May 27, 2003
When you leave the academy to pursue a non-academic career it is assumed by the faculty staff still hanging on that you are chucking in the discipline of philosophy. You have left the university and so are no longer doing philosophy.
If they are in a generous frame of mind they will concede, that maybe you can do philosophy at home as a sort of hobby with a few friends interested in the same books. They will acknowledge that you do read a few books and have a chat about some of the ideas you came across in the books over a few wines and nibbles. It's called a reading group. But it has little resemblence to a reading group inside the academy.
If pressed on the point they will say that you are no longer a professional philosopher. They are the professionals, the proper philosophers. You are not, nor can you be. The tacit judgement is that those doing it outside the academy are just not up to doing philosophy in the proper way. .
What they--both analytic and continental philosophers in academia--- will not grant is that their conception of philosophy is just that: a particular conception of philosophy. Philosophy as practiced as a theoretical discipline in the academy is philosophy. There are no other kinds of philosophy that can be, or are, practised outside the confines of the philosophy. You nearly always the hear tone of ridicule in such academic judgements about philosophy practised outside the academy.
What these academic philosophers actually refuse to grant is the possiblity that as the teachers and guardians of academic philosophy they talk the talk but they do not walk the walk.Their whole identity as professionals depends the refusal.
This academic stance is a grotesque misreading of the philosophical tradition. An alternative kind of is philosophy as a way of life and it was a common conception of philosophy in classsical Greece or Rome. It is generally accepted that Socrates is the common placeholder for a life of examination---both of one's own life and an examination of the culture in which one lives.
Philosophy as a way of life is a life of lived experience, and not a set of doctrines organized in disciplinary terms; a way of being-in-the-world that is communcated through dialogue. In this conception of philosophy it is daily life that provides us with an opportunity to do philosophy not academic disputes about this or that doctrine (eg., metaphysical realism).
Ironically, the tradition of this alternative conception of philosophy is being recovered by those working in the academy. There are different ways of doing it. Its most popular contemporary expression is here
The names most associated with philosophy as way of living are Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. In postmodernity this conception of living is generally given an aesthetic stress as a shaping or creating of one's life. It is a literary interpretation.
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As you might have expected, I strongly agree with you here. My blogging is an attempt to do what you are talking about, although I would only claim it as a mixed success so far.
Part of the difficulty is that it is hard to not have "popular" philosophy just turn into another forum for the professionals to gather together. I try to attract a broader crowd, but it is so easy and reassuring to fall back on what is comfortable.