” had the ear and the wallet of Uncle Sam.
[...] the edifice of academic philosophy will struggle to hold up in a world less dominated by the West.
What we must never forget is that the formation of the character now possessed by contemporary philosophy was completed with the apparent US victory of the Cold War. This was the heyday of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History—an age when liberal Western democracies really did believe that they had found all the answers: the right way to order society, the right way to live, the right things to value, the right beliefs to hold, the right methods to follow in the pursuit of knowledge. It’s hard to imagine this era now, when Western liberal societies are so dysfunctional that it’s tempting to call them the Dead End of History. But contemporary analytic philosophy carries the torch of that legacy. Otherwise, it makes no sense to fill the position that faith used to occupy with a theory of what “we” are doing. The only reason anyone should care what “we” are doing is if “we” hold all the money and power. That’s why I think the edifice of academic philosophy will struggle to hold up in a world less dominated by the West.
THIS PICTURE INEVITABLY BRINGS TO MIND PARTS OF THE CONTINENTAL TRADITION – ESPECIALLY POST-STRUCTURALIST THINKERS WHO QUESTIONED CLAIMS TO FOUNDATIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND COHERENCE. Do YOU SEE YOUR OWN CRITIQUE AS RESONATING WITH THAT TRAJECTORY AT ALL? HOW DO YOU RELATE, IF AT ALL, TO THOSE HISTORICAL DISPUTES BETWEEN THE CONTINENTAL AND ANALYTIC TRADITIONS?
I don’t know so much about post-structuralism, which is often used as a broad term covering figures who were quite opposed, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. I think it too is part of the turn philosophy took as a result of an inferiority complex with regard to natural and social science. It too reacted by aping certain features of science: technicality, high-level jargon, impenetrability by outsiders, etc. All that is a shame, I think—a squandering of the hard-won early modern escape from Scholasticism. But I respect this tradition’s gesture of treating thought and language as always problematic—as an endless pursuit of stability that inevitably ends up destabilising itself.
I see this tradition, insofar as it is one, as responding to the secularisation of philosophy in a different way to the analytic one. There is a lot of reflection on absence in this literature: the absence of the “transcendental signified” in Derrida, the nonexistence of the “Big Other” in Lacan, the disappearance of anything external to power in Foucault. All of this is probably inspired by the Entzug, the “withdrawal” of Being in Heidegger. This kenotic gesture marks a recognition that human power is insufficient to ground human thought and language in anything outside of themselves. This is why understanding had previously been taken to be the continuation of an act of faith, which was a loving surrender to a power greater than our own. In a secular context, thought and language turn in a closed circle. This plays out in the analytic context in the attempt to articulate a realist theory of meaning. The purpose is to ground the meaning of language in the world outside of language, but any would-be realist seeking to articulate the meaning of some expression will end up giving, not a piece of the world, but another string of language (perhaps in a “metalanguage”). Analytic philosophers retreated from this problem in frustration, but the post-structuralists confronted it continually and tried to work out what it meant.
In this context, I suppose I’m a reactionary. I hold onto the hope that true understanding can begin with an act of loving surrender to something transcending it. Some of the figures associated with post-structuralism, Deleuze for example, seem to retain this in a way. Deleuze would, of course, flare up at any reference to transcendence, but it is significant that he is one of the few thinkers from this tradition who believed in the possibility of doing metaphysics. I think this is because he believed in something like Henri Bergson’s method for metaphysics, based on intuition (very different from the analytic philosophers’ “intuitions”). Whereas intellect seeks hopelessly to represent the world and ends up trapped in a closed circuit of its own representations, intuition is able to enter directly into the unending flow of reality. What results is not a fixed thought but a continuing transformation, thus embodying rather than representing what reality fundamentally is. Bergsonian intuition is really, I think, a name for fi des, as his book on mysticism pretty openly admits.
This has got a bit woolly, but I guess the upshot is that, while I don’t feel postmodern enough to align with the analytic or the “Continental” schools, I’m closer to the “Continental” side insofar as they seem to respect the importance of truly dwelling in the ungroundedness of our thought, trying to really feel this ungroundedness, as opposed to distracting ourselves by pumping intuitions or arguing from “provisional” premises that we never seriously intend to examine. “Continental” philosophy might be pretentious, but analytic philosophy is rather prideful.
SPEAKING OF HISTORY, WHAT IS YOUR OWN PERSONAL HISTORY THAT BROUGHT YOU TO PHILOSOPHY? AND HOW MIGHT YOU MAKE SENSE OF THIS IN LIGHT OF THE NOTIONS OF IDENTITY EXPLORED IN YOUR RECENT BOOK?
I was drawn to study philosophy from a motivation that would have been bog standard in the medieval centuries and makes me weird among my colleagues: the pursuit of a beatific state of untroubled happiness and perfect love. I encountered many religions in my childhood and felt that they all promised some version of this, despite their intense differences. My recent book brings together some of my favourite thoughts on this topic. It is a story of sin and salvation. Sin is pride and presumption, and salvation is the sort of escape from fixed identity—the sort of merging into the others in a spirit of pure openness—that I try fumblingly to describe at the end of the book.
The sources I read suggest that the longing for identity leads to the sin of pride and presumption, though by a complicated route. I want to make very clear that I am not opposing the sort of hard-won pride that a queer person feels when they finally overcome the shame imposed upon them by society, or that colonised peoples felt when they finally throw off the inferiority complex colonialism had imposed on them (this is explored with incredible depth in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s “Buru Quartet”, which I believe to be a great work of literature on the level of Dostoevsky). I am speaking, rather, about the pride of the queer-shamers and colonisers, which closed and hardened their hearts. When people get invested in an identity and believe that it gives them high status in a certain context, then they are threatened by anything that might challenge that status or transform that context. This is why we put each other down and try to stop the world from changing. It is hopeless, but it does a great deal of harm along the way.
It’s about trying to forge spiritual connections, which means working with as many traditions, trying as many approaches, looking in as many dark corners, and following as many untravelled roads as possible.
Naturally, I have struggled personally with questions of identity, as I recount in the book. It always seemed like everyone around me had much clearer views on who they were, on what was what, on right and wrong, etc. Philosophy attracted me because it placed more emphasis on asking questions than answering them—every other discipline seemed to skew the other way. I’m often surprised how academics in other humanities subjects, while professionally asserting quite relativistic views, speak and act with extreme moral decisiveness. While verbally denying belief in objective standards, they act with what looks for all the world like immense confidence in the objective rightness of their own judgements, often based on a rather limited understanding of a given situation. I don’t condemn this—self-assurance probably fuels a lot of activism that the world needs. But for myself, I hope rather to never lose sight of the limitedness of my perspective and the inevitable narrowness of my mind. I want to always remember that my brain is very trigger-happy in squirting out the feeling that I understand everything and have got the story perfectly right, but I should never let this feeling deceive me. Philosophy seems a natural home for these aspirations.
YOUR BOOK CHARACTERISES PHILOSOPHY IN A VERY HUMANE, ORDINARY SENSE:
“A CERTAIN WAY OF LOOKING AT LIFE AND THE WORLD [that] SHOULD PROVIDE US WITH A FEELING OF CLARITY AND EASE – A NEW UNDERSTANDING AND AN ABILITY TO NAVIGATE LIFE WISELY”.
WHAT FUTURE CHANGES IN PHILOSOPHY WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THAT MIGHT HELP THIS NOTION OF PHILOSOPHY DEVELOP in order to REMAIN RELEVANT IN THIS ALL-TOO-AI-FOCUSED, IDENTITY-ADDLED PRESENT?
I believe that philosophy will remain inhumane for as long as we continue to think in terms of some unidimensional metric of “excellence”, measured against definite standards. As long as we think in that way, philosophy will become increasingly technically perfect and emotionally sterile—bereft of the wonderful surprises and imperfections that define the human. I know that it’s convenient to speak of such measurable standards with the bureaucrats, who only like to fund things when they see some number going up and don’t care if it means anything. But we don’t have to believe our own spin.
What I’m proposing is that philosophy is good insofar as it helps people to navigate their lives. Very obviously, different people will find different things helpful, and no size will fit all. Philosophy should work like literature in this regard; philosophers should aim at reaching as diverse an audience as possible, or at reaching other philosophers who then reach people (e.g. if their work is particularly technical or inaccessible). It’s about trying to forge spiritual connections, which means working with as many traditions, trying as many approaches, looking in as many dark corners, and following as many untravelled roads as possible. It means opening every window and letting the wind sound through every pipe and hollow (to use Zhuangzi’s metaphor). It means soaking up the rich, wild, chaotic, contradictory cacophony of cultures, habits, symbolisms, prejudices, orthodoxies, heresies, loves, and hates that light up the billions of lives playing out across our world. It means not sinking into the narrowness of any limited tradition, conventional practice, or formalised standard.
The problem is that academic philosophy is currently set up to work on a very different model: the model of elite researchers producing cutting-edge technical “results”, according to approved “methods”, which achieve “impact” by being taken up by technocrats and then imposed on the general public. What I think has happened here is that fundamentally predatory institutions—profit-seeking publishers and cynical government agencies—, have taken advantage of the great weakness of the average academic, which is the size of our egos. We are tempted by the flattering prospect of being taken seriously as scientifi c experts. Like all devil’s bargains, we are lured through our pride into offering ourselves for exploitation.
WHAT CAN BE DONE TO MAKE THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD LESS TECHNOCRATIC?
One thing we can do right now is to simply stop internalising the bureaucratisation of our discipline. We can make a choice to stop thinking of philosophy as a sort of technology, measured by scientific standards of performance and efficiency. We can all choose to think of our philosophical writings as individual poems of the intellect, not as anonymous “research outputs” to be processed for assessment through “excellence frameworks”. Yes, we’d have to surrender the cheap hormone release of scoring high on some fancy “index” or winning at some childishly gamified travesty of academic achievement. But, on the other hand, we win back our souls. What stands in the way is our narcissistic craving for status and recognised success, which can take us so far from whatever initial curiosity or spiritual longing drew us into philosophy long ago.
For a concrete example, it strikes me how easy it would be for academic philosophers to simply boycott peer-reviewed publication. Neither research funding nor hiring would have to be compromised. All we’d lose is an institutional pat on the head. In terms of funding, the Research Excellence Framework explicitly instructs assessors to ignore the venues in which research appears when judging its quality. Therefore, departments could just submit unpublished writing samples to the REF or create nominal publication venues to meet a formal requirement for “published” work.
There is no shame in humane thought; indeed, its scarcity value will only increase as the AI population grows and the human population declines.
In terms of hiring, committees could select longlists by looking at the rest of the CV beyond publications: range of experience, personal statement, references, participation in voluntary initiatives—the same things that hirers look at for in every other sort of job. Selection past that stage could be based on looking at anonymised writing samples. My colleagues have told me that this would make longlisting even more prejudiced towards graduates of elite universities, since this is what would stand out on CVs. My reply is that the proper antidote to prejudice is to cultivate less prejudiced attitudes. One thing we could do is hire in batches—that way the old guard could get to choose one Oxbridge/Ivy graduate with all the right status-markers, while broader-minded colleagues could get to choose interesting candidates: a graduate from the Global South with an original writing sample, a formally underqualified candidate who has managed to attract an independent following online, somebody with an interesting non-academic background and a compelling personal statement, etc. A few successful cases of such hires could be enough to knock out the remaining elitist prejudices in the discipline. Academics who still worry that this might result in hiring the “wrong” candidate should ask themselves whether they chose their life partner by asking 500 applicants to send in portfolios ranked and assessed by the relevant experts. Well, maybe with modern dating apps they did (God help us all).
I accept that this would be a terrible way to hire a nuclear engineer or a judge. In such cases, of course, there are important core competencies and specific knowledge. You want somebody with the best technical training, which the elite schools reliably deliver. Philosophy just isn’t like that, and we should stop being ashamed of that fact. Yes, the world currently attaches very high status to people with quantifiable competencies and predictable knowledge. We’ve been letting them run the world, and look where it’s got us. There is no shame in doing something whose success can’t be measured, codified, and institutionalised. There is no shame in humane thought; indeed, its scarcity value will only increase as the AI population grows and the human population declines.
Alexander Douglas was born in Canberra, Australia where he studied music and philosophy. He now teaches the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics at the University of St Andrews. He has published two books on the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza, one on the philosophy of debt and most recently Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping The Self (Allen Lane, 2025). He has grown increasingly interested in combining ideas from Western and East Asian philosophy. He loves music, literature, history, and engineering. He lives with his wife in Edinburgh.