George Santayana remarked in one of his books that there is no good reason for a philosopher to make his living teaching in a university. He would probably be better off as the man who collects umbrellas and checks coats in a small, seldom-visited museum. And Santayana’s onetime colleague at Harvard, William James, more or less seconded the motion: “What an awful trade that of professor is—paid to talk, talk, talk. . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted to words, words, words.”
As Justin Smith points out, the word coined by the Greeks 2,500 years ago meaning “love of wisdom” and implying a simple, serene way of life has come to mean a credentialed, cordoned-off university profession consisting of people who “do philosophy” the way others do accounting. He brings up a prominent professor (unnamed) who, in 2014, threatened to sue another, lesser-known professor for having written that he was “not a philosopher” (because, despite his standard academic credentials, he was in a different department). Smith wonders what it could mean if “one could plausibly conceive of ‘philosopher’ simply as a sort of license or accreditation, and thus . . . think of the claim that someone is ‘not a philosopher’ as a simple denial of something that is factually true.”
It seems to mean that philosophy, which, according to Aristotle, begins in wonder, has ended in pedantry and protocols and office charts.
Justin Smith is, it should be noted, an academic philosopher himself. His career has included positions in Montreal and, currently, Paris. But he’s “never been good at respecting the disciplinary boundaries” imposed by professional philosophy. Ever since a dropout adolescence in California when he began reading avidly on his own, he has felt like an outsider, which is, of course, what almost all really original philosophers have had to be—sometimes to the point of losing their lives, like Socrates or Hypatia or Giordano Bruno.
The Philosopher is a far-flung miscellany rather than a history of philosophers. It doesn’t mention Hypatia, despite its concern with women as philosophers, or Bruno, so adept at disrespecting disciplinary boundaries himself. Santayana and James are also among the missing—as is Pascal, who wrote, in his Pensées, “To mock philosophy is the true philosophy.”
But Smith almost achieves this kind of true philosophy himself by asking impertinent questions and rummaging through historical and anthropological odds and ends, looking for ways of deflating professional philosophical solemnity and self-importance. He ponders shamans and women herbalists and medieval monks, Jainists in India and Jesuits in China and dispensers of ancient wisdom everywhere. To these he adds fictional monologues and autobiographical asides, further distancing himself from the meticulously abstract, impersonal, closely argued manner of Anglophone academic philosophy.
The book has no chronological order, which “implies some sort of commitment to the march of progress,” or geographical order, either. But it has six chapters, each devoted to one of his philosophical types. These aren’t what I had guessed they would be: temperamental types like James’s “tough-minded” and “tender-minded” thinkers, or those of Stephen Toulmin, who at Cambridge was told that people who liked the color blue, sweets, and cats also liked Plato, while those who liked green, savories, and dogs were in favor of Aristotle.
Smith’s types are archetypes—the “curiosus” (or “curiosa”), the sage, the gadfly, the ascetic, the mandarin, the courtier. They overlap and can seem arbitrary. You’d be hard put to place most famous philosophers in the scheme. But it’s mostly just a way of arranging some “lost, forgotten, or undervalued” conceptions of philosophy. The “curiosi,” for instance, are the early modern “natural philosophers” who, collecting fossils and contemplating clouds, were often derided for their excessive curiosity until they suddenly turned into respectable “scientists” in the early 1800s.
The departure of the natural philosophers from their original home in speculative philosophy seems to have been, if not a crisis, an enduring embarrassment. Philosophers kept arguing about the nature and status of truth, while scientists, without worrying much about what it is, were busy accumulating vast quantities of it, which transformed the way people live far more than any philosophy had ever done.
Soon after the natural world was taken from it, philosophy lost its traditional metaphysical mission as well, and it has been in retreat ever since. The Anglo-American “analytic” philosophers have tried to make it a handmaiden of science, much as it had been the “handmaiden of theology” in the Middle Ages, adopting a narrowly logical, technical manner. The mainly French and Central European “Continental” philosophers have meanwhile been attempting to steer it in the direction of literature and psychology but, lacking the stylistic and imaginative gifts of predecessors like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, have tended to settle for portentous obscurity.
Smith writes plainly and modestly enough to be kicked out of both clubs. He says his book is not about “what philosophy, ideally, ought to be.” Still, he clearly would like it to be something a lot more ideal than what it so excruciatingly is. But the exotic specimens he collects from other cultures and epochs are not likely to sweep anyone off his philosophical feet. The homilies of a naked Indian gymnosophist, or the crabbed scriptural commentaries of assorted scribes, are going to be as impenetrable and tedious to most of us as the average slice of opaque academic prose.
More promisingly, he considers retrieving the idea of philosophy as a way of life that was prevalent from the Greeks to early modern times, when to be a philosopher usually meant renouncing worldly pursuits and pleasures in order to live a spare, tranquil life that could show others the way to true happiness. It might, of course, be hard for a happiness-peddling philosophy to get its foot in the door in our therapeutic society, where there is already a large caste of professional healers—psychologists, counselors, life coaches, gurus—who are there to lead us, if not to happiness, at least to abject dependence on themselves.
But it at least raises the possibility that reading philosophy can be a pleasure—if a strenuous one, a steep climb for a perhaps breathtaking view. He implicitly acknowledges this by turning to writers like Montaigne, Sterne, and Whitman for philosophical sustenance, and you could add many others to the list—Dostoyevsky, Melville, Kafka, Borges, Rilke, Wallace Stevens—in whose work there is a broader philosophical vision, and far more excitement and enchantment, than in all the academic philosophy of the past half-century put together.
Smith’s own book, despite its literary touches, doesn’t exactly excite or enchant. Its real effect is cautionary. If it offers an imperative, it’s to watch out for imperatives. Ideas or practices that may seem universal, or inevitable, or progressive probably are not. What is universal, it suggests, is the human tendency to pause for thought. Smith demonstrates that this has been, can be, and should be done in an infinite variety of ways.
Lawrence Klepp is a writer in New York.
