The Feminist Philosophers blog has twice linked this new section of the New York Times’ opinion section called “The Stone”. In his lead essay, Simon Critchley defines philosophers by going back to the story of Thales falling in the well:

Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.”

He goes on to suggest that falling in the well is a result of an other-worldliness that is actually the main benefit of philosophy:

Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at your back. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ”

And of course, philosophers win in the end:

Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.”

Feminist Philosophers seems to find this account of philosophy enraging. First of all, it’s an inaccurate assessment of the state of the profession:

Well, that’s the sort of thing that makes me pretty cross. It’s the kind of statement that leaves students unprepared to find that in fact professional philosophers form a club, with pretty well defined boundaries, that reflect all sorts of divisions in the society. And that many (most?) philosophers today are unwilling or unable to recognize the extent to which their choices are influenced by an unconscious internalization of the mores and conventions of our time.

It might be objected, however, that Critchley’s account is of the “philosopher” simpliciter, not of “philosopher” as a job description at a modern university. In that case, his definition of philosophers as out of this world is aspirational rather than empirical.

Even this argument leaves the Feminist Philosophers cold:

This is not an uncommon description, and it may be one philosophers generally think is true of them. So let’s suppose it is part of philosophy’s self-image, and restrict our attention to those doing philosophy in Western universities today. Philosophy professors seem to be on the whole very privileged and elitist practitioners. For people who do not hold to society’s values, they conform to lots of them and benefit from them. Thus there seems to be a suspicious gap between the self-image and the reality.

For my part, I have two reflection on this. First, I asked the students in my intro class to have a discussion of “what is philosophy?” on the last day of class, and in my opinion it went really poorly. Part of the trouble is that we were all in one group instead of in smaller sections, which seems to work better with Hawaiian students. More importantly however, I think it’s probably unfair to ask students to do meta-philosophy without more regular philosophical experience. To the extent that they had an opinion on the state of philosophy, they seemed to think that philosophy is for the most part the asking of unanswerable questions, which is, at best, profitable only as a means of intellectual entertainment. Progress in philosophy is more or less impossible, and everyone just has to work out for themselves what they really think on the basis of opinion alone.

If that’s what philosophy is, it might best to abandon philosophy all together.

My second reflection is that in Chinese philosophy, the picture of the philosopher falling in the well could never have caught on as an image. Analects 6.26 says:

Zaiwo asked, “If a person of ren were told there’s a person of ren down a well, would he go in after him?” The Master said, “How could it be that he would? A gentleman can be sent to save him, but not to jump in after him. He can be tricked but not duped.”

The point of the story as I see it is that Chinese philosophers are supposed to be practical people whose intelligence and morality prevent their being duped by life. Some mistakes are inevitable, even for sages, but falling in a well is not among them. Up until 1906, all the mandarins in China had to pass a test showing that they knew the Confucian classics, and so there was a large overlap between philosophical interpretations and political action. If you fall down a well, you’ll never be an advisor to the king, and for the Chinese that was what it was really about. They believed in Marx before Marx, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways—the point however is to change it.”

The Zhuangzi also has some good well stories. In the seventeenth chapter, there’s a quote that has become a Japanese idiom:

You cannot discuss the sea with a frog in a well, for he is limited in space. You cannot discuss ice and snow with a summer insect, for he is fixed in his own time. And you cannot discuss the Way with a pedantic scholar, for he is bound by his doctrines.

In Japan, a “frog in a well” is like our “big fish in a small pond” but even more restricted. Zhuangzi seems to have a strongly perspectival view of knowledge, yet he also thinks that some perspectives give us a wider look at the world than others. The point seems to be that a philosopher has to go beyond the ordinary without thereby losing sight of the ordinary. If your milieu as a scholar is the university, you’re blind if you don’t see the political structures that support the walls of the academy around you. That makes you worse than a frog in a well, because at least that frog knows about the walls of the well.

Corey once said that it was only after he got over philosophy that he felt like he could study philosophy in grad school without worrying about selling out. At the time I thought I was enough over philosophy not to worry about it, but sometimes I do wonder if my best contribution to the state of philosophy might be to do something else. The one thing that keeps me in the game is the idea that your biggest impact on the world as a philosopher is not the papers that you write which no one will ever read but the couple dozen kids you teach each semester. For better or worse, that’s the legacy you can have as a philosopher. As such, you actually don’t have a lot of time to waste. A semester goes by pretty quick and then it’s done. After it’s gone, there’s no point in wishing you had spent less time stuck at the bottom of a well.