Philosophy as a Profession

Montaigne points out that “it is far easier to live like Caesar and talk like Aristotle than to live and talk like Socrates.” In other words, it is far easier to rest content in the smug satisfaction that one is in possession of the truth than it is to unremittingly persevere in the quest for truth, recognizing that one is and will always remain merely a seeker.

The intellectual of today obtains his smug satisfaction by becoming a “specialist.” Acquiring a narrow but exquisite understanding of one narrowly circumscribed area of knowledge, he becomes, or imagines that he becomes, a possessor rather than a seeker of truth. The truth he possesses, however, is not the sort of comprehensive truth that encompasses the human condition—or even his own individual condition—in its entirety. His specialized knowledge is from the outset intended to be relevant only in his “professional” life. The sole benefit it confers upon his “personal” life is the income he obtains by placing it at the service of his employers.

Our age endeavors to impose this same sort of separation of personal and professional life even in the realm of philosophy, thus effecting a grave and momentous change in what it means to be a philosopher. The philosophers of the past who lived austere and ascetic lives, for example, did not consider this an incidental fact about their “personal” lives, but rather a definitively important part of their philosophical method. Their austerity arose from a frank acknowledgment of the fact—a fact our age resolutely tries to conceal from itself—that every man must make an inevitable choice between two paths: the pleasant, agreeable path to wealth and honors, and the austere, difficult path to truth and wisdom. Hypocrites who claim to be lovers of wisdom, but in reality merely intend philosophy to be a “profession” in which they can achieve wealth and honors, justly deserve the ridicule that has been so aptly dispensed to them by genuine lovers of wisdom—for example, by Plato to the Sophists, by Schopenhauer to “university philosophy,”and by Nietzsche to “culture-philistines.”

Socrates’ character in the Republic observes that most of those who constitute the demos care very little for the pursuit of truth and wisdom, so that the relation of philosophy to a democratic regime must therefore be “as a foreign seed sown in alien soil”—that interaction with the regime inevitably results in the “perversion and alteration” of philosophy—and that the most advisable course for the philosopher is to remain quiet, to mind his own affairs, and to stand aside, as a man stands “under the shelter of a wall in a storm.” 

When the “professional philosophers” of today render their services to the democratic regime, there is indeed just such perversion and alteration. John Rawls, for example, tells us that philosophy conceived as a “search for truth” cannot possibly provide “a workable and shared basis for a political conception of justice in a democratic society.” He proposes instead that we conceive of political philosophy as a process of collecting and categorizing the “settled convictions” of such a society and deriving our conception of justice to accord with these convictions. Thus political philosophy, formerly conceived as a quest for truth and wisdom about political regimes, is now redefined as a quest to reach predetermined conclusions that accord with the settled convictions of the present regime. Like any competent professional, the “professional philosopher” must place the interests of his employer—whether he conceives of this as his state, community, society or regime—above “personal” passions such as those that might inspire him to seek truth and wisdom.