Comments on: Planet de Botton

By: a.c.

a.c. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:14:12 +0000

One way to ‘add it on’ is to be controversial in an area that gets media interest, which is what Dawkins has done.

By: Gc

Gc — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:46:26 +0000

“GC, my feeling is that being a public intellectual isn’t something you can just ‘add on’ to your work. ”

Yeah, that`s true. At least you can write a blog. That`s, what I think, what Socrates would do if he was a still alive

By: Miranda Tyson

Miranda Tyson — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:49:24 +0000

GC, my feeling is that being a public intellectual isn’t something you can just ‘add on’ to your work. It comes from deep within the work. Sartre, Freud, Marx… all public intellectuals because they were out to change the world, had a relatively simple message, were masters of the stage. Alain de Botton IS a public intellectual and not a bad one at that. I just despair that we will ever get our work on a national platform.

By: Gc

Gc — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:46:01 +0000

Miranda, I don`t agree. You can even popularize theoretical physics. But I didn`t mean just to popularize philosophy, but to be a public intellectual like Russell was or what Dawkins is now. Good public image radiates also to the more scholarly projects.

By: Miranda Tyson

Miranda Tyson — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:37:22 +0000

Gc, if we don’t have ‘good intellectual celebrities who can be the face of academic philosophy to the public’, it’s not a coincidence; what we do and what the public want are essentially very far apart. If you want to bring analytic philosophy to the public, you immediately travesty it. My view is that philosophy departments should make room for a diversity of styles, and at the soft wing, there should be room for brilliant but light minds like de Botton to flourish. We have pushed out too many clever but light-footed people. They have gone off to be journalists, when they could have been on our team.

By: Gc

Gc — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:28:21 +0000

You need somekind of good intellectual celebrity to be the face of the academic philosophy to the public. We had Georg Henrik von Wright and Eino Kaila before him in Finland, and philosophy was well respected in publc compared to most other counties. Also quite a few non-professionals were very intrested. I see, in my mind, sophisticated analytical philosophic views in the essays of Väinö Linna, who was a factory worker turned to writing (I believe there is no good translation of the unknown soldier to the english available), but I am not trained to do philosophy.
When von Wright died in 2003 it has been downhill ever since.

By: Miranda Tyson

Miranda Tyson — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:44:43 +0000

It’s distressing to admit, but someone like Alain de Botton is a frightening figure for us in these desperate financial times. He is essentially standing back and asking, ‘What are you guys for?’ And that’s a question we will always have a hard time answering. I’ve just spent two months writing a paper on Aristotle’s notion of luck. The article is highly scholarly, it has something like 300 footnotes, it will be read by 500 people if I’m lucky and will make zero difference to the national debt. I might have wanted to take my arguments out to the media, to try to change the world, but I’m not that sort of person and my material doesn’t allow for this sort of propogation. Do I sometimes feel strange about what I do? Sure, when I leave my study, and meet my children’s friends, or talk to a homeless man I help to look after. We probably all have that sense. De Botton is provoking us, making us feel our vulnerability. I don’t resent him for it, but I do fear that voice – and hope that society will continue to be tolerant enough to let us do our stuff, which is admittedly strange, beautiful esoteric and not especially useful when compared with medecine.

By: Fabrice Brulard

Fabrice Brulard — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:21:38 +0000

Brian,

I’m not sure someone who has written the sentence, “One of those means is the study of those who have gone before us, and I will not apologize for doing it” is in a strong position to criticise the quality of anybody’s writing.

A pedant might also point out that “his TENDENCY to make unfounded assertions, sweeping generalizations, and grandiloquent pronouncements IS detestable.” And furthermore, it could be said that your comment is itself an unfounded* assertion and a sweeping generalization.

Whatever we think about modern academic philosophy, surely we can all agree that only a small percentage of it is well-written. Not that Locke or Kant were much better, of course.

*(or at least unsupported)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:01:34 +0000

It seems to me that there are two separate issues: ADB’s accusation that 99% of academic philosophers in UK are “not philosophers as such” and spend their time discussing the work of others, on the one hand, and the issue whether someone like Wittgenstein would find a job in contemporary British academia (or even pass his viva!), on the other.

I think ADB’s claim is just plainly false. In any event, it seems to me to be much truer of the way philosophy is practiced on most of the continent than of British philosophy in general. It is true that we need to set our work in context in order to get published, but, in general, the setting up should only cover the introductory part of a good paper – the bulk of a good article is supposed to be new.

As for the Wittgenstein (Nietzsche, Barthes, Woolf etc.) issue, that’s a tricky one. I’m not sure how helpful these questions are – after all, we may as well ask whether Socrates would have gotten a job (the man never published a single line!). For what is worth, I’m pretty sure Nietzsche would find a job on the continent. I shall leave it to others to decide whether that’s a virtue or a vice of contemporary British academia.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:50:42 +0000

The ‘teaching the works of others’ is a complete red herring. The idea that the ‘true’ philosophers spends all (or even most) of their time writing original philosophy strikes me as absurd: it presupposes something which he is claiming to be challenging, to wit that ‘real life’ (e.g. teaching, administrating, loving, living, dying — in short, the things we do every day) is incompatible with doing philosophy.

There is a gap between what philosophy truly is and how it is practised in academia. But that doesn’t mean academics are collaborators with the status quo. I teach my students that they are learning to be lovers of wisdom, learning (amongst other things) to yearn for truth and to detest falsity. They’re also learning other things, but those things are only means to an end of real value. One of those means is the study of those who have gone before us, and I will not apologize for doing it. My problem with de Botton is that he points out an ILLUSORY problem in academic philosophy (which is rife with problems) and then presents as an alternative something which in no way rectifies the REAL problems with academic philosophy.

For what it’s worth, I’ve tried to read books by de Botton. They are very badly written. His prose is not to my taste; his grammar is fine. But his tendency to make unfounded assertions, sweeping generalizations, and grandiloquent pronouncements are detestable. I like to think that I (and my colleagues in the Universities) are doing what we can to develop human beings who can realize that very fact.