WISDOM, FRIENDSHIP AND THE PRACTICE OF PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

This paper considers the impact that the practices of friendship might have on shaping philosophical activity in the twenty-first century. To consider what it means to practise philosophy necessitates understanding the effect that the structures of the contemporary university have on philosophical enquiry. Maintaining the historic sense of the university as a place where conversations take place which aim at deepening the understanding of one’s world is increasingly difficult in universities structured by the imperatives of the neoliberal economic policies of the last forty years. The model of friendship, because it is both personal and conversational, has the power to reinvigorate not just the practice of philosophy but also the understanding of the university as a place for deep learning.

Keywords:

• friendship
• conversation
• neoliberalism
• university
• Oakeshott

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Michael McGhee, “The Voice of Cordelian Ethics: Imagination and the Loss of Religion,” Journal of Scottish Studies 10 (2018): 52–68.

2 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (London: Routledge, 1991) xii.

3 Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

4 Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack, eds., Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (London: Routledge, 2004).

5 “Vulnerability and the Politics of Care” conference, British Academy, 9–10 February 2017. Pamela Sue Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance,” ed. Nick Bunnin, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Pelagia Goulimari, Spec. issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25.1–2 (2020): 36–45.

6 Pamela Sue Anderson, “‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’: A Spiritual Turn in Philosophy of Religion,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 85 (2009): 119–29 (119).

7 Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012).

8 Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010).

9 Bob Brecher, “Universities: The Neoliberal Agenda” in Interrogating the Neoliberal Lifecycle: The Limits of Success, eds. Beverley Clack and Michele Paule (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) 127–42.

10 Michael Oakeshott, “The Idea of the University” in The Voice of Liberal Learning, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001) 117.

11 Collini, What Are Universities For? [Kindle ed.] 32–38.

12 Julian Baggini, “If Universities Sacrifice Philosophy on the Altar of Profit, What’s Next?,” The Guardian 21 Dec. 2018, available <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/21/universities-philosophy-profit-business-partners> (accessed 12 Feb. 2019).

13 Oakeshott, “The Idea of the University” 106; my emphasis.

14 Ibid. 107.

15 Ibid. 106.

16 Ibid. 116.

17 Ibid.

18 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) 1–38; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2014) 27–88.

19 Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) 1.

20 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015) 28.

21 William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (London: Sage, 2014) 20–23.

22 Brown, Undoing the Demos 176.

23 Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism 22.

24 Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30.2 (2001): 190–207 (199).

25 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart; trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 268.

26 Collini, What Are Universities For? 33–34.

27 Oakeshott, “The Idea of the University” 109; my emphasis.

28 Jessica Shepherd, “I Think, Therefore I Earn,” The Guardian 20 Nov. 2007, available <https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/nov/20/choosingadegree.highereducation> (accessed 12 Feb. 2019); “What Can You Do with a Philosophy Degree?,” Times Higher Education Supplement 17 Nov. 2016, available <https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/subjects/what-can-you-do-philosophy-degree> (accessed 12 Feb. 2019); Nicholas Miller, “5 Reasons Why Philosophy Majors Make Great Entrepreneurs,” Entrepreneur 5 July 2017, available <https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/295699> (accessed 27 Nov. 2019).

29 Collini, What Are Universities For? 56; my emphasis.

30 Oakeshott, “The Idea of the University” 109–10.

31 Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. [1989], trans. Trista Selous (New York: Columbia UP, 2007) 59–60.

32 Michèle Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Hamer (London: Routledge, 2003).

33 Thus Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) is both a discourse on the nature of the universe and a reflection on how to live well in that world.

34 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Steadfast_Philosopher,_by_Gerard_van_Hondhorst.jpg> (accessed 8 Feb. 2019).

35 <http://www.edward-hopper.org/excursion-into-philosophy/> (accessed 8 Feb. 2019).

36 Genevieve Lloyd, The “Man” of Reason (London: Methuen, 1984); Beverley Clack, “Introduction,” Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition: A Reader (London: Macmillan, 1999).

37 Mark Oakley’s article “Invitation to Contemplate” in The Church Times 1 Feb. 2013 includes a reproduction of this painting and a helpful commentary on the contemplative function of the series of paintings of which it is a part. See <https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2013/1-february/books-arts/reading-groups/invitation-to-contemplate> (accessed 28 May 2019).

38 Anderson, “‘Thoughtful Love of Life’” 120.

39 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson; trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

40 Quoted in Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994) 13; see also 121.

41 Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, LXXXIX, “On the Parts of Philosophy” line 6, available <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_89> (accessed 15 Feb. 2019).

42 Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Penguin, 1969) 64.

43 Seneca, Selected Letters, trans. Elaine Fantham (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010) 31.

44 F.H. Sandbach, The Stoics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) 162.

45 Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire 119–20.

46 Epicurus, “Principal Doctrines,” trans. P.E. Matheson, in Greek and Roman Philosophy after Aristotle, ed. Jason Saunders (New York: Free, 1966) 53–57, 55–56.

47 Seneca, “On Favours” in Moral and Political Essays, eds. and trans. John Cooper and J.F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 288.

48 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8–9; Politics 1.13 on women; also Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire 54–56.

49 Plato, Symposium 209b.

50 Ibid. 209a, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford UP) 52.

51 Ibid. 209a, 52.

52 Ibid. 209c–d.

53 Epicurus was the first to open his school to women: Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire 117. Nussbaum also sees Lucretius as framing his ideal of marriage as a form of philia: ibid. 187.

54 For a variety of explorations of friendship, see, for example, Marilyn Friedman, What Are Friends For? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993); Mary Hunt, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York: Crossroad, 1991); Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz (London: Routledge, 2002).

55 Julie K. Ward, “Aristotle on Philia: The Beginning of a Feminist Ideal of Friendship?,” Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julie K. Ward (London: Routledge, 1996) 155–71.

56 Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice.

57 Lawrence Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence (London: Routledge, 2005), esp. 111–13 (113).

58 Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations [1949] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) 61.

59 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, trans. Ilse Lasch (London: Rider, 2004) 12.

60 Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence (London: Granta, 2010.)

61 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Life, Death and (Inter)subjectivity: Realism and Recognition in Continental Feminism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60.1 (2006): 41–59 (41).

62 Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, The Slow Professor (Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 2016).

63 Ibid. 89.

64 Ibid. 88; my emphasis.

65 For critiques of academic cronyism, see bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (London: Routledge, 2004); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (London: Routledge, 1990).

66 Jennifer Saul, “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy,” Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, eds. Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013) 39–60.

67 Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice 136.

68 Marshall McLuhan, The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment (Berkeley: Gingko, 2005).

69 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958] (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998) 178.

70 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1948] (New York: Harcourt, 1968) 455.

71 Arendt, Human Condition 182–84.

72 Roger Burrows, “Living with the H-Index? Metric Assemblages in the Contemporary Academy,” Sociological Review 60.2 (2012): 355–72 (358).

73 For problems with the supposed objectivity of statistics, see Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990).

74 Chris Parr, “Imperial College Professor Stefan Grimm ‘Was Given Grant Income Target,’” Times Higher Education Supplement 3 Dec. 2014, available <https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/imperial-college-professor-stefan-grimm-was-given-grant-income-target/2017369.article> (accessed 25 Feb. 2019).

75 Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (New York: Stein, 1973).

76 Oakeshott, “The Idea of the University” 113.

77 See Catherine Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76.4 (2008) 905–33.

78 Arendt, Human Condition 243–47.

79 Ibid. 237.