I'm wondering whether what literary agent John Brockman has called the third culture isn't, in effect, philosophy in an mode of broad-ranging intellectual synthesis, an attempt to pull things together in an era of intellectual hyper-specialization. Let me ease into it.
For some time I've been aware of a distinction between philosophy as an academic distinction and philosophy as a mode of thought, a distinction I have from Peter Godfrey-Smith (himself a philosopher, who is fond of octopi). It was a philosophy as a mode of thought that led me to major in philosophy as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Alas, academic philosophy turned out to be intellectually specialized in a way I sense to be at odds with the mode of thought.
But then what did I know?
By the time I'd figured that out I'd racked up enough philosophy course to fulfill the requirements of the major, so I saw no point in switching to something else. But what would I have switched to? Literature is what I'd come to love, but I didn't have enough courses in English to satisfy score a major there. But I did take lots of literature courses, many of them the polymathic Richard Macksey. Now, that's what I was looking for in philosophy, an opportunity to range far and wide, to synthesize, and literary study, as Macksey conceived it, was a good vehicle for that. I had, in effect, majored in Macksey.
More recently Eric Schlisser has argued for synthetic philosophy, which he found in Daniel Dennett's From Bactria to Bach and Back. Yes, Dennett is a card-carrying philosophy, but that book is not philosophy as it is practiced in philosophy departments. It is a wide-ranging look at life and mind under the rubric of evolution. [I should add that I've not read the book, but I've seen many Dennett lectures on it and am familiar with a number of his papers and have blogged about them.] That is to say, it is philosophy as a mode of thought rather than as an intellectual discipline.
Other books in the mode include Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals. These investigators are card-carrying academics with specialized credentials who have chosen to address themselves to a general audience in works of larger scope than is typical of the academy. And they are writing as much for themselves and for fellow specialists as for that general public. It is the only way they have of putting things together. Still more recently I have argued that journalist John Horgan has written such a synthetic book in his (ironically titled) The End of Science, in which he takes the via negativa toward outlining the whole.
Brockman's third culture
And that brings me to John Brockman who, in has capacity as literary agent, had helped bring many of these books to light. Here is what he says in the introduction to an edited collection, The Third Culture (1995):
The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.
In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.
[...]
The wide appeal of the third-culture thinkers is not due solely to their writing ability; what traditionally has been called "science" has today become "public culture." Stewart Brand writes that "Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly." We now live in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change. Science has thus become a big story.
That sounds an awful lot like Schlisser's synthetic philosophy.
I regard the emergence of this synthetic mode of discourse, this philosophical mode, as another indication of fundamental changes in our culture, something Dave Hays and I have called rank-shift. Not only do intellectual specialists have to change how they think and work, but it is necessary to rework a civilization-wide general view of the world. That can only be done in the public arena.
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Note: I have decided to gather my posts on this topic under the label " philosophy new."
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Here's a note I posted to futurist Bryan Alexander on Facebook on this topic:
I've been thinking about the "decline of the humanities" in whatever form it's taking. & I've got two things in mind: 1) the (peculiar) history of English lit, and 2) John Brockman's 'third culture.'
On English lit, the core skill of literary criticism has been 'close reading'. The practice arose before WWII but didn't become standard until after the war. According to Gerald Graff in "Professing Literature" (p. 173):
The new pedagogical concentration on the literary 'text itself' was designed to counteract the large problems of cultural fragmentation, historical discontinuity, and student alienation. But putting the emphasis on the literary text itself also had a more humble advantage: it seemed a tactic ideally suited to a new, mass student body that could be depended on to bring the university any common cultural background - and not just the student body but the new professors as well, who might often be only marginally ahead of the students. The explicative method made it possible for literature to be taught efficiently to students who took for granted little history by professors who took for granted little more history.
It's the bit about cultural fragmentation that caught my eye. The hidden assumption, the patriarch in the woodpile as it were, is that the values embedded in the canonical texts and professed by literature professors were universal. And hence were just what was needed here.
However, once along comes deconstruction and blows a hole in that and we have African American studies, feminism, and the rest come pouring in through the breech. And now we get the Culture Wars and the Canon Wars and identity politics. Looks like cultural fragmentation to me. Whoops!
And this is certainly one reason given for the decline of the humanities. Is it? And, while I'm inclined to think we're seeing over-reach on identity, I surely don't want to return to "the good old days".
That's one thing. And then there's John Brockman and his 'Third Culture'. Brockman, as you may know, is literary agent to the stars of science, with folks like Richard Dawkins, Steve Pinker, Dan Dennett, and others in his stable. Of course in coining that term he's playing off CP Snow's two cultures.
Here's a bit of what Brockman says about this third culture:
The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.
In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.
Yada yada. There's a snide triumphalism about this that I don't like, but he's certainly right about the increase in general audience science writing of all kinds. What I'm wondering is whether or not this is cutting into interest in the humanities in colleges and universities. Are humanists no longer "rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are"? But then, did academics of whatever stripe EVER do this?
And then there's the shift from literature to other media.
