David Weinberger's Intranet Buzz:
Philosophy Without Permission

Jean-Paul Sartre once said that we choose our advisors. For example, if you're wondering about premarital sex and you go to your priest for advice, you've pretty well chosen the answer you're going to get. So, even when asking someone else to decide there's just no escaping the awful burden of responsibility for ourselves, or, as my tribe prefers to think of it, guilt.

Thus, I know my own hands are dirty when I tell you that I went to Chris Locke (http://www.rageboy.com/index2.html) for consolation after getting slammed in a way that was particularly hurtful to me. When you call up RageBoy because someone's done you wrong, you're unlikely to come away in a spirit of loving forgiveness. It was RageBoy, after all, who advised Bishop Tutu that the "truth and reconciliation" trials were ok so long as they could hang the bastards afterwards.

Here's what brought me to RageBoy:

A few issues ago, I pointed readers to a long-ish article I'd written called "The New Metaphysics of the Web." The article — an attempt to work out some issues that are important to a book I'm writing — draws a contrast between our traditional metaphysics that understands things in terms of their self-contained limits and the hyperlinked metaphysics of the Web that sees things more in terms their relationships. I use that basic idea to suggest that the Web ultimately is spiritual or transcendent.

I was well aware when writing it that there have been 2,500 years of philosophical thought about metaphysics, and that the container view has been trashed for many decades. And I included a footnote at the beginning that tries to head off some criticism by acknowledging that philosophers have said many of the things I say in this article.

This drew a posting from someone logged in as "grimmelm" on my discussion board. It's long, learned and correct. He produces antecedents for most of the major ideas in my article. For example:

... The criticism of "container metaphysics" is cogent. And it was cogent when Hegel made it two centuries ago...

Martin Buber built up an entire theology by deleting the self and replacing it with relation...Adam Smith, whose entire _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ grounds all moral judgements in our ability to empathize with others. The importance of conversation and sociability to basic humanity? Goes back to Aristotle, at least. The illusion of the "present" which must be understood in connection to the past and the future? Augustine...

Not only do I agree with this, I actually knew most of it already. (The Adam Smith work was news to me.) But what am I supposed to do with this information? What does grimmelm want from me?

This was the question I posed to RageBoy. And I think his answer is basically right:

"He wants you to shut the #$&% up."

In other words, only academic philosophers have the right to have this conversation.

I find myself torn. On the one hand, when I taught college philosophy for six years, I argued vigorously for teaching the history of philosophy so that students would understand that their ideas have histories. I still believe that.

On the other hand, I haven't read history of philosophy — or any academic philosophy, actually — since leaving teaching. Oh, I manage to fit an occasional intellectual work in between InformationWeek, The Simpsons and The Girls of KM,, but I really don't know what's going on in the field. So, does that mean I have to shut up?

Absolutely, if I were writing about new advances in academic philosophy. But I'm not. I'm trying to think as best I can about what's remarkable about the Web. And that has to be a possibility even for people off-campus. Otherwise, only academic philosophers will have the right to talk about anything interesting.

This is, in fact, the game academic philosophers play. Whatever the topic, the philosopher's role is to find the unquestioned assumption and raise it, sometimes because the assumption is blocking genuine thought, but usually because it makes the philosopher the smartest person in the room. So, if at some gathering two architects are talking about designing a newel post, an ontologist will subvert the conversation by asking, "But how can you really talk about newel posts without talking about the nature of tools, the way in which we dwell on the earth, not to mention the is-ness of posts and the as-ness of newels? You know, Hegel had some insight here when he talked about..." And now not only is the philosopher in charge of the conversation, but he's the only one entitled to have it. As a lapsed philosopher you can trust me on this.

Grimmelm didn't even do me the service of advancing the conversation by showing how Hegel's thought leads us to new insights about the Web. He didn't suggest ways in which Buber's I-Thou can be fruitfully applied to Web relationships. No, he's just marking his territory by pissing over my writing.

But here's the bad news for grimmelm: our trans-cultural culture now is bursting with amateurs with ideas of every sort, most of whom only know that Hegel rhymes with bagel. These ideas, good and bad, are tossed into the wind without asking anyone's permission. Most are blown to desert regions, but some cause our noses to twitch and we pay attention. And a thousand more voices jump in and say amen, or extend the idea, or get it wrong, or do all of the above and then take it as their own. The ideas take root and bear fruit. Are they right? We'll argue about that forever. The real question is: are these ideas clarifying? edifying? beautiful? funny? terrifying? transforming? (And, yes, I know that this idea itself has a long history.)

I remain a true believer in the importance of understanding that our ideas have histories. Everyone should understand this. Some of us should engage in the full-time pursuit of these histories. Others should study the ways we think and help us to be rational where rationality is called for. We'll lump these folks together and call them "philosophers." And they'll have many interesting conversations amongst themselves. And they may even venture into the public fray of ideas — which has exploded out of the studies and quads — where their contributions will be most welcome insofar as they illuminate and extend and have the bite of passion in them.

But when they instead seek to shut down conversations for being unauthorized, ungrounded or contrary to the tenets of schoolhouse debates, they'll be ignored. Philosophy really doesn't have to be the deliberate pursuit of irrelevance.