The republic of professors

The republic of professors

We may take the fact that Nietzsche abandoned his tenure in Basel, in order to be able to pursue his thoughts free from academic pressures, just as Kierkegaard preferred to live off his inheritance rather than seeking a permanent position within either academia or as a minister within the Church, as a sign that something had changed within the universities themselves. Even if the life of Kierkegaard and the slow descent of Nietzsche into clinical madness are hardly comparable, we can nevertheless say that the authority which someone like Hegel, who was eventually seen as a kind of state philosopher—an accepted spokesman of the world-spirit at its most advanced stage—had ceased to exist by the second half of the nineteenth century. A number of contributing factors are responsible for this development, which became most visible in the changes in Continental philosophy, but also in different ways in England and in the USA.

On the Continent, in Germany and France especially, the sciences had become increasingly dominant in the formulation of what pre-occupied society. France had the Grands Ecoles and Germany, after the liberal reforms instigated by Humboldt, relatively self-reliant universities that governed their own affairs, not in total but in a rather far- reaching form of academic freedom. This meant, of course, that in whatever way one wants to define ‘autonomy’, a large degree of vested interest had for the time being found its ‘adequate’ organizational form of expression. Also, in different ways academic freedom had become a class privilege, in both Europe and in the USA. This in itself was

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not, at first, seen as a class problem, but as a natural, even desirable event. The philosopher had been replaced by the Professor of Philosophy; a new intellectual type emerged within and, consequently, outside the universities. As early as in his book Nature (1836), in his ‘American Scholar’ delivered a year later at Harvard and in his Essays, First Series (1841) Ralph Waldo Emerson developed the concept of Man Thinking as opposed to a world of alienation, just as his friend HENRY DAVID THOREAU complained in Walden ‘There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.’ That the rebellion against the professionalization of philosophy, as found in the writings of Emerson, was avidly picked up by Nietzsche has already been mentioned in passing. How, indeed, could he have resisted a passage by Emerson, like this one, taken from ‘Circles’, which he adopted verbatim, stating only ‘Ein Amerikaner mu β es ihnen sagen [An American may tell them]’:

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet says Emerson. ‘Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame that may not be revised and condemned…. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.’

(Thoughts out of Season (Unzeitgemä βe Betrachtungen), 1875–6) When William James, looking back late in life, laconically claimed that the academic and

the disinterested classes were identical, and hence the only social group capable of looking for the truth, he was only expressing a sentiment that had become the general opinion in academic circles by then:

In our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries…and unlike them, we stand for ideal interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and wield no powers of corruption. We ought to have our own class-consciousness. ‘Les intellectuals’!

(William James, 1908) It would soon become the issue of a great debate, though; even if the young John Dewey,

in 1905, would almost for the last time in history reclaim the responsibility for a whole nation of philosophy. James of course looked back at the successful history of Pragmatism, and at the German University, as he had experienced it at a time when it seemed to represent what Charles Saunders Peirce had termed the ‘community of investigators’. If we look at the beginnings of Pragmatism, as it emerges out of the genteel atmosphere of the Metaphysical Club, we get a glimpse of what ideally the Gelehrtenrepublik might have been about, and certainly we will understand the role of the Gentleman-Scholar. But we shall miss—while overpraising the benign character of William James who popularized the philosophy of Pragmatism more than anybody else— that the original insights of Pragmatism, as outlined by Peirce, were far from simple. To

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the contrary, they were won over and against Kant, Hegel and British traditionfsal empiricism as exemplified by John Locke and David Hume. Peirce, the son of the famous mathematician Benjamin Peirce, did not take his logic lightly, and his attempt to turn Kant upside down was a serious exercise in itself. Peirce went to extreme lengths to refute the Kantian ‘a priori’ categories, claiming that as a result reality, seen as a reality- in-itself, would eventually be unknowable. At the same time he rejected the Hegelian idea that truth could be attained by following a certain logical pattern, defined by the nature of truth itself. In order to get out of what he perceived to be the dilemma of speculative idealism (Hegel) or the fallacy of objectivism (Kant), and in order to escape from fruitless relativism, Peirce introduced the category of belief, as a guidance for action; which when tested by many would lead to truth. In a way, though differing from both Kant and Hegel, Peirce was nevertheless deeply indebted to both of them. From Kant he took the methodical approach and from Hegel the evolutionary approach towards the idea of truth. By placing this inheritance into the hands of a ‘scientific community’,

he could rightly assume to have successfully introduced the idea of fallibilism into the philosophical construction of reality, making thought and action part and parcel of one inseparable activity. Rather than being preordained, as in the case of Hegel, truth, as Peirce put it, was ‘fated’ to ultimately happen as the result of the investigation by many. It is obvious that this epistemology, whatever its eventual ramifications might be—and it is not unfair to state that the seminal character of Peirce’s work, as a logician, as the founder of modern semiotics, and the father of the various versions of Pragmatism that would follow, is the result of exactly these ramifications—puts a great trust in the social reality of any given community. If we were to push this argument, we could claim that Peirce was already mistaken where his immediate academic surrounding was concerned. Not only was he not judged by his peers on the strength of his intellectual abilities, but also by his nonconformist attitudes and behaviour, which barred him from ever obtaining the permanent academic position he so badly wanted, almost turning him into a tragic hero in the annals of academic life. He was also wrong in his belief that a friend like James would adhere to the rigors of his own standards of logical inquiry. James, with a few little known exceptions, which would however seriously harm the career of Peirce, defended his friend in most cases and definitely always in print, but veered so far from what Peirce had originally envisioned that the latter toyed with the idea of renaming his version of Pragmatism, to put a difference between himself and his followers. James, to make the ideas of Peirce more accessible to a wider audience, drew heavily on his own work as a psychologist; his tome, Principles of Psychology, had appeared in 1890, and where Peirce was interested in the scientific proof of a given belief, James judged its validity by its usefulness for the practical life of the individual. The ‘cash value’ of truth, as he put it, was to be seen in its workability, its suitability, in its usefulness! Had he confined all of this to the field of inquiry, Peirce might not have objected, but as a definition of truth this did not work. The more James moved into the direction of seeing the task of philosophy as making life worth living for the individual, the more he distorted the original intentions of Peirce. Thus it was only a small step from a Pluralistic Universe (1909), in the sense of James—the title that he gave to the book which would move him closer to a religious view of the world than Pragmatism would ever go—to relativism at the cost of scientific investigation. But then again, we must bear in mind that the Pluralistic Universe contained the Hibbert Lectures, given at Oxford in 1908–9, and

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whenever James talked in public he tended to simplify matters, in order to be understood. Nevertheless, and whatever his intentions, James managed to move Pragmatism away from its epistemological confinements into the world of life as lived. To put this in a totally different fashion, and William James into a different perspective: he had arrived, where he had always wanted to be as a philosopher, at the heart of an identifiable US experience, and its specific challenges and demands.