Burning Down the House
Photo by Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash
Philosophy today looks like an archaic ruin. In the West, its foundations lie in long-buried texts by ancient Greek thinkers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Walls constructed through centuries of debate now crumble under accelerating economic pressures and administrative neglect. The shared love of wisdom that once covered it appears to have blown off in the storms of identity politics and digital fashions. A discipline dedicated to the love of wisdom looks sadly unloved. A tradition that once incubated every science seems ready to collapse.
Without Roof or Windows
Yet we philosophers, trained to be critical thinkers, continue to carry on. We live in this weather-beaten house, with its shaky foundations and crumbling walls and blasted canopy, and we try to make the best of it. But the demands of professional credibility keep us from repairing the house itself.
Photo by Juliana Malta on Unsplash
As my book Social Domains of Truth suggests (pp. 297-98), the house of contemporary philosophy holds many niches—epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, etc.—but it lacks either roof or windows. Experts from various subdisciplines and sub-subdisciplines gather in their own little niches for specialized discussions. Once in a while we bump into our colleagues from other niches. But there’s no roof on our house: we have no shared sense of what philosophy is all about. And the house has no windows: we don’t have openings through which we can meaningfully talk with a wider public. That makes it hard to undo the damage.
Why Bother?
If you’re not a professional philosopher, you might ask, So what? Why does it matter that the disciplinary love of wisdom looks woefully unloved? Why worry that a profession of critical thought has become both splintered and remote? Even if you’re a philosopher by trade, you also might wonder what the problem is. Aren’t complaints about fragmentation and isolation nearly as old as philosophy itself?
I can’t answer adequately in a single blog post. But let me give one reason why all of this matters. Today truth is in trouble. So many people doubt that they either can or should pursue truth. And if, as a society, we give up on truth, then our social institutions—including education, politics, journalism, law, and science—will slowly collapse. They too will look like worn-out ruins. Philosophy has always tried to figure out what truth is and why it matters. It needs to do so once more, not only to meet its own expectations but also to offer genuine insights for an allegedly post-truth society.
Breaking Free
“Burning Down the House” by David Byrne and the Talking Heads is one of my favorite songs. I love the energy of their performance, the dreamlike logic of the montaged lyrics, the playful urgency of the one-line refrain: “Burning down the house.” It’s not a destructive call for arson. To burn down the house, as Byrne and his bandmates explain, is to break free from whatever holds us back and to take creative flight.
There’s much in philosophy, both in the ancient tradition and in the contemporary profession, that holds us back. There’s much that keeps us from exploring the insights our society needs. But there’s wonderful creative potential too. It’s time, in John Dewey’s century-year-old words, for Reconstruction in Philosophy. It’s time for burning down the house.
