Professional philosophy and authenticity

To set a price for oneself whereby one becomes no longer a person but merely a cog! Are you co-conspirators in the current folly sweeping over nations, which, above all else, want to produce as much as possible and to be as rich as possible? Your concern ought to hold out to them a counter-reckoning: what vast sums of genuine inner value are being squandered on such a superficial external goal! (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 206).

Like other fields with a high degree of professionalism and lots of competition, academic philosophy exacts a lot of us. It requires we're willing to move practically anywhere, face painful dilemmas about family, finding jobs in the same area of your spouse, relocate multiple times, lose our savings yet again, and--hardest of all--lose our friends or opportunities to be close to parents and siblings. For those of us who are first-generation, or immigrant, or both, it also often requires we cut emotional ties with our friends and home environment. Even if we don't want to cut ties, it happens, almost inevitably. Or so is my experience. 

But to what extent does academic philosophy require that you give up yourself? To what extent does it require the loss of authenticity? 

I've been mulling over this especially after I read this moving piece of philosophical autobiography. The piece is written by Fabio, who ended his career as a philosopher after a two-year postdoctoral fellowship. He writes honestly about his struggles with academic philosophy, 

Philosophy has always been a very personal affair. Well, not always. When it stopped being a personal affair, it also stopped being enjoyable. It became a performance. I realize that many of you are able to seamlessly weave personal involvement and academic performance together. For me, that’s always been impossible. I’m too slow, my thoughts too dim, and too prone to distraction to focus on one single problem. And when I do, I am unable to crystallize my involvement with such a problem to intelligible and coherent terms. And even if I manage that, I can at best produce a competent list of platitudes. When the inexpressible (not because mystical, but because too close to the bone for me to articulate onto the field of discourse) project of shaping (edifying, in both senses of the term) my own individuality — what I thought philosophy was about — became the public performance of puzzle-solving, that’s when I developed a rejection of philosophy.

My first response to this would be to say: but you don't need to choose! Philosophy can be so much more than puzzle-solving. Still, I think it's important to be honest and clear about the trade-offs involved. Philosophy written from the heart is, at least in my experience, more difficult to sell to a journal than philosophy that intervenes in some recent debate that you might have something useful to say about, but not really keeps you up at night. 

Clearly, though, philosophers do prize honesty and authenticity--the voice of the person who seeks and is honest about it. The best philosophy is deeply personal. Augustine's Confessions, which wrestle with faith, grief, family, still resonate today, as do Descartes' or Al-Ghazali's skeptical doubts. We value Zhuangzi's playfulness and Mengzi's earnest optimism. To know such people, even across the ages, is like having valuable friends we can lean back on, and from whose works we can draw wisdom and insights now. We marvel at Fanon's raw insights into racial micro- and macro-aggressions and how his perplexity gives rise to deep philosophical insights. We read along with De Beauvoir's mixed feelings on her mother's death, more recently also Elizabeth Barnes' and Havi Carel's deeply personal insights on disability and long-term illness. We admire philosophers who can weave the personal and the professional. 

Maybe there's a tension between two kinds of philosophy, as Martin Lenz speculates: "The first kind is what one might call a spiritual practice, building on exercises or forms of artistic expression and aiming at understanding oneself and others. The second kind is what one might call a theoretical endeavour, building on concepts and arguments and aiming at explaining the world." --maybe the problem is that we value the second one almost exclusively in professional academic contexts. 

Maybe there is, as Ian Kidd says, just a difference between good philosophers and between people who are good at professional philosophy. Some people are good at both, but there is a tension between playing the game well, writing the sort of stuff that finds uptake in top journals, and between genuine, lasting philosophical insight. So the question then becomes: to what extent do you need to sacrifice yourself, your authenticity, to be good at academic philosophy? 

It seems to me that professional job consultants, notably Karen Kelsky who has helped lots of people without good placement directors or network, say you cannot possibly be yourself to succeed in academia. She cautions that, on the job market, "yourself is the very last person you want to be". So we try to game the system, to jump through the multiple hoops (including, as Kelsky keeps on cautioning, not seeming girly if you are a woman--God forbid), that would give us the prized academic job. This felt tension between authenticity and being good at academic philosophy comes with a heavy price.

It makes us too invested in writing about things that we are not genuinely interested in and thus, as a result, other people will also be less interested in. We professionalize ourselves into triviality. The loss of authenticity comes with a loss of what we value. This is too high a price, and hence, when I was on the market for several years, I decided I didn't want to play that game. To give up yourself is to give up too much. This decision turned out well for me, but could've turned out otherwise. There are no guarantees either way. 

But what is authenticity?

Many authors implicitly or explicitly assume an essentialist notion of authenticity. For example, Jennifer Morton in her Moving up without losing your way (2019, Princeton UP) discusses the ethical costs of social mobility. She discusses the well-known phenomenon of code-switching, where immigrants, ethnic minorities and first-generation students mould their way of acting so it is more in line with white, middle-class Americans in some situations. Morton writes "we should be wary of thinking of this issue as one concerning authenticity. If authenticity is thought of as staying true to one's childhood self or to a particular culture, then most education will be inauthentic'' (p. 81).

The problem with such essentialist notions of authenticity is that authenticity becomes static and only for a few people: people who tend to live where they grew up, not move social class etc. You see this ideal of authenticity in political discourse where the rooted white working class, or native-born are pitted against the rootless cosmopolitans. I think this is too narrow a reading of authenticity. What is happening here is not so much that code-switchers can't be true to some authentic childhood self, but that they need to develop multiple personae or roles that are in tension with each other.

Being authentic means to have an integrated self, and to be able to live in line with one's values.

Those values sometimes are rooted in one's upbringing and home environment. For example, Sam Lebens argues that being an observant Jew can be a decision that is due to a sense of rootedness. He acknowledges, through his faithful practice, the efforts of ancestors who have faced severe persecution for trying to keep their faith alive. But our upbringing need not define us. Take, for example, Jude the Obscure, a novel by Thomas Hardy which features a working-class English man who dreams to be a scholar. Although he works as a stone mason, his heart is in scholarly study. He teaches himself Latin and Greek in his spare time. Part of the great tragedy of this novel (surely one of the saddest stories in classic literature I've read) is that he ultimately abandons his dreams. For Jude, authenticity is Latin and Greek, and being a man of letters, in spite of his upbringing. Similarly, for some philosophers, puzzle solving is what they feel is valuable and they love doing. But not for everyone. 

Finding your philosophical voice is very difficult--trying to negotiate that balance between writing things that are publishable and that are in line with your values is hard. It also comes with privilege. People already tenured or in a tenure-track position will find more opportunities, more ways of making this happen. I think especially those of us in such luxury positions should do more philosophy we value. Not purely out of self-interest, but also to shift the norms in the discipline. I am reminded of the Daoist ideal of wuwei or non-action, not the faking of coolness but the genuine not trying to try. Achieving this would mean, in a professional context, we don't write mainly to get things published in the right venues, but we write about the things we care about. As the things we care about get published (it will take multiple tries and perhaps also less traditionally valued venues), we can shift the norms and open up the realm of philosophical possibilities. 

Comments

[a philosopher]

Thanks for this post. It speaks to much of what's been on my mind lately. I only at the moment have a small point, about why it's difficult to get interesting, authentic work published in journals. Many referees, although certainly not all, approach their job as one of finding argumentative flaws or raising other objections. This, of course, leads to people writing pieces which are "referee proof", which usually means writing narrowly on some small topic in a highly technical manner in order to make a small interjection. If referee norms were more in line with rejecting for lack of substance, originality, or insight, we would get more authentic pieces into journals.

I say all this as an analytic philosophy who enjoys this sort of adversarial game in person, but loathes it in publishing. I will say that lately I've had some run of luck with positive referee reports which were clearly written with an eye to originality and insight, with less concern on technical details. So perhaps the tide is turning on this? One can hope.

[another one bites the dust]

Inauthenticity is more of a problem for some people than for others. I also left philosophy late after having a postdoc and having published over a dozen articles. I remember my first year on the market I applied for 60 jobs or so and got one interview for a one year teaching position. My competitors were about 5 years older than me on average and had already finished postdocs. One of them was already teaching at the university I was interviewing at. I knew right then that I was going to have a very difficult time on the job market. Things were so bad that people much older than me and much more advanced in their careers were applying for entry level positions. I remember that one of the other interviewees was in his 40s!!!!

In this kind of competitive environment it was very hard for me to be myself. Both on the job market and in person at conferences or in any professional atmosphere, even getting drinks after a talk, I was thinking of the dire situation I've put myself into by doing a PhD in philosophy and how I may end up in my mid 30s with no job and no relevant skills to get another middle class job. This in fact scared me so much I started having panic attacks at night and was unable to sleep. The fear utterly destroyed my authentic self and made me in fact feel guilty for being myself, because I had the idea that my authentic self was not witty enough and didn't come across as smart enough. I felt that my authentic self was too critical as well. So, I started to hate myself and everything about myself. I felt I was too dumb, too slow, not affable enough, not cool enough, not attractive enough, not funny enough...

In the end, I left philosophy, in part because I couldn't find a decent job but also because it was just too stressful. I was so unhappy I wanted to die. I was getting drunk every Friday to deal with it too, which was making me feel ill. I decided enough was enough and I had to leave. It's been two years now. The first year was hard. But this year is much better. My sleeping has improved, my happiness has come back, and I am starting to have new interests. I do not yet have a new career and may or may not bother with that at all. My partner now has a good job luckily and our financial situation is much more secure than it was a few years ago. I could just work in the gig economy to pull in some extra change and we'd be fine. I might be an Uber driver. After philosophy, I am no longer an ambitious person. It destroyed that part of me, I think for good.

Do I hate philosophy now? I hate the professional discipline. I think it sucks. It's far too competitive. It's too elitist, and there is far too much cronyism. Philosophy is not for people like me. My skin is too thin, my fear of rejection too high, my anxiety too bad... I fancy myself a strong thinker and that is what others say about me too. I had zero trouble writing a dissertation and figuring out the publishing game with almost no help. However, I cannot continue day in and day out living a life of fear. I cannot continue to compete like crazy for years and apply for hundreds and hundreds of jobs over years and work to make people like me by being witty, telling good jokes, fostering the acceptable political views, and on and on. That's a horrible way to live!

[Yay yay no more APA]

Fabio’s post resonated with me and I feel much the same way, although I haven’t left academia. I got a teaching position that doesn’t require much research, and now life is totally different.

I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to know that I never have to go to another APA, which I absolutely loathed. I hated networking and posturing in conversation, which I now don’t have to do. I hated working on papers that didn’t make a meaningful difference to a philosophical problem, but which I knew were likely to be published, just because of the way they were written. I don’t have to do that anymore. Basically all of the things that I hated about the profession are gone because my job does not require me to deal with “the profession” at all. All I have to do is teaching, service, and whatever research I want to do. And that’s it. And it’s beyond amazing.

[TT prof]

TT professor here. Like Yay yay, Fabio's post really spoke to me. So much of philosophy research seems to be to be such a waste of time. So much of it is just tinkering with solutions to philosophical problems that only exist because people need something to write about (for prestige, for jobs, for promotions, or whatever). It makes me think of a passage from (I think) a Dostoevsky novel, where a character says philosophy is something it's good to spend a few years on, but a waste of a life otherwise.

As someone at a teaching institution, the research requirements are minimal enough that my dissertation pubs carried me easily. As a result, I get to write on what I want (if at all), pursue non-academic interests, perfect my teaching, have a life, and so on. I think I would be deeply unhappy if I were at a more research-intensive school. My reasons are largely Fabio's.

[a philosopher]

My own story (and feelings) is much like "another one bites the dust"s, except that I've responded by leaning into my authentic self more. Facing the fear, anxiety, insecurity, stress, etc, my response has mostly been "fuck that". I don't have the energy to put on a professional persona, or figure out what people want to see. So I've just been riding through the end of my post-doc as myself. I applied to a bunch of jobs this job season, with no interviews. The whole exercise now feels like a total waste of time, although I'm super happy that what I've been writing (and publishing) is stuff I'm genuinely excited about. I feel like even if I don't get to go on in philosophy (and that seems very likely), the (very small) bit of work I've gotten to do was worthwhile --- not merely small interjections into a debate. I only regret that I didn't have more time to write and publish one or two more papers (although nothing stops me from carrying on them with, even if I become an "independent scholar").

In any case, I'm a very competitive person. While having to compete in philosophy has worn me down, and I don't see myself continuing much longer, I do have other competitive pursuits which genuinely excite me right now. I'd rather be my authentic self and pursue them than try to hone an inauthentic philosophical persona over the next five years on the off change I'll get a decent full-time permanent job in philosophy.

Come to think of it, I think clinging to my authenticity (whether in what I've written, or now in pursuing other competitive pursuits) is most of what's kept me sane lately.

The pursuit of professional success in philosophy via inauthentic image crafting or worthless paper-writing is a dark hole I don't want to go down.

[way-of-lifer]

There are philosophers who explicitly weave together the personal and the philosophical, and I am on board with admiring them. I myself tend to write about topics that are of personal urgency, but tend not to show, in my actual write-ups whether they be articles, conference papers or something else, that these are personal issues for me. Nevertheless, the philosophical process for me is a personal one. I am very much on board with Pierre Hadot in thinking of philosophy as a way of life, as a way of dealing with You.

Some may think my omitting indications to the personal nature of the questions I write about inauthentic. But any writing involves editing. I would claim that those who disclose the personality of the topics also think carefully about how much to say about the personal aspect of these topics. That is no less authentic -- it's about communicating your ideas after all, and there is no obligation for self-disclosure in philosophy (which I like).

I've felt that not just has my writing not diminished my authenticity, doing professional philosophy -- very much as a junior, I admit -- has fortuitously helped me become more authentic. The philosophical community is allowing and supportive of some personality traits of mine, such as ambition, that my peer support communities in other realms do not encourage.

That said, the community is not supportive about everything. What shakes me to my core about some professional philosophers is talking about vulnerable groups like they were chess pieces to be moved about to accomplish an argument. This is not just a feature of philosophical writing -- it's even more a feature of "controversial" dinner table conversations at conferences. "Say, what do you think of transracialism", uttered by a white cis dude not working on the topic, does not come across to a minority philosopher as an icebreaker but rather as treating minority positions as intellectual curiosities.

But there is authenticity also in the rage I feel at such dinner tables. So as a whole, with regard to authenticity, I have only gained.

[Late Bloomer?]

I feel like I've only lately found my "authentic" philosophical voice. Unfortunately it arrived around the same time I started being in real contention for permanent academic positions, and I have begun to worry that those few places (on the internet and in print) where I've expressed myself in my "real" voice might be hurting me on the mid-career-scholar job market.

Tbh, I think getting out of academia might better allow me to do the kind of philosophy I really want to do, but it's been a sad, slow process of realization that staying in the university system is potentially more likely to stifle my authenticity than to promote its flourishing. Still, like "a philosopher" above, I think I'm starting to lean into my "more genuine" self (or selves) and am kind of looking forward to the freedom of philosophical expression that leaving the academic discipline of philosophy might offer me.