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academia, Confucius, David D. Hall, generations, Harvard University, Jacques Derrida, Ken Wilber, postmodernism, technology, Thomas Aquinas
A decade or so ago, in David Hall‘s graduate class on method and theory in the study of religion, Hall asked the class why the study of religion in recent years had focused so much on particular historical details in individual places rather than larger issues that characterized or crossed traditions. I responded that the competitive job market and publish-or-perish tenure system require that people take an ever narrower focus, in order to carve out a niche for themselves. Hall replied, “Er, well, yes, that’s the cynical explanation.”
And I thought: cynical? Hall made his name studying the material conditions that gave rise to American “religion,” the economics of printing and text production. Much of his career was about the (often wise) materialist advice to explain the popularity of certain ideas by following the money. And yet suddenly, when that same mirror was turned on his own intellectual environment, of the 21st-century North American university – somehow it became “cynical”? Somehow, unlike all those thinkers we study, we have magically managed to escape the pressures of money-making and live in a world of pure ideas?
I suppose it might not have been so hard for Hall to think that way as a member of the Luckiest Generation: the pre-baby-boom scholars who taught at a time, unthinkable now, of vast expanding opportunities in academia. But for a member of today’s academic proletariat, it’s hard not to think in materialist terms – to follow the money, as one tries to think and write in socially approved ways in order to make it possible to earn a living.
It’s not that contemporary academic thought in the humanities is monolithic; there are at least three major methodological approaches that are very much at odds with one another. But there is something these approaches all share in common, and I think that that something can be attributed directly to the material conditions of academic life.
The first and oldest of these approaches is philology. Philology is devoted to the collecting, editing and translating of old texts – figuring out exactly what it is the text says, more than what it means. There aren’t that many philologists left teaching at smaller or regional colleges, but they often receive the juiciest teaching positions at the big prestigious universities, the Harvards and Pennsylvanias.
The second major approach is analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers devote their attention to analyzing arguments in ever more precise detail, leaving aside as many extraneous issues as possible in order to get one tiny conclusion exactly right. Analytic philosophy tends to be the object of scorn and derision outside of philosophy departments, but it rules those philosophy departments with an iron fist. The philosophy job market is cruel enough to those who are trained solidly within the analytic tradition; if you do anything else, your odds of getting a teaching position in a philosophy department these days are very close to nil.
The third, and surely most widespread, of the three is postmodernism, or the many variants on it. Postmodernists believe, among other things, that there is no definitive interpretation of any given text; a text is certainly not limited to what its author intended. So one can, for example, perform a “queer reading” of a classical text, examining homoerotic dimensions that are more apparent to a contemporary reader than to someone in the text’s own time. Leading postmodernist Jacques Derrida emphasized reading at “the margins,” those parts of a text which the author wished to wave aside. In philosophy, the majority of postmodernists are often quite cagey about advancing philosophical theories that they claim as their own (in the way that analytic philosophers do); rather, their works typically involve the exegesis of someone else’s existing work.
All three approaches are found in religion departments today, and they are typically quite hostile to each other. Postmodernists, especially, are philosophically opposed to the philologists’ attempt to pin down a single fixed text and the analytics’ attempt to find a single truth; analytic philosophers and philologists both disdain postmodernists’ apparently fast and loose readings of texts and of the world.
Beneath this hostility, however, there is one thing that all three schools of thought have in common. And that is the tendency to think small. The philologist focuses on tiny details of a single text, the analytic on tiny details of a single argument. The postmodernist may look at a whole text or even corpus of texts, but with the attempt to establish one single new interpretation among many, no attempt at anything grand or definitive; and talking only about what’s within the text and its historical context, not examining whether the text’s content is true or correct about the world outside the text. (Thus much postmodern work in so-called ethics tends to actually be in ethics studies.)
And that smallness, in turn, brings us back to the material conditions with which I opened. There is endless room to publish new work coming from all three of these methodological approaches. There are always ever more obscure texts for philologists to study, lying forgotten in dusty rooms until someone publishes about them in a journal. There are always smaller and smaller corners of an argument for analytic philosophers to poke at, finding some new detail or twist that has not yet been explored. And there are nearly infinite ways to reinterpret a text in the postmodern manner, taking the many permutations and combinations of applying interpretive lens X to text Y. If you want to publish in an academic journal, any variant of these three strategies gives you a good start for finding something new to say.
What you can’t do is be a scholar in the manner of Confucius, who tried to faithfully pass the received great ideas of the past down to new generations. Such scholars were the norm in the old days; now they are nearly an extinct breed. Sadder yet, the dominance of these three schools leaves no room for the wide-ranging, broad-minded work that pulls together many fields of knowledge into a single synthesis. If a young scholar today were to try to write the contemporary equivalent of Plato’s Republic or the Mencius, she would find herself eating out of garbage cans.
It is for these reasons that I have embraced blogging with such excitement. In academia, I could never have gotten away with asking the big questions I ask here. I would have earned great scorn for saying as much as I do on Greek and Chinese philosophers without knowing Greek or Chinese. Never mind that Thomas Aquinas managed to be one of the world’s greatest Aristotle commentators without knowing any Greek; if written today, his painstaking works would be snubbed as the scribblings of a dilettante. But if one wishes to try and learn, as I do, from all the major philosophical traditions – to learn all the languages involved would itself require a lifetime of training before one could begin to do any actual thinking. Outside of academia, one can start the thinking process as one wishes, and allow oneself to be corrected by people who do know the relevant languages if one gets something egregiously wrong.
I make no secret of being a big-picture thinker. (At least, not anymore.) But I also keep in mind the admonitions of the previous weeks: the details do matter. Ken Wilber is another philosopher who was able to get to the big picture by sidestepping academia; but I found that in his early work at least, he erred in the opposite direction, often writing the same book many times and rarely letting himself be corrected about the things he gets wrong. He could have used some of the detail-mindedness that academia provides. (Though I am currently reading some more recent works of his and finding that he may have started to get better at this.)
For this reason I have some sympathy for all of the approaches I discuss: we need the philologists to collect the texts we learn from, the analytic philosophers to sharpen our arguments’ precision, the postmodernists to remind us there might always be another way of looking at it. All of these approaches risk getting lost in their details, not seeing the forest for the trees; but Wilber (like myself) tends to gloss over the trees that make the forest up. The ideal approach, far easier said than done, is to combine the two. For that reason I’m grateful to have had a detail-oriented PhD training before trying to write about the big stuff on my own. That certainly doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to get it right. But it feels like I’ve got a good shot.
Ethan Mills said:
Analytic philosophy: While analytic philosophy still reigns supreme in North American philosophy departments, I think there is pressure at some institutions from some administration, students and faculty to be more inclusive of cross-cultural perspectives. A few decades ago, most analytic philosophers probably wouldn’t have called Nāgārjuna a philosopher, but now I think the tendency has shifted to saying something like, “That’s philosophy, but I’m not sure I want to know anything about it!” Which is considerable progress, all things considered.
The Big Picture: As a scholar I have to discuss secondary literature and get nit-picky about arguments and I genuinely think this can be worthwhile work, but I try to use the details as a stepping-stone to the big picture. This is becoming apparent to me as I write the last chapter of my dissertation where I’m trying to say what I think the historical story I’m telling about Vasubandhu, Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi might have to tell us about big metaphilosophical issues such as what we can hope to get out of philosophy. I’m not sure how much of my speculation will be of interest to the majority of philosophers (not much, I suspect), but I think it’s interesting. I hope to get away with it as long as I show my scholarly credentials with the details. At one point I considered writing my dissertation on the concept of a philosophical tradition, but I figured that was far too explicitly metaphilosophical for prime time!
Amod Lele said:
I agree with all of this, Ethan. My own dissertation used the details to get at the bigger picture as well. I think you’re wise to avoid taking up the concept of a tradition as a dissertation – dissertations, above all, are expected to be on the details, and that’s going to require some big-picture thinking. Would make a great next project though.
Re analytic philosophy, yes, that’s progress – though whether it will go further remains to be seen.
elisa freschi said:
The picture is different in Europe, but I share your concern about the focus on only small details. Interestingly enough, the stereotype in the departments where I have been working was that Europeans do study Greek and Sanskrit, but they often miss the broad picture, whereas Americans try to draw big pictures which are rootless (Japanese are even more accurate than Europeans).
A possible solution: *more team work*! I am presently working with a colleague who enjoys listing all occurrences of the word prasaṅga in the Mahābhāṣya and appreciates my general conclusions. That’s a perfect match (at least insofar as working together is really helpful and pleasant).
Amod Lele said:
Yes, that’s been my impression of the European and Japanese universities as well. I think the idea that American academics draw rootless big pictures is quite unfounded – I wish it were so, frankly. But I can see how someone would get that impression in the European and Japanese places, where it sounds like the problem I’ve described above is even worse. Or at least, it is like that in departments of religion or area studies. Philosophy might be a different story…?
Ethan Mills said:
More teamwork is a good idea. In some sense, it’s already happening: I couldn’t do what I do without the work of European, Japanese and Indian scholars who decipher bizarre scripts, consult various manuscripts and produce critical editions. I’m just not trained to do that work, so I’m glad other people are. My dissertation advisor is part of a translation team with several European scholars. For a North American philosopher, he’s very historically oriented, but even he has interesting disputes with his European colleagues, which I think will produce a good translation. I often find that translations done by more philologically-inclined scholars tend to be unreadable unless you already know Sanskrit! (I think there’s an article somewhere that jokes about “Buddhist Hybrid English”) But then more philosophical translations are often more impressionistic and it’s harder to understand the relation between the translation and the original. So translation teamwork is a good idea in particular.
I’ve been lucky to have some professors who take a problem-centered approach and some who take a more historical approach. My impression is that you can’t really understand what the problems are without some history and you can’t really understand the history without a philosophical appreciation of the problems. Also, I just think classical Indian philosophers had interesting things to say that I think I can learn from as a philosopher.
elisa freschi said:
well said, Ethan, I completely agree and look forward to read some of your future (or present?) works.
Ethan Mills said:
Thanks, Elisa. I just found your blog and I’m looking forward to reading it!
elisa freschi said:
send me a reference for your articles! There are too many E.M. on the web and I failed to find them.
Ethan Mills said:
Hi Elisa. Thanks for your interest! I really ought to make a webpage for myself, but a list of my publications and conference presentations can be found here (it’s a list of grad students, so you’ll have to page down a bit to find me): http://www.unm.edu/~thinker/students_pgsa.html
I hope to publish some articles based on my dissertation work on Jayarāśi, Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu over the next few years.
elisa freschi said:
Hi Ethan, yes I would recommend at least an academia.edu page, especially since I cannot locate any of your articles in my library…:-(
Amod Lele said:
Paul Griffiths’s “Buddhist Hybrid English” article really isn’t a joke, despite the clever title. It’s a serious argument that some Buddhist texts have a vocabulary so technical that they’re really better off not translated; a detailed paraphrasing is better. I’m not sure I buy the point, but the argument is thought-provoking and well worth a read. (Then again, I suppose that statement applies to pretty much everything Paul Griffiths has ever written.)
Beyond that, yeah, I’d say I agree. I don’t really see myself doing the kind of scholarship that is well expressed in translations anymore; I’ve always been a comparativist at heart, and now I no longer need to specialize for the sake of jobs/tenure. I’d much rather think cross-culturally about others’ translations and editions. But I’m glad people still do that kind of work, and when they do, I think it makes good sense to do it in teams with philosophers and historians together – though the team members had better like each other enough to make it through the inevitable conflicts!
Ethan Mills said:
That’s right, that’s where that’s from. Griffiths didn’t mean it as a joke, but I use it as a joke to describe “translations” filled with so many square brackets and untranslated words that they’re unreadable unless you already know the original language.
elisa freschi said:
The problem is quite complex and I see your point. However, I guess you keep on going back to texts in the original. If one does not, one runs the risk to compare the ideas of the translators, rather than of the texts. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in it, as long as one is aware of it. As you aptly pointed out several times, one’s world-view influences one’s translations and editions…
Amod Lele said:
True. I would add, though, that if one wishes to be fully comparative in philosophy it is almost impossible to read all the texts in the original. One would need to know Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, German, French and English at a minimum. Where will that leave the time to actually read anything?
elisa freschi said:
That’s a very interesting point. I am inclined to think that the solution is (surprise, surprise) team work.
But as for the case you describe, that is, a single scholar who compares texts and ideas in Tibetan, Skt, Pali, Chinese, Japanese, Greek… (by the way: why don’t you mention German?), the issue might be rephrased, in my opinion, as “what does making comparative philosophy mean?” I suspect that it means “thinking along someone else” and I am not sure one can think along someone one barely knows. In other words, there is no easy short-cut. Thinking along takes time, because it takes time to become familiar with someone else’s thoughts. Language seems to me not to be the main barrier.
Amod Lele said:
Well, actually, I did mention German. Speaking of paying attention to the details! :) :)
I think it is true that thinking alongside someone else takes a lot of time, whether or not language is a problem. (Aquinas had no Greek, but spent more time with Aristotle than most of us ever will.) The thing is that I think part of the objective of comparative philosophy is to arrive at a truth not merely about the thinkers one studies, but about the content of their ideas – whether reality actually is singular, what the human good consists of, and so on. And to do so in a way that takes account of the insights across the thinkers of the major traditions. That is what Wilber tries to do, but I think he does fall into the trap of “barely knowing” some of the thinkers and traditions he studies. Hopefully, as more specialized studies are done, the task will become easier.