Although we have no access to the confidential dossier, we have all worked for many years in close proximity to Professor Ronell…

Draft letter in defense of NYU German Professor Avital Ronell.

The letter’s list of signatories reads like the syllabus of my lit theory proseseminar in grad school. And this is their very public performance of moral reasoning:

The absolute reverence for charismatic, against-the-grain smartness––a smartness that cannot be limited by clarity or force of argument, constrained by evidence, tempered by humility, sullied by philistine integrity, bothered by commitments to an other who is not an abstraction––is an ethical and intellectual sham.

Philosophy was supposed to be different from other disciplines, or so I thought some forty-five years ago, when I was hooked. Philosophers were supposed to be, like Socrates, the fearlessly critical ones. The ones who stood back and said, look, don’t uncritically buy into the values of your society. Reflect. Question. Are these values truly those of a good life? Now too many philosophers have decided to set old Socrates aside, embracing the productivity principle.

Mitchell Aboulafia, Jacobin.

Why was philosophy supposed to be any different? Why would it escape the radical transformations––or deformations––of the modern research university? Over the course of the nineteenth century, philosophy became a discipline just like history, philology, or physiology did; it became a highly specialized and institutional way of knowing. And some folks refuse to come to terms with this.

The elegy for a philosophia perennis, a wisdom that tells us how to live, courses through early modern and modern European intellectual history. From Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s humanist syncretism and Kant’s metaphysics-to-come to Max Weber’s critics in the 1920s and Habermas’s life-world, the desire for a single, unifying source of concepts and norms never abates. It’s an eschatological dream of reason overcoming its temporal divisions and realizing an ethical totality.

One of the most salient and consistent criticisms of Weber’s “Scholarship as Vocation” (1917) was that the German sociologist had demoted philosophy to a mere Fachdisziplin––a specialized form of university-based knowledge. But he was right. German universities had turned philosophy into just another discipline; they produced philosophical knowledge by means of a division of labor just as they produced chemical or philological knowledge. These were all forms of alienated labor and, thus, the kinds of knowledge they produced had no relation to, in the ubiquitous term of the day, Leben.

And this just was, as Albert Dietrich put it in 1922, the “permanent crisis of philosophy” [Dauerkrisis der Philosophie]. Like many post-war German intellectuals, Dietrich dated that crisis to Hegel’s death, when real philosophy––as in a full-throated idealism––gave way to “mere” epistemology. Weber had provided the right diagnosis of the situation around 1917 but he had offered no possible therapy. Dietrich, like so many intellectuals in the decades to come (and even now it seems), longed for a recovery of true philosophy, what Kant called “a total unity” [eine absolute Einheit], a philosophy thought would integrate life and knowledge, the fragmented disciplines, the human. Only a philosophia perennis can save us.

Today’s professional scholar is a simply a worker doing his work….He knows that life consists of innumerable work days and only a few holidays; he knows that in order to prove himself he’s got to come to terms with this life; he’s got to find it bearable.

Arthur Salz, Für Wissenschaft gegen die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1921).

Anytime I mistake what I do for more than it is, I reach for the Germans writing around the turn of the twentieth century. Salz, a sociologist who taught at Heidelberg until the Nazis forced him out of Germany in 1933, responds to Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf:

In 1909, the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald published a theory of culture [Kulturwissenschaft] based on “energetics,” the idea that the flux of energy (how energy-relations changed in space and time) could explain everything in the natural world. Max Weber reviewed Ostwald’s Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft that same year. And he didn’t like it. (His underlying critique amounted to “One discipline to rule them all!” turns one way of knowing into a comprehensive worldview). It’s a crucial text for a number of reasons, one being it moves my final chapter along.

But Weber’s brief aside (above) on how Ostwald’s theory might account for art is just perfect. According to the “purportedly precise” formulas of an “energetics cultural theory,” writes Weber, the value of anything––a person, a new technology, a society––can be determined by calculating the amount of energy it saves. The printing press was of great cultural value, for example, because it reduced the amount of energy required to distribute information.

But what about a fine, well-crafted table, asks Weber? Wouldn’t it be an unconscionable waste of resources, time, and, ultimately, energy to spend months finding the right wood, preparing the lumber, designing plans, cutting and fitting the pieces together, and then coating it with a finish? Such a thing would be but a memorial to wasted calories.

Art just isn’t efficient.