Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture

IMAGES OF THE INTELLECTUAL

IMAGES OF THE INTELLECTUAL FROM PHILOSOPHY TO CULTURAL STUDIES Arecurring theme in both postmodern and poststructuralist thought is the anachronism and exhaustion of philosophy. Whether individual thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, or Kant are placed on trial, or the Western metaphysical tradition tout court, the final verdict is often damning. What was once the ultimate repository of human wisdom is now a monument to the hubris of past generations. At best philosophy is subject to gentle mockery for its grandiose aspirations toward eternal truths. At worst, it is roundly condemned for its role in enforcing a Western, phallocentric tyranny of reason. Of course, the end of philosophy is a long-standing theme; it almost seems as if the condition of philosophy is to be in permanent crisis.1 But what is distinctively new is the broad reach of this idea. No longer just a subject of debate 7 among philosophers, the demise of philosophy has become a leitmotif of contemporary thought. Even as philosophical concepts permeate more and more disciplines with the spread of “theory,” philosophy as a field is under attack. It is now common for cultural critics, sociologists, literary scholars, and even journalists to refer in passing to the end of philosophy as a taken-for-granted event, an integral part of our postmodern cultural condition. Why, I wonder, has philosophy become a scapegoat for so many people? Contemporary philosophers seem to be a relatively innocuous bunch of people. Their departments are usually small, at least in the English-speaking world,2 and among the first to disappear as academic budgets are slashed and universities bow to corporate criteria of efficiency and vocational relevance. Philosophy ’s contribution to the grand scheme of things, either intellectually or politically , would appear to be minor. In one sense, of course, this confirms the claims of its critics that it lingers on as “an antiquarian fossil” rather than as a living discipline, an obsolete body of knowledge on a rough par with classical philology.3 But why expend so much effort castigating a relatively marginal discipline ? And why philosophy in particular? The reason is, of course, that philosophy remains haunted by the ghost of its own past as “one of the most prominent pillars of the modern order,”4 an aura that endows it with a lingering authority and prestige. In fact, both its critics and defenders may take the preeminence of philosophy too much at face value. Have philosophers really defined the course of Western history and culture? We can clarify philosophy’s influence on the world only by looking at the lines of connection between philosophical ideas and such social fields as the judiciary, government, commerce, bureaucracies, education, and everyday life. Much of the time, one suspects, such ideas have furnished convenient but dispensable rationales for actions that are actually inspired by more mundane motives. Those decrying the Western metaphysical tradition are, however, usually not very interested in such mundane acts of sociological investigation. What is at stake is less the actual historical impact of philosophy than its ethos, its idealized self-image and conception of its own role. Such an ethos, according to Avner Cohen, comprises the implicit set of presuppositions, sentiments, self-images, hopes and anxieties that together form the collective raison d’être about the ultimate significance of the enterprise in the act of its practitioners. The ethos relates closely to what the members conceive as the deep cause behind the enterprise—what makes it meaningful to its practitioners. It provides its members with a coherent sense of identity and mission.5 I M A G E S O F T H E I N T E L L E C T U A L 155 What is particularly interesting about the ethos of philosophy is that it reaches beyond the specific practice of philosophers to raise questions about the status, function, and authority of knowledge as such. In inveighing so passionately against philosophy, contemporary scholars are often disassociating themselves from a particular image of the intellectual. Zygmunt Bauman suggests perceptively that postmodernism tells us less about changes in the world than about the changing position of intellectuals in that world. Because of the rapid expansion of higher education and the information industries, an ever larger sector of the population is engaged in creating or processing knowledge. At the same time, these knowledge workers depend on bureaucratic structures that are felt to compromise the traditional...