Late in his career, Plato wrote two dialogues, the Sophist and Statesman, each apparently aimed at defining the figure named in its title. But the real subject of these dialogues is their own methods: definition, distinctions, analogies. The dialogues are written as if part of a trilogy, but the climactic dialogue — The Philosopher — was never written. Perhaps that was the point: defining the philosopher needs one to be a bit of a philosopher oneself. Plato’s readers need to take the essential last step for themselves, asking what (if anything) the activities labeled “philosophy” have in common.
If Justin E.H. Smith had this unwritten dialogue in mind when christening his book, he does not mention it — his erudition is worn lightly. Unlike some philosophers who take their lead from Plato, he makes no attempt to intuit the essence of philosophy from the armchair. He gives us, rather, a fragmentary survey of “the history of human activities carried out under the label ‘philosophy,’ as well as many [similar] activities that have been carried out under other labels.”
In this, Smith, like Plato, makes good use of analogy. Plato thought statesmanship was a bit like weaving, sophistry a little like angling; Smith likens philosophy, unexpectedly, to dance. He argues that philosophy is best regarded as “a universal human activity with many distinct cultural inflections.” Dance, to his mind, is a better analogy than (say) ballet, something “by definition, European,” though it may well crop up outside Europe “by diffusion or appropriation.” The tradition of European philosophy that traces its lineage back to Plato and Socrates (Smith calls this tradition “Philosophia”) is, then, like ballet, a single cultural inflection of a universal activity.
This provincializing of Europe helps to show how at least two ancient civilizations, India and China, have intellectual traditions of writing and argument enough like “Philosophia” to merit the name of philosophy. But Smith goes further, proposing that the reflections of nonliterate societies, oral traditions, and discursive forms based on myth and metaphor have some claim to count as philosophy as well.
As Smith rightly notes, what counts as philosophy has always been up for grabs. That is why it may prove useful “to think of ‘the philosopher’ as represented by various types … whom in different times and places it will make sense to consider as philosophers.”
Smith teaches philosophy in Paris but went to graduate school in the United States, where he was well-schooled in the conventions and concerns of the so-called analytic philosophy that dominates the Anglophone academic world. But philosophers who write in this style are only one of the six types of philosopher to star in Smith’s story: In his equivocal label, they are “Mandarins.”
The Mandarin shares the pages of Smith’s book with five other types. There is the Curiosa, who blurs the boundaries between natural science and philosophy. There is the Sage, who engages critically with a culture that he or she has thoroughly internalized. There is the Gadfly, whose critical engagement with the culture deploys such modes as parody or invective. There is the Ascetic, who disclaims such ersatz values as wealth or honor or pleasure for the real values: goodness, reflection, simplicity. Finally, there is the Courtier, speaking convenient untruths to power. These types flit in and out of Smith’s pages; wisely, he does not furnish us with representative examples of each type but rather invites us to see something of them in ourselves, our colleagues, and the figures of history.
It is helpful to be reminded that there are other models for a philosophical life than that of the tenured academic. “Mandarins” know this, of course, because they are required to study these philosophical freelancers in graduate school (Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Mill), but since the age of Kant, the greatest of the university philosophers, it has grown harder to take them seriously. Smith urges that much is lost when philosophy becomes an activity “one is enabled to do only with the appropriate accreditation within a particular institutional setting.”
Smith is not calling for a return to some purer idea of the philosophical vocation, entirely free of institutions, their money and prestige. But he pointedly reminds us just how big a deal Socrates made of the fact that he, unlike the sophists and rhetoricians with whom his accusers had confused him, took no money for his teaching. Indeed, he didn’t even claim to teach; all the important truths were, after all, within us, needing only a well-aimed prod to be brought to the surface. In this respect, the Mandarins, with their monthly salaries, are more like the ancient sophists than like Socrates. But this does raise the important question of how Socrates kept his family alive. Sage, Ascetic, and Gadfly all at once, he set a high bar for any future claimant of the philosopher’s mantle, and it is hard to see how his purity of motivation could be sustained in the 21st century.
Commercial society has no obvious place for a Curiosa or Sage or Ascetic, philosophical types who stand awkwardly alongside the interests of the mercantile classes (especially when their vocations rely for their sustainability on commercial patronage). Nor does commercial society display a consistent attitude toward its Gadflies, putting one under house arrest while giving another a prime-time slot. It has, however, found a temporary dispensation for its Mandarins: the modern research university with its combination of teaching, publishing, and committee duties, selling transferable skills to the children of the middle classes and a dose of high culture to liven up their weekends.
A university affiliation for philosophers certainly has advantages: It roots out the phonies and incompetents; it provides thinkers with communities of peers; it keeps them in the black. But the training that Mandarins must undergo has the well-known disadvantage of churning out acolytes and clones rather than independent thinkers. Tenure can, in principle, serve to protect the freedom of the Gadfly to provoke and the Sage to meditate, but the graduate school, job market, and tenure track that must be endured along the way tend to produce a pliant, unmeditative type, willing to settle for a professorial chair, well-fed children, and picket fences.
Smith, who dubs his book “an essay in the proper Montaignean sense,” is happy, as Plato was, to end his book in aporia: a state of productive puzzlement. Like Plato, he does not think this so much a confession of failure as a redefinition of success. He aims not to eliminate all puzzlement but to leave us puzzled about the right things. In the conditions of modern, capitalist society, where any ambitious thinking takes leisure and leisure takes money, the biggest challenge is to find venues for philosophical reflection outside the academy for those without independent means. Smith’s book does not have an all-purpose solution to this problem, but it does offer a convincing answer to a more modest challenge: that of showing the regnant academic conception of philosophy to be only one possibility among others.
Smith himself risked his colleagues’ contempt by selling philosophical conversations over espressos at fixed hourly rates. There isn’t room in the market for too many Sartres-for-hire, but Smith’s response to the challenge at least shows enterprise. Others who find themselves convinced that philosophy can be, and sometimes ought to be, done outside departments will have to show a little gumption of their own.
