There is More Than Is Dreamt of in Our Academic Philosophy

In a 2020 essay critiquing academic philosophy’s norms against aestheticizing or personalizing one’s writing, the philosopher and critic Becca Rothfeld observed that “to slice ornament away is to sever the self (and its context) from the writing — and to leave the reader without any sense of intimacy with the author.” In her first book, All Things Are Too Small, a collection of essays celebrating maximalism and indulgence, Rothfeld shows us a more intimate and imaginative vision of contemporary philosophy. Rich with aesthetic, cultural, and personal reflections, the book nevertheless adheres, in its careful arguments and conclusions, to the stringent analytic method of philosophy. And over the course of its seemingly disparate essays, it constructs a moving vision of the good life. All Things Are Too Small is a reminder that the philosophical and the literary can do more than merely coexist — they can coalesce. Rothfeld’s expansive and extravagant world demonstrates, by contrast, that the academy’s present vision of philosophy is, in many ways, all too small.

When I say that the academy’s vision of philosophy is too small, I have in mind, first, the range of inquiries that we regard as philosophical; second, the materials that we deem appropriate to discuss; and, third, the forms and conventions to which our writing must conform. To my mind, the essence of analytic philosophy is the care and precision with which it approaches the question of what follows from what. This is a method in which I am as devoted a believer as any. But it seems to me that our discipline too often operates as though the stringency of the philosophical method somehow requires stringently constraining our philosophical inquiries, materials, and forms.

This inference is a mistake. There is no methodological obstacle to a richer and more eclectic vision of philosophy than what presently fills our academic journals — so long as our careful method of inference is accordingly adjusted, and thereby preserved. Moreover, if drawing from the aesthetic or the personal can bring distinct philosophical value to what we have to say — and All Things Are Too Small shows us it can — then our current stringency has philosophical costs.

I suspect the real reason that the domain of analytic philosophy has become so narrow is not that we’ve systematically determined that it must be, but rather, that we have become comfortable — too comfortable — with the limitations we have imposed on ourselves. It’s easier to determine what exactly follows from a set of materials when they are unambiguous propositions rather than, say, works of art, our lives, or any other phenomenon that does not already present itself to us in forms most amenable to our methods. Thus, we find ourselves increasingly siloed in the conversations others like us are already engaged in, and in the forms that they most easily take.

But philosophy is supposed to be hard. I’m not saying we should stop the conversations we are having, necessarily. But nor should we be afraid to step outside of them, or to engage with a messy plurality of media and materials. Our discipline consists of skillfully manipulating ideas and calibrating inferences in order to identify insights: playing with thought experiments, evaluating analogies, and finding the precise ways in which things do and do not relate. It’s our job to know when to weaken a contention into a conditional, when to structure it as a trilemma, when to favor a narrow conclusion over a broad one. We can pursue more ambitious and imaginative inquiries without sacrificing this rigor, bringing our stringent method to bear on an expanded domain.

Rothfeld threads this needle masterfully. She takes us on wild and dreamy explorations, shows us blurry but dazzling ideas — and then snaps into focus when the time comes for her to advance an argument: spelling it all out, hiding no balls. It is impressive enough in itself — and a demonstration of Rothfeld’s philosophical prowess — that she can so fluidly toggle among her methods and modes, knowing exactly when to come down from the clouds and again pick up the knife. But as Rothfeld weaves together her many textures and threads, what emerges from these materials is something greater than the sum of its parts.

Consider an essay entitled “The Flesh, It Makes You Crazy,” in which Rothfeld analyzes a number of classic supernatural horror films by the director David Cronenberg. As she unearths their core ideas about both the brightest and darkest dimensions of embodied life, she also explores the baffling things that happen to our minds and bodies when we fall in love. This focus leads her to an examination of the relationship between what the philosopher L.A. Paul has termed “transformative experiences” — experiences that radically change a person in ways they cannot anticipate — and consent.

Cronenberg’s central idea in films like Dead Ringers and The Fly, Rothfeld argues, is that “whether lusting and falling in love are more like body horror or more like reincarnation is merely a matter of emphasis.” More philosophically, Rothfeld argues that consenting to the transformative sort of love or sex many of us desire is, in a way, impossible: “Can a person consent to dying? Can she consent to a complete renewal, which amounts to the same thing? Surely she cannot consent in the normal way.” There is a sense in which the readings of Cronenberg and the meditation on consent and transformation happen in parallel — but a much deeper, messier sense in which they are mutually reinforcing. And although they could be separated and developed in clean, independent inquiries — ones conforming to the familiar standards of academic philosophy — it should be obvious that philosophical value would be lost. They simply wouldn’t add up to what we see, when we see it all at once.

In another of my favorite essays in the book, “Having a Cake and Eating it, Too,” Rothfeld reflects on the titular phrase — “A feat too perfect, too complete…on Earth, we are not permitted to conserve and consume at once” — by way of Simone Weil’s ideas about the tragic incompatibility of looking and consuming. In Rothfeld’s interpretation, Weil, a philosopher and mystic who starved herself to death at the age of 34, died not because of a disdain for food but out of a recognition of her own hunger’s insatiability. The essay also reflects on the nature of beauty and our insatiable desire to consume it, to become one with it; on the profoundly fraught relationship that many women today have with food, eating, and their bodies; and on the impossible tragedy that is mortality.

Throughout most of Rothfeld’s book, I heard “all things are too small” as a joyful proclamation. It is a celebration of the wonders and possibilities of this world and of our insatiable appetite for it. But there is a different way in which to hear this proposition: as an expression of inconsolable mourning for our finitude, or a cry of despair over the shadow of loss cast by everything we love. Although coping with the pain of this smallness has long been one of philosophy’s central challenges, Rothfeld manages to take it up under a refreshing new light, threading it with personal reflections on beauty, embodiment, and the burdens intimately familiar to so many women of our time. “Until we ascend to the celestial restaurant,” Rothfeld counsels in the end, “I recommend binging to bursting. If it is never enough, try to love that about it.”

Rothfeld is right that the norms of academic philosophy don’t normally permit us to cultivate this level of intimacy — they don’t normally permit us to fully express ourselves. It’s striking that philosophers are willing to accept this, since, like artists, we tend to completely identify with our own work. What enticed us to philosophy was the invitation to think in a certain way that felt magical in part because it was fundamental. As academics, we have slowly winnowed our scholarly selves to the sharp point of specialization — but I cannot imagine that these narrow slices are the only parts of our philosophical identities that we have left. With All Things Are Too Small, Rothfeld invites us all to reconsider just how much of ourselves we sublimate when we write our ideas down.

It might be that, within the academy, we have simply resigned ourselves to the belief that the present smallness of our discipline is inevitable: that the arc of any discipline is for its inquiries and insights to become increasingly narrow. As we accumulate knowledge, the idea goes, every later generation of scholars stands on the shoulders of all those who came before, and contributions must become increasingly specialized as things go along.

But this needn’t be philosophy’s only trajectory. Philosophy is essentially free, its playground the entirety of logical space. Rather than remaining siloed within our ever-narrowing branches, we are at liberty to leap from branch to branch while weaving new connections and insights among them. The singular magic of philosophy lies in its pairing of imaginative liberty with analytic clarity, but the field has come to privilege the latter at the expense of the former. We should not forget that analysis is merely our tool, our vehicle for exploring and making sense of the world. Empty in itself, it is only animated and rendered valuable by the inquiries we have the imagination to ask. It can only take us where we are adventurous enough to go.

All Things Are Too Small lays bare another, very different way in which the present narrowness of academic philosophy is costly. In several essays, Rothfeld engages with a number of mainstream or “pop” philosophical ideas and practices that have become immensely influential in recent years, but which have been largely ignored by academic philosophers. Most of these are ideas and practices that valorize (or even fetishize) some form of minimalism, and are thus antithetical to Rothfeld’s indulgent vision of the good life. In “More Is More,” Rothfeld takes on the contemporary “decluttering” practices popularized by the modern guru of tidiness Marie Kondo, whose The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing triggered an entire movement. Rothfeld describes an episode of Kondo’s Netflix show (Tidying Up With Marie Kondo) in which Kondo “talks a newly bereaved woman into discarding her dead husband’s belongings” and insists “that the items we most desperately long to cling to are precisely the ones we must renounce.”

Rothfeld criticizes the decluttering movement for not recognizing that certain material possessions might be especially hard for us to relinquish, not because we are imprisoned by them, but because they represent, and keep us connected to, parts of ourselves. More fundamentally, Rothfeld admonishes the movement’s background conception of the ideal self as something that strives for utter detachment — with its “obligatory injunctions to relish ‘fresh starts,’ ‘blank slates,’ and all the other clichés of inauguration” — rather than as something constructed and made distinctive by accumulation: “It is only via accumulation — of friends, of fears, of phobias, and of the myriad paraphernalia that accompany any life — that we graduate from schema to soul.”

That Rothfeld disagrees with the substantive philosophical presumptions of the decluttering movement is beside the present point. What’s refreshing is her recognition that these are substantive philosophical contentions, and thus worth taking the time to seriously engage with: to make arguments rather than simply dismiss or assert. The mark of an excellent work of philosophy is not necessarily that it convinces the reader of the truth of the author’s thesis. Rather, it’s that it leaves the reader with a deeper and clearer understanding of the object of inquiry, and so empowers her to determine what she thinks for herself. Rothfeld reminds us that the philosophical method is not merely a tool that we use to deliberate and defend our own views, but also one that we can use to help facilitate the deliberation of others.

In another essay, “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave,” Rothfeld mounts a scathing takedown of the increasingly popular mindfulness movement, or what I might refer to as a certain brand of “mainstream mindfulness.” Rothfeld critiques the movement’s foundational conceptions of “thoughts” and “judgments” according to which they do not constitute us but rather inhibit or even enslave us; its central aim of cultivating and practicing what’s often described as “nonjudgmental awareness” (or “pure attention”); and its contention that such cultivation allows us to access the “true selves” that supposedly lie beneath the noise of our thoughts, feelings, and judgments. Rothfeld argues that these core contentions are false or meaningless at best, and dangerous at worst:

I happen to disagree with Rothfeld. But I also think our disagreement illustrates exactly why it is valuable to seriously engage with “pop” philosophical ideas. Even if Rothfeld’s challenges are compelling against certain ideas that might be peddled under the label “mindfulness,” there are other, facially-adjacent understandings of mindfulness that strike me as deeply insightful. In particular, it might be true that a call to disavow or discard all negative thoughts, feelings, and judgments is some combination of meaningless, impossible, and dangerous. But it’s also true that we cannot always trust such thoughts, feelings, and judgments to serve our considered interests; that the ones contrary to our considered interests are often the product of automatic (or “mindless”) patterns; and that these patterns can be very difficult for us to identify, let alone break.

As I’ve come to understand mindfulness, the suggestion to practice “nonjudgmental awareness” is not a prescription to suspend the formation of judgments at all (nor an allegation that failing to do so is the cause of all our problems). Rather, it’s an encouragement to cultivate a higher-order awareness of one’s judgments, as such, when they arise. This consists of intentionally observing one’s own thoughts, feelings, and judgments (the “awareness” part), while resisting the impulse to automatically endorse or reactively pile onto them (the “nonjudgmental” part). I myself have found that efforts to practice this — for instance, by self-consciously resisting my intense and destructive impulses in moments of distress — serve to facilitate my own cognitive empowerment. Indeed, mindfulness has been incorporated into several effective and targeted therapeutic interventions for conditions characterized by intrusive thoughts or impulses. This understanding of mindfulness is more akin to the ideas that Rothfeld attributes to the Stoics. But it is also what many of us are talking about when we talk about mindfulness, even if it might not be the only present referent of the term.

More fundamentally, my (comparatively charitable) interpretation of the idea that our thoughts and feelings don’t constitute our “true selves” is that we needn’t automatically identify with every single thought or feeling that we have — which is to say that there is something we might refer to as our “self” (perhaps even our true self) that is not simply identical to the entirety of our thoughts and feelings. In other words, there is some part of ourselves that serves — or at least can serve — as our higher-order cognitive arbiter. It seems to me that this conception of the “self” essentially underscores the possibility of taking reflective space from — and so discriminating among — our wildly uneven mental contents. As someone who does often feel dragged along “kicking and screaming” by my own thoughts, this insight strikes me as not only true but immensely powerful, irrespective of whether we describe it using the language of “true selves” or not.

By engaging seriously with the ideas of mainstream mindfulness and so facilitating this dialogue — indeed, by even recognizing that there is a dialogue to be had — Rothfeld has initiated a philosophical conversation that is both substantive and consequential. The claim that we can never trust our own judgments is profoundly different from the claim that we cannot always trust them, and this difference matters. It is the razor’s edge between an idea that might be weaponized by pernicious actors in gaslighting, disenfranchising, or manipulating others, as Rothfeld observes, and an idea that might transform countless lives for the better. As it turns out, it is not always clear what we talk about when we talk about mindfulness — but disentangling and evaluating such conceptual distinctions is precisely the forte of us analytic philosophers.

I suspect that at least some philosophers have resisted engaging with these and other mainstream or “pop” philosophical ideas because they assume that any contributions involve picking low-hanging fruit. But this is not a necessary entailment. To really believe in the method of philosophy is to recognize both the depth and the breadth of its analytic value; whether you choose to pluck produce that hangs low is entirely up to you. When I say that All Things Are Too Small is a serious philosophical achievement, part of what I mean is that Rothfeld is interested only in reaching high.