In praise of plodders

There was an article a couple days back in the “Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/ called “What People Just Don’t Understand About Academic Fields.” (Unfortunately, I can’t link to it because apparently you have to be a subscriber–but it doesn’t really matter for this post.) The article included a few paragraphs from a handful of professors in different fields each talking about what most people don’t seem to understand about what they do or why they do it. None of the entries struck me as all that interesting, but they did remind me of an essay by Isaiah which has been bothering me for awhile. The essay is called “Philosophy and Government Repressession” (1954) and was printed in “The Sense of Reality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0712673679/qid=1059082425/sr=12-8/104-8064233-2395929?v=glance&s=books. In trying to correct what he thinks is a common “misunderstanding of what philosophy is and what it can do,” argues that second- and third- rate philosophers are essentially worthless, except as obstacles to be overcome by truly great thinkers.

Here’s the passage, sort of cobbled together, that really gets me:

bq. third-rate historians, fourth-rate chemists, even fifth-rate artists, painters, composers, architects, may be of some value; for all these subjects have their own techniques and operate at their own proper level, which may be low, but remains a level. But there is no such thing as third-rate or fourth-rate rebellion, there is no such thing as a trivial effort to cause a major upheaval. That is why the third-and fourth-rate philosophers, who are really engaged in applying techniques of their predecessors who are dead and gone, as if they were practicing a science, as if they were being chemists or engineers, are not so much unsuccessful or unimportant, or unncessary or superfluous, as positively obstructive . . . In philosophy alone the plodding, competent, solid workers who cling to accepted methods, and half-consciously seek to preserve familiar landmarks, and work within a system of inherited concepts and categories, are a positive obstruction and a menace–the most formidable of all obstacles to progress. The world, one likes to think, has been created for some given purpose and everything in it plays some necessary part. If you ask what necessary part the second- and third- and fourth-rate philosophers, and those, even, below that line, can have been created to play, perhaps the answer is that, if they did not exist, the possibility of those great creative rebellions which mark the stages of human thought would never have occurred.

The story goes that gave up philosophy and became an intellectual historian because he thought he wasn’t good enough to make a serious contribution to philosophy. (Whether the story is right or not, I leave to the biographers out there.) I read the passage above, more by chance than anything else, when I first arrived at Oxford to study political theory. And I have to say, at the time, I found it rather depressing. I mean, how would you know if you had a revolutionary idea? And, anyway, who sets out on a career in philosophy, or a related subfield like political theory, thinking: I’ll just be one of those third-rate (or worse) hacks whose only real purpose in life is to make things so bad that some true genius will come along to fix them? I suppose if you sit around with A.J. Ayer, J.L. Austin, and Stuart Hampshire, trying to keep up gets a little depressing after while. But I think turned that bit of intellectual anxiety into a real downer. If you’re expectations are that high–if the only point of doing philosophy is to revolutionize the field–then maybe it would make sense to jump ship early on.

There are probably lots of reasons to complain about ‘s romantic image of philosophy. But for my part, I think his image is neither helpful nor accurate. It’s not helpful because it encourages beginners to give up before they ever really get going–and perhaps was guilty of this himself. It isn’t accurate because it denigrates intellectual virtues that are actually very important in great philosophy. Patience, persistance, and plodding–not to mention a “cool name”:http://www.politicaltheory.blogspot.com/2003_05_18_politicaltheory_archive.html#94661717 –may sometimes be necessary, even if they aren’t sufficient. No wonder never commented (or did he?) on _A Theory of Justice_. Must not have been rebellious enough for his tastes. Some first-rate philosophical plodding, indeed!