Chapter 9. “Maybe You can Make a Bigger Impact Outside of the Academy.”

Glioblastology, the Book

Chapter release Thursday! Welcome new subscribers. Special shout out to those who found us by way of

Re-Imagine Success

! Thank you, Nabeela!

What We Leave Behind

I had my second of five radiation treatments this afternoon. Two down, three to go. I’ll admit the higher dose radiation and fairly quick development of side effects caught me off guard. Strangely, I feel better tonight than I did after the first treatment on Tuesday. Thanks to all those sending good vibes!

Chapter 9 is definitely the most straightforwardly philosophical of the bunch. When I first wrote this chapter, I was still exploring whether this book would be directed to the academic world or the real world! ;)

You’ll probably notice my voice oscillating between those two worlds: my current peers and colleagues in academia and my social world of friends and family. In that way, you’ll read something new tonight, but for me, it was a re-experiencing of earlier times when the future felt more openly possible.

That guy, me, writing then, didn’t know how open the future was, and here I am now, worrying that it isn’t. If he, or me, I guess, if I could see me now…

Stick with this one, fam. It’s an important chapter to me. I really enjoyed editing it and giving it another life in this special format with you. xx. <3 -a.

—

Chapters are available to paid subscribers but paid shouldn’t be a barrier to access. If I can help with a sign-up, just shoot me a reply or DM. I’m always psyched to do it.

---

Chapter 9. “Maybe You Can Make a Bigger Impact Outside of the Academy.”

What is philosophy? It is both a subject and a verb: a category of thinking, research, and writing that appears on course catalogs at universities, and, broadly speaking, it is something that philosophers do. “Have you been doing much philosophy lately?” a colleague asks.

In a more popular culture sense, philosophy is also understood as a general framework for living life. A “philosophy of life” that directs our daily priorities and governs our conduct: Where should we spend our time? What are our obligations to the environment, to others, and our social interactions? Does each person have a responsibility to mitigate or ameliorate suffering in the world where it is encountered? Consider global issues: infectious disease, authoritarian regimes, and human trafficking. Are these worldly issues with a philosophical bearing on our daily lives to urge a response from those in democratically governed countries and wealthy nations to exercise influence in the world to improve the lives of others? Even or especially, what is one’s responsibility if a regime arises in one’s own country?

What about local issues: housing insecurity, food insecurity, police violence, city planning, and education? Should a philosophy of life consider and direct our involvement in addressing these issues? Should political philosophy be taught to citizens of a democracy so that they can elect representatives and govern with integrity and commitment to democratic ideals?

Philosophy, in this general sense, is closely related to, and sometimes conflated with, morality or applied ethics. Medical ethics makes for a good example that applies formal ethical theories to the practice of medicine, offering guidance on many topics, often those that are socially and politically polarizing. Does a seriously ill person have a “right to die”? The 21st century sees these issues grow in complexity with new technologies like the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool that may forever shape the reproductive landscape as heritable gene editing leads to so-called designer babies by selecting favorable traits or suppressing genomic mutations that are causes of disease.

Increasingly, the medicalization of the end of life calls for philosophical guidance to navigate delicate issues related to informed consent, autonomy, and power of attorney.

Professional philosophers will rightly point out that each of these varied applications of the term “philosophy” threatens to stretch the discipline beyond its intended scope, and if I haven’t done that, others may protest that I’ve blurred the boundaries between philosophy and political theory or adjacent fields like bioethics. Philosophy cannot be all things to all people. Maybe so, but what I am promoting is the idea that philosophy’s diverse and wide scope finds plenty of intersections for public scholarship. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, offers tools for thinking that apply broadly.

Academic philosophy is philosophy’s professional dimension, and in the contemporary setting, it is practiced in its dominant subspecialty: analytic philosophy. Background on this particular variety of philosophy is worth exploring because it informs the major practice in today’s universities. It also sets up a discussion of “philosophy in the wild,” which I call the type of public scholarship that defines much of my speaking about my illness experience. Philosophy as a set of tools equips us with means to investigate the world, but unlike the empirical methods of the hard sciences, philosophy formulates different sets of questions.

Contemporary analytic philosophy is concerned less with the general “philosophy of life” discussions than it is concerned with what academics take to be the more serious work of doing philosophy called “concept analysis.” This is the discussion, dissection, disaggregation, and deconstruction of a common or ordinary term, phrase, or notion with excruciating detail until its nature, meaning, or relationship to other terms or definitions is revealed. Tedious work, for which success is not enlightenment but immunity from counterexamples, meaning the aim of this work is to define a concept in such a way that the definition holds up to examples intended to poke holes in it.

I consider myself a philosopher. Although I consider myself a member of the fold, I’ll break ranks to share my experience and growth through philosophy after my diagnosis. I prefer to understand philosophy not by the topics it considers but by the methods it employs, and my preference for a new methodology changed after I was diagnosed with a serious illness.

In the analytic tradition, progress is measured by securing an analysis of a concept that cannot be shown false by counterexamples. Victory in this space is not winning, but rather, winning is simply not losing, and so success in the field of philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century is defined by who doesn’t lose the most, not by, say, who advances the most ideas or who is the most creative. This leads philosophers to say the least, in the most precise terms. This incremental and adversarial style of chipping away meaning until you arrive at some fundamental truth is criticized for its concern with pointing out others’ errors rather than firstly critiquing one’s own work. When the criteria for success are defined by securing against error, philosophers are disincentivized to suggest innovative and ambitious ideas when the risk-reward structure doesn’t fit the adversarial model.

Why would I go out on a conceptual limb when the audience attending my talk is more interested in exploiting errors in reasoning than achieving a new insight? At least, that’s how professional philosophy felt to me when I was in the academy.

This style bifurcates ideas into either true or false. Adversarial, oppositional, and risk-averse philosophy does not map onto the complexity of the world that is rich in nuance. More, a field where criticism is the norm of discourse, the loudest, most confident, and institutionally recognized voices are amplified, while the perspectives of early career researchers, marginalized voices, and students, faculty, and staff from smaller academic programs lack a broad platform to advance their views. Principally, this model threatens the health of its practitioners. The psychological toll is deleterious to health when fighting tooth and nail in a field that thrives on criticism. I herald philosopher Martin Lenz who concludes an essay on similar themes with this call to action:

The critical nature of philosophy will thrive more if we model our conversations on the playful exchanges among friends rather than on the idea of a tribunal looking to tear down a philosopher who has an idea.

Trained in the analytic style, my post-graduate years have found me betraying this tradition in pursuit of the verbose and prose-heavy styles of existentialism and phenomenology. Readers now have something to blame if they find my own work to resemble these characteristics: verbose and prose-heavy! These traditions were historically more popular in Europe and are collectively called Continental philosophy, a foil to the contemporary analytic tradition—a foil isn’t quite right because the traditions do not confront each other; rather, those who train in one tradition will always have something to say about the other.

Phenomenology and existentialism are in the Continental tradition. These are concerned with the nature of individuals in society and environments rather than the objective treatment of concepts. In the analytic tradition, the search continues for truths that are timeless: necessary truths, they are called, definitions that are true now, tomorrow, and yesterday; true on Earth, Mars, or the ice planet Hoth. A necessary truth is one that could not possibly be false.

“True in all possible worlds,” is a way that philosophers describe these sorts of “analytically true” statements.

Analytic philosophy includes laws of logic. Logical rules and mathematical proofs are examples of these necessary or analytical truths. Solving a mathematical proof is as true on Earth as it is on Pluto. It’s necessarily true.

Logic, analysis, proofs, and rules are vitally important to the language of computer systems, for example. This work may feel foreign to folks without a background in philosophy, but in fact, philosophy undergirds important advances in developing computer science and programming languages.

Don’t get me wrong. Analytic philosophy, with its careful study of logic and mathematics and precise treatment of language, is an indispensable tool for the contemporary information economy.

And yet, philosophy as a careful critique of being in the world, the method of philosophy that I have come to prefer, calls on different methods. Here, I continue a tradition that has become expected of existentialist philosophers, to break with the methods of philosophy as practiced by contemporaries, described by philosopher Patricia Sanborn in her 1968 primer: Existentialism: A Guide to the Movement that has Revolutionized Philosophy and Influenced the New Generation Throughout the World:

Specific human relations move into the foreground, and the more general categories of logic and metaphysics are useful only insofar as they lead to an understanding of existential phenomena.

Just what are existential phenomena? Sanborn explains:

The thing encountered is the phenomenon

and, in general:

It is only a way of dealing with what presents itself to human experience.

Sanborn’s point is that what existentialist philosophers study is what presents itself in human experience. Unlike logic or mathematics, which do not present themselves to us in experience—that is, you can’t “see” the number two, existentialists study what you encounter in the world.¹ The continental tradition reflects this methodological difference.

Rather than analyzing concepts and employing the rules of logic to construct, evaluate, and validate arguments, continental philosophy takes the individual’s experience as its core building block. Starting from a robust description of experience, those interested in this method of philosophizing connect the individual’s experience with history, language, and cultural movements to see how these factors affect the human condition.

Whereas analytic philosophy seeks a clean, symbolic representation of language to uncover its logical forms, continental philosophy explores the conceptual world by describing our experiences and using our moral imaginations to take up the experiences of others. Existentialism is a household name for this sort of philosophizing.

You may notice the similarities and differences between this and the ordinary use of the term existential. For example, philosophical existentialism is not at play when someone asserts that nuclear weapons in the hands of a terrorist organization present an existential threat to America. Yet, these different uses of the term each take experience and being to be closely related.

For the existentialist philosopher, your experience requires your being. There is no experience before your existence. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "existence precedes essence," meaning that our existence comes first. We must be a thing out here or else there wouldn’t be a thing to have an experience. Sartre went further and said we come to possess an essence through our experiences, but not only experiences, also, our choices. We have an active role, we have agency, in shaping who we are.

Says my amateurish understanding of ol’ J-P. S.

A nuclear weapon is a threat to our being, and no being means no experience, so I suppose it is an existential threat.