I’ll be holding a philosophy intensive called “Cultivating An Intellectual Life” starting the week of May 4. Please follow the link to this form if you’d like to find out more!

Academics are not trained to think well about money. In fact, I would say that we are well-trained not to think about it at all. We often approach it instead with some mixture of condescension, confusion, apprehension, and disgust. I speak for myself.

But I’ve also had a long-standing secret interest in investing, one I largely ignored and rejected for many years as morally suspect. Investing is morally suspect in a number of ways. Our culture has almost entirely forgotten the consensus of the three great Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that taking interest is morally blameworthy. And our financial system is a train wreck of corruption, conflicts of interest, and exploitation that any right-thinking person should view with suspicion.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out a way to stop using money, which means the question becomes: how to use it well? After I left the Academy, I took a job with a company in the renewable energy industry where I worked for about three years. I had no business experience or knowledge and obtained the job through some combination of luck and the kindness of my new employer. I spent a while looking for ways to obtain some basic level of business knowledge. I took an introduction to accounting course at thirty-five, something my twenty-five-year-old self never could have imagined doing. I started a certification in corporate sustainability reporting. I thought about getting an MBA, but felt doubtful about the massive debt this would require, not to mention the time it would take and the letters it would add to the already excessive list after my name. (Who wants to be an MA, MTS, PhD, MBA?) Then I discovered the CFA.

The Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute curriculum provides some of the most rigorous financial training in the world at a fraction of the cost of an MBA. I recently spoke to an investment banker who told me he still found the first level of the CFA’s three tests difficult, even after a BA in accounting and an MBA in finance. The CFA Institute recommends spending at least 300 hours studying for each test, which means a total of 900 hours for the full certification (compare this to the recommended 300-500 hours of studying for accountants wishing to earn the CPA). I immediately knew this was my best option: world-class training in the fundamental language of business (finance and accounting) that I could pursue independently at a very low cost.

I jumped in, half-heartedly at first, then as the first exam approached rising early and going to bed late in order master the intricacies of statistical analysis, the time value of money, basic economics, corporate financial statements, stock valuation, derivatives, and more. In certain ways, this learning process was more difficult than anything I did during my PhD. It felt like I was growing a brand new part of my brain. I scraped through the first test successfully and spent about a year studying for the second test, which I did not pass. I studied for seven hundred hours all told. I decided at this point that I had what I needed. I knew I didn’t want to be an investment banker or a security analyst, so there was no specific reason for me to obtain the full CFA certification by passing all three tests. But my perspective on money, finance, and economics had been fundamentally transformed. When I left my corporate job last year, I knew more about finance than almost anyone else at the company.

Before studying for the CFA, I used to criticize capitalism without really having any idea how it worked. After the CFA, I have a much better idea. Am I still critical of capitalism? Yes. But now I’m more interested in figuring out how to work against it by knowing it from the inside, rather than by ignoring it. Capitalism is unavoidable. It’s a strategic reality, to use a framework of Michel de Certeau. Users of capitalism, however, are nonetheless free to relate to it tactically, subverting its rules and structures to their own ends. Intellectuals won’t be able to relate tactically to capitalism, however, if our understanding of it is based on a smattering of Marx and Weber, a vague sense that we don’t like Milton Friedman, a New York Times-cultivated conviction that the experts at the Federal Reserve are mere technicians rather than purveyors of a set of moral values, and a sincere but naive belief that there are “ethical investments” out there somewhere (if we could only find them) that would assuage our consciences in exchange for a few a percentage points per year and still allow us to retire comfortably. (Again, I speak for myself.) Meanwhile, Wall Street firms pull the strings of the global economy and laugh at our ignorance. This will not do.

I said in part 1 of my Manifesto that the independent scholar cultivates three kinds of independence: institutional, intellectual, and financial. It’s time to talk about financial independence. I want to start by saying that by financial independence I do not mean independent wealth. Being independently wealthy means you have enough wealth that you no longer have to work. I do think this outcome is more achievable than many of us would assume. (See, for example, the work of Early Retirement Extreme and Mr. Money Mustache.) At some point I laughed to myself that my odds of becoming independently wealthy were probably better than those of landing a good tenure track position at a college or university. The humor lies in the absurdity that someone with rock solid academic credentials improves their likelihood of financial success by starting over in a completely new career. But what I want to talk about in this post is something deeper than wealth. I want to talk about a mindset shift around money.

Financial independence as I understand it is not about wealth, but about recognizing that death is coming for all of us sooner or later. On a cosmic timescale, death is already knocking at the door for each of us. Remembering that death is immanent puts money in a different perspective. This mindset doesn’t immediately solve anything. It doesn’t necessarily mean that anxiety about money will go away. It doesn’t mean that money doesn’t matter. Money is a real thing that solves real problems. (Though, as Naval Ravikant puts it, the only problems money can truly solve are money problems.)

In the scope of one’s life, money problems are some of the least important, especially beyond a certain point of basic sustenance. For myself, I know they often serve as cover for deeper existential challenges I struggle to face directly: Why am I here? What am I here to do? What hard decisions am I avoiding? In what relationships am I failing to make things right? What challenges am I too afraid to engage? What risks am I too afraid to take? Too often, I tell myself I’ll answer these questions when I have more money.

Seneca recommended temporarily living apart from all of one’s possessions on a regular basis as a reminder that possessions are both unnecessary and unavoidably impermanent. Worry about possessions not only generates more anxiety about money, but can serve as one more distraction from the deeper questions each of us needs to ask.

Financial independence means asking these questions directly. It means knowing what thing, cause, person, relationship, or project you would sacrifice all of your money and possessions for, if it came to it. It means consistent awareness of the fact that you will die soon, that all of your possessions will go to someone else, and that everyone will forget you. Are you still worried about money? Or do you feel a different kind of dread now? If the latter, good! You’ve taken the first step toward financial independence. If you can endure the terror of the shortness and insignificance of your life, and if you can alchemize that terror into a sense of calm and acceptance, it will permanently and fundamentally transform your relationship with money. I call that transformation financial independence. I like how Vicki Robin describes financial independence in her book, Your Money or Your Life: “Financial independence is an experience of freedom at a psychological level. You are free from the slavery to unconsciously held assumptions about money, and free of the guilt, resentment, envy, frustration, and despair you may have felt about money issues” (p. 55). This kind of independence is only another facet of what I talked about in my previous posts. Institutional, intellectual, and financial independence are three flowers on the same stalk. They’re different forms of the same internal freedom.

With this framework in place, I want to suggest a few more specific ideas for those with PhD’s inside or outside the academy who are wrestling with these questions.

1. People with PhD’s are capable of earning a lot of money.

2. People with PhD’s deserve to earn a lot of money.

3. Making money isn’t evil.

1. People with PhD’s are capable of earning a lot of money. I think this point needs to be emphasized. If you successfully earned a PhD, you have the ability to make money. All you have to do is to apply yourself with the same intensity and dedication to making money that you did to completing your PhD. Making money is a skill that can be learned like any other skill. It might take some time. More people with PhD’s need to know that they actually can make money if they set their minds to it. There are abundant resources for learning to make money. Read all the business and self-help books you can get your hands on, digest them, master them. Learn about new fields and certifications that will give you credibility and enhance your earnings potential. Experiment with new projects. Talk to new people. Each of these tasks will be easier than getting a PhD and the financial payoff will likely be much larger. If you have a PhD, you’re capable of understanding and putting new material into practice. Indeed, if you’re willing to become a beginner again, I suspect that learning to make money will be much easier than earning a PhD.

2. People with PhD’s deserve to earn a lot of money. To think through this a little more, stop for a second to ask how much tuition is paid for a class that you typically teach. I estimate that, collectively, students in the classes I used to teach paid between $100,000 and $300,000 in tuition. That’s per class, per semester. Let’s give half of that number—a generous cut, I think—to staff, maintenance, facilities, and administrators. This still leaves between $50,000 and $150,000 of tuition for the instructor (ten to twenty times more than many adjuncts are paid). Say I were to teach four classes at this price point per year. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be making between $200,000 and $600,000 for this service. Run the numbers for your own situation and see what you come up with. Perhaps your students pay less tuition, or perhaps your administrators deserve higher salaries (though I seriously doubt the latter). Whatever the case may be, I am almost certain that most university instructors are criminally underpaid, and this probably includes many tenured professors at prestigious universities. Now ask yourself: where is all of that money going? And why shouldn’t more of it go to the professors who are the only ones that are actually essential to running a university? Let me say that again: the only thing you need to run a university is professors, smart people with PhD’s who know how to teach and how to do research. Everything else is secondary. That being the case, if university instructors are not being paid reasonably, and if we can’t carry out our work successfully in existing institutions, it’s time to leave and to find other places where we are paid what we are worth.

3. Making money isn’t evil. The humanities are going to die if everyone in the humanities keeps accusing anyone who tries to make money of being a capitalist. I would like to think that I am just as critical of capitalism as the next North American with a doctorate in the humanities. But until we abolish capitalism and replace it with something better, we’ll need money to keep the humanities alive. People with PhD’s in the humanities need to go make a lot of it or pretty soon there won’t be any more PhD programs in the humanities, because there won’t be anyone funding them. At many of our universities, there may not even be anyone who really understands what the humanities are or what they are for. So stop getting tangled up in your own moral objections and go make some money. The fact is that even as a professor or a graduate student you are deeply entangled in capitalism and finance. Indeed, I suspect that there is a direct correlation between the size of a university’s endowment—a pot of money managed by financiers who could not be more capitalist if they tried—and the shrillness of the denunciations of capitalism delivered by that university’s faculty and graduate students. Independent scholars need to start making what Taleb, author of Black Swan, calls “f*** you” money. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb explains, f*** you money “shields you from prostituting your mind and frees you from outside authority—any outside authority” (p. 21). This is another form of independence that I think more intellectuals are capable of achieving and should try to achieve, not for the sake of making money, but for the sake of pursuing their intellectual vocations without interference from external conflicting interests.

There is more that needs to be said about each of the ideas I have discussed in this essay and the previous three. But as we reach the end of this manifesto, I’d like to return to the idea of being an Independent Scholar. There are no doubt a host of exemplars to whom we might turn for inspiration here. But I would nominate Moses Mendelssohn as the patron saint of contemporary Independent Scholars. Mendelssohn was a Jew in eighteenth-century Berlin, recognized across Europe not only as a philosopher but also as a defender of Jewish equality and an interpreter of Judaism. As a Jew, however, Mendelssohn was unable to obtain employment at a university. He spent his professional life working at a silk factory, first as a bookkeeper and then as an owner. Let me say this: if Mendelssohn was able to write brilliant philosophical work over many decades while earning enough money to provide for himself and his family, there is no reason the rest of us can’t try to do the same. Circumstances, abilities, and outcomes will vary. But this should not stop us from working to create new institutions that serve the intellectual life more effectively and from carrying out meaningful intellectual work to the extent of our abilities.

I recently started in on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which is notoriously difficult. I’m still in the Preface, because I spent a couple of weeks going over background material and comments from various authors about the book. So if you’d like to dig into this challenging but massively influential work of philosophy, now is a good time to join!

That said, I try to provide as much context as possible during each discussion, so that if you’ve missed earlier installments, you can still jump in and track with what’s going on. And if you’re really ambitious, previous episodes are still available to rewatch on my channel.

If you’re interested in joining, I’ve love to see you there! You can follow this link to join for this week’s discussion:

Why read Kant, or any other philosopher, out loud together? The reason is simple. Learning philosophy is like learning a language. For almost everyone, the first time they encounter a philosophical text, it can actually feel like a foreign language. That’s because, in an important way, it is. There are words and concepts in philosophy that have a long history of development and use that rarely if ever intersects with how most of us speak most of the time, sometimes even when we’re using those very same words! I think there are two ways to address this challenge. One is by having someone explain the words or concepts, especially by using simplified frameworks that can help make them easier to remember or to understand. But this is only a temporary solution. The most effective long-term way to learn the language of philosophy is just to immerse yourself, as if you were trying to learn Spanish or Arabic or Chinese. Practice the language. Speak it with others. Eventually, you’ll be surprised how naturally it comes.

Why Kant specifically? There’s a lot that could be said in answer to this question. But below are a few quotations from others as a prelude.

Philosopher J. G. Herder on Kant

I have had the good fortune to know a philosopher. He was my teacher. In his prime he had the happy sprightliness of a youth; he continued to have it, I believe, even as a very old man. His broad forehead, built for thinking, was the seat of an unperturbable cheerfulness and joy. Speech, the richest in thought, flowed from his lips. Playfulness, with it, and humor were at his command. His lectures were the most entertaining talks. His mind, which examined Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Crusius, and Hume, and investigated the laws of nature of Newton, Kepler, and the physicists, comprehended equally the newest works of Rousseau….and the latest discoveries in science. He weighed them all, and always came back to the unbiased knowledge of nature and to the moral worth of man. The history of men and peoples, natural history and science, mathematics and observation, were the sources from which he enlivened his lectures and conversation. He was indifferent to nothing worth knowing. No cabal, no sect, no prejudice, no desire for fame could ever tempt him in the slightest away from broadening and illuminating the truth. He incited and gently forced others to think for themselves; despotism was foreign to his mind. This man, whom I name with the greatest gratitude and respect, was Immanuel Kant.1

Moses Mendelssohn on Kant

Mendelssohn and Kant met in person only once. But they read each other’s work and corresponded for more than a decade. In a letter to Elise Reimarus, Jan. 5, 1784, Mendelssohn wrote:

“Very nice to hear that your brother does not think much of the ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ For my part, I must admit that I didn’t understand it. The summary that Herr Garve put in the Bibliothek is clear to me, but other people say that Garve didn’t understand him properly. It is therefore pleasant to know that I am not missing much if I go thence without understanding this work.”

Kant’s translators on Kant

Paul Guyer and Allen Wood

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of the seminal and monumental works in the history of Western philosophy. Published in May 1781, when its author was already fifty-seven years old, and substantially revised for its second edition six years later, the book was both the culmination of three decades of its author’s often very private work and the starting-point for nearly two more decades of his rapidly evolving but now very public philosophical thought. In the two and a half centuries since the book was first published, it has been the constant object of scholarly interpretation and a continuous source of inspiration to creative philosophers of many schools. To tell the whole story of the book’s influence would be to write the history of philosophy since Kant.2

Norman Kemp Smith

The Critique of Pure Reason is more obscure and difficult than even a metaphysical treatise has any right to be. The difficulties are not merely due to defects of exposition; they multiply rather than diminish upon detailed study; and, as I shall endeavour to show in this Commentary, are traceable to two main causes, the composite nature of the text, written at various dates throughout the period 1769–1780, and the conflicting tendencies of Kant’s own thinking.

Seldom, in the history of literature, has a work been more conscientiously and deliberately thought out, or more hastily thrown together, than the Critique of Pure Reason. … What is much more serious, is that Kant flatly contradicts himself in almost every chapter; and that there is hardly a technical term which is not employed by him in a variety of different and conflicting senses. As a writer, he is the least exact of all the great thinkers.3

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Kant

The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidarity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic, and, I will venture to add (paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen), the clearness and evidence of the Critique of Pure Reason…took possession of me with a giant’s hand.4

Kant on religion (from Onora O’Neill)

Kant’s philosophy of religion has perplexed even his warmest admirers. Nobody has pointed this out more amusingly than Heinrich Heine, who saw in Kant the Robespierre of the intellect. The orderly philosopher of Königsberg, whose daily constitutional was attended and sheltered by his servant Lampe, armed with a modest umbrella, was really a terrorist who destroyed the ancien régime of European religion and philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason was the sword that killed deism in Germany. Yet Kant, Heine suggests, derailed this sublime and terrifying philosophy, that pointed toward the death of God, when a domestic difficulty arose. He relented and patched a God together because his servant, old Lampe, was disconsolate. Heine lampoons Kant:

“Immanuel Kant traced his merciless philosophy up to this point, he stormed heaven,…there was no more allmercyfulness, no more fatherly goodness, no otherworldly rewards for this worldly restraint, the immortality of the soul was at its last gasp…and old Lampe stood there with his umbrella under his arm, a miserable onlooker with anxious sweat and tears running down his face. And so Immanuel Kant had mercy and showed that he wasn’t just a great philosopher, but also a good person. He thought it over and said, half kindly and half in irony: “Old Lampe must have a God, or the poor fellow can’t be happy—but man ought to happy on earth—practical reason says so (at least according to me); so let practical reason also disclose the existence of God.” By this argument Kant distinguished theoretical from practical reason and, as with a magic wand, brought back to life the corpse of deism which theoretical reason had killed.”5

Kant on his own work

In a letter to Karl Friedrich Stäudlin of May 4, 1793, Kant wrote,

“The plan that I made for myself some time ago as I prepared to work in the field of pure philosophy called for the resolution of three problems: (1) What can I know? (metaphysics); (2) What ought I to do? (morality); (3) What may I hope for? (religion).”6

I’ll be holding a philosophy intensive called “Cultivating An Intellectual Life” starting the week of May 4. Please follow the link to this form if you’d like to find out more!

In my previous two posts, I discussed what I mean by the term independent scholar and by the idea of institutional independence. I also mentioned that I would discuss intellectual and financial independence next.

I want to suggest five ideas that flesh out the concept of intellectual independence. This is an incomplete, pragmatic list. But here it is:

1. Getting a PhD can be worth it, even if one never obtains academic employment.

2. People with PhD’s can produce world class scholarship, even if they aren’t employed by a university.

3. Scholarly writing is a worthwhile enterprise.

4. We need new, open-source platforms for publishing.

5. We need new, open-source venues for teaching.

Let’s take a look at each item in detail.

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1. First, getting a PhD can be worth it, even if you never obtain academic employment. I once heard someone lament that they worried about not being able to “use” their PhD by obtaining employment at a college or university. I’ve had the same thought myself. But I also wonder if this is the right understanding of what it means to use a PhD. What if we think of a PhD not primarily as job training, but as training in the practices designed to cultivate certain goods internal to those practices? In using the language of practices and internal goods, I’m drawing on the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

To illustrate the difference between internal and external goods, MacIntyre offers the example of a child being rewarded with candy for learning to play chess. The candy is an external good relative to the game of chess. But chess also has internal goods, things you can get only by playing chess. MacIntyre says that these goods “can only be identified and recognized by the experience of participating in the practice in question. Those who lack the relevant experience are incompetent thereby as judges of internal goods.”[1] In other words, MacIntyre is saying that if you’ve never played chess, it won’t just be impossible to acquire the goods internal to chess. You won’t even know how to evaluate or make sense of those goods.[2]

To unpack MacIntyre’s chess example further: in asking about the internal goods of chess, one is asking about what makes chess good aside from other external factors. There are all kinds of associated goods one might imagine, such as chess awards, chess grants, chess publications, chess schools, endowed teaching positions for chess masters, chess clubs for disadvantaged children, chess competitions to fight climate change, and so on. Each of these goods has its place. But none of these goods are the internal goods of chess itself. It would be tragic if we lost sight of the actual joy of playing chess amidst all the other associated external goods.

I want to say something similar about the practices of intellectual life that would, ideally, be taught in a PhD program, and that I believe are taught in many PhD programs. Getting a job as a professor is an external good relative to those practices. Achieving recognition for one’s academic work through awards and grants is also an external good. Other external goods include solving practical problems, such as climate change or inequality. The latter are no doubt very important goods that we should care about. But these goods are extrinsic to the practices of intellectual life. We should be able to identify some goods that are built into the intellectual life, goods you couldn’t get any other way and that you wouldn’t even know how to name or value if you hadn’t been trained in the relevant practices. The fact that scholars often leave these goods undefined or unstated may be a result of the fact that we are so preoccupied with external goods such as jobs and recognition that we rarely ask ourselves what the internal goods of intellectual life actually are. The decision to pursue a PhD should be asked with these goods in mind and might be based on whether the PhD program in question will cultivate the relevant goods. For me, retrospectively, the answer is a definite yes. But this will vary depending on the person and the program.

This failure to ask about the goods internal to the practices of intellectual life seems to lead some academics to feel the need to justify their work in other terms, especially in terms of social impact. That justification in terms of social impact may be necessary, especially when it comes to obtaining funding for one’s research. Social impact is also an important good that scholars should care about. But intellectuals should not let the importance of social impact, or need to provide external justification for their work, eclipse the goods internal to the work itself.

Thinking in terms of internal goods is especially important because it turns the whole scholarly enterprise into a collaborative rather than a competitive one, where each person fights desperately for one of a few and shrinking number of faculty positions. As MacIntyre writes, “External goods are… characteristically objects of competition in which there must be losers as well as winners.” On the other hand, “Internal goods are indeed the outcome of competition to excel, but it is characteristic of them that their achievement is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice.”[3] It seems that failure to see how certain goods are internal to the intellectual life has corroded intellectual life, because it has resulted in destructive forms of competition. Refocusing our attention on internal goods is a needed corrective to the zero-sum competition that characterizes much of Academia.

So what are the goods internal to intellectual life? We might answer this question in any number of ways, but I would start by turning to Pierre Hadot’s book, Philosophy As a Way of Life. Hadot argues that intellectual life is most fundamentally about self-cultivation. He puts it like this, “the philosophical life will be an effort to live and think according to the norm of wisdom, it will be a movement, a progression, though a never-ending one, toward the transcendent state.”[4] Hadot says that this transcendent state is fundamentally “a consciousness of inner freedom.”[5] I would suggest that the primary internal good of Independent Scholarship is independence in this sense. As I said in the first installment of this manifesto, Independent Scholarship is scholarship as the practice of freedom. On the most basic level, this is what I mean by intellectual independence. I recognize that this description of intellectual independence is vague and unspecified, that immediate objections may come to your mind, or that you may have no idea what I am referring to. Still, I find the idea of inner freedom satisfying as starting point for exploration, if inadequate as a full account of intellectual life (and even more inadequate for political life, as Hannah Arendt insists).

But I would add that there are a handful of more specific practices worth discussing. Some of those practices are things like disciplined reflection, writing, research, intellectual friendship, and teaching. There may be others. But these seem to me some of the core practices that belong to the intellectual life. These practices produce internal goods that cannot be achieved in any other way. Each of these practices deserves its own extended discussion, which I will defer to another time. But let me note that I refer to intellectual friendship instead of publishing, because I believe publishing is only one way of sharing one’s work. The practice of publishing is important, because it turns the intellectual enterprise into a collaborative one. But publishing is not the only, or even necessarily the best, way to achieve that objective. I would propose that intellectual friendship is the broader practice within which we ought to think of scholarly publishing.[6]

2. I just said that publishing is a subset of intellectual friendship. But I would like to discuss publishing in more detail, because it is an activity that nonetheless involves almost all of the practices of the Independent Scholar, including disciplined reflecting, writing, and research. Publishing is also an activity whose conditions and purpose are not always clear. I will start with the conditions needed for producing scholarship, before discussing the purpose. Regarding the conditions, I want to say: People with PhD’s can produce world class scholarship, even if they aren’t employed by a university.

Sometimes it might even be the case that people with PhD’s can produce better scholarship when they are not employed by a university. It seems that not a few faculty are held back by constraints on what they feel they can publish. Nassim Nicholas Taleb observes that academics often “live under continuous anxiety, pressures, and indeed, severe bastardization of the soul.” Unsurprisingly, he notes, this “corrupts their writing.”[7] For some, publishing as an Independent Scholar will be a liberation from those constraints. Of course, those who choose this path will need to carve out time and money for research and writing. But how many professors at universities lack exactly these two things? It seems to me that there is a great deal of time and money to be had outside of Academia. Why not go earn money and create time for yourself, so that you can pursue your own research according to your own plan?

Time and money aside, many of the great intellectuals have lived and worked away from universities. Some did so for part of their careers, others for the entirety. I need only mention philosophers such as Descartes, Hume, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Edith Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Among scientists, Michael Faraday, Ada Lovelace, Charles Darwin, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, and Jane Goodall are noteworthy examples. My training is in religion, so I would be remiss if I did not also mention Augustine, Catherine of Siena, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Each of these figures produced field-changing, paradigm-shifting scholarly work of enduring value during periods of time when they were not employed by a university. Hegel and Einstein released their most famous work before obtaining stable university employment. Bonhoeffer published some of his most profound writings only after being pushed out of his university position by the Nazis. Jane Goodall never obtained an undergraduate degree, though she later earned a PhD. Nikola Tesla left university without obtaining a degree. If this group is any indication, one could say with confidence that being employed by a university is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing groundbreaking scholarly work, even in the sciences.

The upshot of these examples is that institutional setting is entirely contingent. Independent scholars should be flexible and open-minded about the institutions they affiliate with. They should also be entirely pragmatic. If an institution will support their work for a time, they should take advantage of the opportunity. But they should leave as soon as it becomes clear that the institution no longer offers what they need to continue working with a sufficient degree of intellectual independence. This is an important intersection of intellectual and institutional independence: it is impossible to have one without the other.

3. I also want to talk about the purpose of publishing. On this point, I would argue that scholarly publishing is a worthwhile enterprise. I’m surprised how often I hear skepticism about the entire enterprise of scholarly writing, not only from non-scholars, but from those who have ostensibly dedicated their lives to this pursuit. One critique I have heard goes something like this: only a few people will ever read my scholarly work, and most people couldn’t understand it if they tried, so why bother? One response to this worry is to try to become more “engaged,” perhaps through popular-level writing or social media. I do understand the sense of futility that can accompany the process of scholarly writing and publication. But I think the arguments that accompany that futility are generally misguided and the attempted solutions often a waste of time.

For one, it isn’t necessarily true that only a few people will read one’s scholarly work. There are niche communities online whose interests are even more specific than much academic work. Post your work online and you will almost certainly find interested readers from all over the world. Even better, find conversation partners and share your work with each other. This can be done even if you are not in the same field. I think there is rich opportunity for intellectual exchange through writing, perhaps more than ever before. It is part of the purpose of academic writing to cultivate communities capable of facilitating that exchange, but we need to write in order for those communities to form.

On a more fundamental level, I think we have lost touch with the idea that writing, thinking, and personal formation can be part of a single, coherent, integrated process. Personally, I write in order to unfold my intuitions, to see where they lead, and to see whether they hold up. Writing is for me a process of discovery. It’s part of how I explore the world, sharpen my thoughts, clarify my emotions, and shape my sense of self. On some level, I don’t care whether anyone ever reads what I write. Writing can be a meaningful practice even if the result of one’s writing is never shared. If it is hard for us to imagine scholarship in this way, I don’t think the problem is scholarly publication per se. The problem may be a constricted sense of what scholarship is and can be. Scholarly writing and publishing can shape us morally, emotionally, and spiritually in profound ways if we pursue it with those ends in mind. Writing can be a tool for the inner freedom that the independent scholar cultivates. It can also be a medium for intellectual friendship.

Beyond the question of whether any individual’s scholarly writing is important, I think the collective scholarly enterprise is an essential part of contemporary society. It is true that most works of scholarship will not be widely read in the way that, say, works of popular fiction or those of some superstar intellectuals are. But this is true in almost every human endeavor. Only the best practitioners in any field become well-known, especially outside their field. Participants in a practice who complain they no one will ever hear of them, as some academics do, have missed the point (though Thomas Nagel has a fascinating explanation of why this sort of thing tends to bother us). There are many athletes in every sport, many musicians, many business persons, and many writers that most of us will never hear of. But in order for the famous few to emerge, there have to be many others laboring in that field, pushing it forward in new ways, training new entrants, and maintaining the standards of excellence appropriate to that field. The humanities as a whole seem to have lost touch with this idea. The result is a general malaise around scholarly writing and publishing and, I think, a significant loss. Again, we need a better sense of internal goods of scholarly writing and publishing, goods which can be achieved whether or not one’s writing achieves recognition or fame.

4. The remaining two ideas about Independent Scholarship have to do with the institutions that facilitate publishing and teaching. Regarding the first, I would argue that we need new platforms for publishing. While I defended the importance of scholarly publishing in the previous section, it is also true that academic publishing has been corrupted by the institutions that produce it, just as intellectual life has been corrupted by the institutions created to cultivate it. The academic publishing process (especially for academic journals) is held hostage by a handful of publishers who do not work for the best interests of scholars or scholarship. We need public, nonprofit, open-source platforms—think something like Wikipedia, Reddit, or GitHub for scholarly publishing—that include rigorous and efficient peer-review processes. The current system hides scholarship behind paywalls, which do in fact prevent it from being read. I think this is bad for scholarship and bad for scholars.

As a side note, I would suggest that scholars should consider making their published work available online for free, even if this violates an agreement with a publisher. Many publishing agreements are unjust, because they benefit one party at the expense of another and because there are no other viable options for scholarly publishing. This is little better than a racket. I think it is morally permissible to violate publishing contracts in order to rectify the injustice that they seek to legitimize through a veil of legality. I view this as a justified form of civil disobedience, or as a tactic in Michel de Certeau’s sense. I support projects such as Anna’s Archive for the same reason.

5. Finally, I would argue that we need new venues for teaching. I have some hesitation about endorsing online platforms for disseminating content, even though I use them often both to produce and to consume content (I’ll have more to say about this in the future). Something about the centralization of control over so much content worries me. That being said, I still think platforms such as Substack and YouTube are probably some of the best options for independent scholars who want teaching to be an ongoing component of their intellectual lives. Not only this, but it is entirely possible, indeed it is likely, that you can make more money creating courses and lecture series online than you can in many university positions. Successful content has the potential to continue to generate income in perpetuity. Many contemporary colleges and universities can’t offer anything like this type of income security, even for faculty with tenure.

Money is an external factor, even if a necessary one. But we also need new venues for teaching because, in the current university system, much teaching has lost touch with the internal goods of intellectual life. Some of my favorite diagnoses of the fate of university teaching are those of Hilarius Bookbinder, for example:

Scriptorium Philosophia

Comments on "The average college student today"

Wow did people have a lot to say about that post. Over 400,000 people read it and over 1400 restacked it, thus making it more widely read than probably all of my professional writings combined. I am surprised and grateful for the engagement. It’s been very interesting to me to see what resonated and what others have experienced. I can say that of the pr…

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a year ago · 849 likes · 2 comments · Hilarius Bookbinder

We’re not going to solve this problem on the same level of institutional thinking that created it, to paraphrase an apocryphal saying of Albert Einstein. Teaching in the university system is so entangled with chasing metrics that belong to the wrong games that I have little hope for it.[8] C. Thi Nguyen calls this “value capture.” The only way I see around this problem is to remove ourselves from the teaching game set up by the university system and to create new games built around the actual goods of teaching. This is vaguer and more general than it should be, but I hope it’s enough to serve as a placeholder for more thinking and for more work in this area.

There is much more that can and should be said about what it means to cultivate intellectual independence. But these five ideas capture some important aspects of the idea. We might summarize them in the following five terms, which to my mind capture some of the core values of intellectual independence:

1. Cultivating inner freedom

2. Institutional flexibility and pragmatism

3. Intellectual friendship through written and verbal dialogue

4. Open-source publishing

5. Open-source teaching

In the spirit of pursuing intellectual independence with friends, I’ll be doing just that in my upcoming intensive, “Cultivating An Intellectual Life.” Please follow the link to this form if you’d like to find out more!

[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 188–89.

[2] A similar idea is invoked in L. A. Paul’s notion of transformative experiences, which are those one cannot decide to undertake based on utilitarian calculations, since one cannot know the nature of the experience involved and one cannot even know one’s preferences will change in wake of the experience. Instead, one has to decide based on whether one wishes to go through the transformation that the experience will entail. Being initiated into practices with internal goods might be described as a transformative experience of this sort. See her book, Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014).

[3] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 190–91.

[4] Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 59.

[5] Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 69.

[6] Of course, the necessity of friendship for intellectual life was recognized by Aristotle and others after him. For an excellent discussion, see Lorraine Smith Pangle, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[7] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Random House, 2012), 164.

[8] This problem goes back at least as far as the early twentieth century, as Frank Donoghue shows in The Last Professors (Fordham University Press, 2008).

I’ll be holding a philosophy intensive called “Cultivating An Intellectual Life” starting the week of May 4. Please follow the link to this form if you’d like to find out more!

Some time ago, I read a piece in the New Yorker about academic fraud scandals in behavioral psychology. The fraud is disturbing in its own right. But the following sentence caught my attention, because it captures the absence of independence that seems endemic to some parts of Academia. The context of the sentence was a description of the experience of a former PhD student. The student’s dissertation had criticized the research of a senior scholar whose work was later found to contain fabricated data. The PhD committee informed the student that they would not sign off on her dissertation unless she removed the criticism of the senior scholar. I quote now from the article:

In an e-mail, the adviser wrote, “Academic research is like a conversation at a cocktail party. You are storming in, shouting ‘You suck!’”[1]

The point of the advisor’s email was that the PhD student was not to criticize the work of the senior scholar, because this was improper etiquette for the cocktail party called “academic research.” I must admit that I never experienced anything like this during my time in Academia. My advisor and my dissertation committee offered me an incredible amount of latitude in my work and evaluated the results with a great deal of integrity. But retrospectively, I can also see how the academic system as a whole is less meritocratic, less objective, less scholarly, and more like a cocktail party than I previously realized. This fact alone should prompt us to ask whether Academia is the best place for scholars and scholarship. Institutional changes are making that question more urgent.

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I think there was a time, several decades ago, when it might have been possible for a larger number of individuals to cultivate a meaningful intellectual life within Academia. That time appears to have passed. I am doubtful that it will return any time soon. There are undoubtedly pockets of vibrant intellectual life that remain. If you find one of those pockets, then by all means you should pursue it and enjoy it. But if, like me, you entered academia because you wanted an intellectual life—if you put in the work, earned a PhD, and are less than satisfied with the available options—then I think you should cut your losses and leave as soon as possible. Not because you’re giving up on your intellectual vocation, but because you care too much about that vocation to sacrifice it to institutions that have other priorities.

I don’t say this to be vindictive or petty, now that I find myself on the outside of Academia. I say it because I think higher education in the United States is going through tectonic changes that will render it increasingly inhospitable to genuine intellectual life. Let me offer a few reasons in defense of this hypothesis.

First, in a significant number of cases, the return on investment for a university education no longer makes sense. Tuition has increased dramatically due to losses of public funding and other reasons I don’t fully understand (but for a compelling attempt to provide reasons, see this excellent discussion on “resource vampires” by Hilarious Bookbinder). In many cases, jobs that require a university degree no longer justify the cost of acquiring that degree. Professors in the humanities sometimes lament that undergraduates no longer care about knowledge for its own sake and are excessively pragmatic in how they approach their college education. But I cannot blame students for being pragmatic. Pursuing knowledge for its own sake is an admirable ideal, but not when it means taking on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. One analysis suggests that about a quarter of college degrees in the US result in a net financial loss relative to one’s lifetime earnings.[2] I would not be surprised if that number continues to rise. On the other hand, it is possible to earn non-university qualifications that offer an excellent return on investment. The lifetime earnings of an electrician with a high school education might be lower than those of an investment banker. But the return on investment, not to mention the quality of life, might be higher. I think more and more of the college-aged population will connect the dots and decide not to go to college in the traditional way.

Return on investment aside, the universal availability of high-quality online content of all varieties renders many colleges and universities obsolete. Now almost anyone can take computer science courses at Harvard. Massive Open Online Courses along with extensive YouTube material on every subject imaginable has rendered the practice of listening to a professor in a large lecture hall almost entirely irrelevant. This obsolescence will be a further source of declining enrollments.

The demographic cliff caused by lower birthrates during the Great Recession became a source of declines in university enrollments starting in 2025.[3] Many institutions have already folded, while many others will need fewer instructors.[4] The result of these combined changes will be an ongoing decline in the need for faculty members, leading to a smaller number of elite institutions that will employ a much smaller number of PhD’s than was previously needed.

Universities are also losing credibility as reliable producers of knowledge for several reasons. One reason is the replication crisis in the social sciences.[5] Replication of scientific results is at the core of the scientific method. A significant number of studies in the social sciences, some of which had become famous or influential, have simply failed to replicate. The large number of failures has caused a broader crisis in the social sciences, especially psychology.

This replication crisis been fueled in part through a second crisis, which is the academic fraud crisis I mentioned previously. Academic fraud has reached the highest levels of the most prestigious universities in figures like Claudine Gay[6] and Francesca Gino[7] of Harvard. Studies are not only failing to replicate; it has been discovered that the reason for that failure has to do, in a significant number of cases, with fabricated or manipulated data.[8]

Universities are also losing credibility because of ideological conflicts between conservatives and “woke” progressives that have plagued them for decades, but which have grown particularly virulent in recent years.[9] I have no interest in weighing in on this debate. But combined with the replication crisis and the academic fraud crisis, declining enrollments, and the obsolescence of the university as a technology for disseminating information, these ideological conflicts put universities in a deeply precarious position.

What are the implications of these changes for scholars? I would suggest that anyone with a PhD will increasingly be forced to choose between several options. One option is to keep chasing the tenure track. Achieving success in this arena will increasingly mean becoming the equivalent of an academic rock star. For most, I don’t think the sacrifices required to pursue this option will be worth it. I think the pressures required to succeed on this path will only aggravate the problems of academic fraud we are already facing. A second option will be to accept an ancillary role in the intellectual rock star’s orbit as an adjunct instructor or an administrator. Perhaps there will be a few for whom these are viable positions. But I don’t think most individuals with a PhD aspire to either of these outcomes; for most, these options will be dead ends. To my mind, neither of these options truly facilitate the kind of intellectual life we need. A third option, which is the one I am recommending, is to leave the university system and to set out on one’s own. I think there are bountiful opportunities for a meaningful intellectual life and for earning money as a scholar and teacher outside of Academia. It’s time to start forging a path for this to happen on a large scale.

I also want to emphasize that this is not a consolation prize. Leaving the cocktail party is the first step toward true scholarly independence. I don’t mean that institutions per se are a problem for intellectual life. They are undoubtedly necessary, and it is urgent that we find or create new institutional structures for scholarship and the life of the mind. But I would also suggest that intellectual life is not dependent on any particular institutional structure or set of institutions. I would also suggest that the institutions created to cultivate intellectual life in this country have been corrupting it for some time. To the extent that this is true, it’s time to set out in a new direction.

If you’re interested in exploring intellectual life with others outside the academy in my upcoming intensive, “Cultivating An Intellectual Life,” please follow the link to this form!

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie

[2] https://freopp.org/is-college-worth-it-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis-1b2ad17f84c8

[3] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2024/12/11/college-age-demographics-begin-steady-projected-decline

[4] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/mergers-collaboration/2025/12/18/colleges-couldnt-survive-2025

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html

[7] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html

[9] An excellent treatment is that of Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024). Also see the “grievance studies affair,” in which bogus papers were submitted to and in several cases published by peer-reviewed journals in a number of fields.

I’ll be holding a philosophy intensive called “Cultivating An Intellectual Life” starting the week of May 4. Please follow the link to this form if you’d like to find out more!

There was a time when I would have fled the term Independent Scholar. It was to me a mark of failure, conjuring old tennis shoes, worn out sports jackets, and academic has-beens with nothing to show for their years in graduate school. For many years, I was determined that I would never be an Independent Scholar. But I no longer view being an Independent Scholar as a mark of shame or failure, reserved for those who couldn’t make it in the Academy. I now view it as a mark of courage and dedication to intellectual life, a term taken by those who have chosen to blaze their own trails outside contemporary institutions of higher education.

Several years ago, I had the dawning realization that I urgently needed to start making alternative career plans. After a decade spent completing two master’s degrees, a PhD, and a postdoc, it had become clear to me that my journey through Academia was almost certainly at an end. Like many others, I had published articles in prestigious journals, won a teaching award, successfully taught hundreds of undergraduate students at multiple universities, and received the acclamation of my supervisor and dissertation committee. I realized, at some point, that none of this mattered. It wasn’t just that the jobs were too few and far between. Even if I miraculously landed a job, reports from former colleagues and others suggested that being a professor might not entail what I had hoped it might. And there are bigger changes on the horizon in the university system, which I’ll talk about in a later post. Those changes made staying in Academia seem like a dead end.

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I also have two children who are based in Chicago. For me, staying in Academia would probably have meant moving away from them, and I just didn’t feel that was something I could do. So for several years I found new work in a new industry, even as I have maintained a sense of vocation as a scholar.

In this four-part series, I want to discuss a number of topics that intersect with the idea of being an Independent Scholar. First, I’ll explain what I mean by the term Independent Scholar. After that, I’ll explore three types of independence which the Independent Scholar cultivates: institutional independence, intellectual independence, and financial independence.

Regarding the last topic, I want to note in advance: many academics are not trained to think well about money. For some of us, this can be an obstacle to separating from the university system. I think it is important to explain why money doesn’t have to be an obstacle to becoming an Independent Scholar. Let’s dive in.

What Is An Independent Scholar?

In order to explain what I mean by the term Independent Scholar, I’ll begin by telling a bit more of my own story.

I went into Academia because I was interested in living a life dedicated to ideas, to meaningful conversations and rich intellectual friendships, to hard but rewarding work as a teacher, and to scholarship that I cared about. But as I went on the job market several years ago, it became increasingly clear to me that “getting a job” meant, in a significant number of cases, being overworked and underpaid, alienated from colleagues, caught up in bureaucratic red tape, and teaching required courses that might not be of particular interest to me or my students.

Realizing that the ideals and values which got me into Academia weren’t going to materialize at many university positions, those same values led me out of Academia. It wasn’t that my values or sense of vocation changed. Quite the opposite. My desire to pursue the life of the mind has only acquired new depth and clarity as I have proceeded. What has changed is not my sense of vocation, but the possibility of pursuing that vocation within the set of institutions that we call Academia.

I’ve seen a few post-academics like myself write blogs or post videos about how to get a tech job or other new position with a PhD in the humanities. This is undoubtedly an important topic. I have benefited from this kind of content. But I would like to hear more discussion of what it means to continue to be an intellectual after acquiring a position in a new industry. I have found myself looking for a way to name my ongoing sense of vocation as an intellectual, but few conversation partners for what I have in mind. There are any number of terms one might choose. But I landed on the term Independent Scholar.

Perhaps I can explain the idea of an Independent Scholar by distinguishing the term from several other terms which do not capture what I have in mind. The first term is public intellectual. Public intellectuals communicate scholarly ideas to a broad, non-scholarly audience. One might think of figures such as Cornel West or Noam Chomsky. In the world of YouTube and podcasts, Andrew Huberman or Jordan Peterson might be some of the better-known cases. It is possible to be both an Independent Scholar and a public intellectual. It is also possible to be one without being the other. One might be a public intellectual without being an Independent Scholar in my sense; one can also be an Independent Scholar without being a public intellectual. I would suggest there is some amount of tension between the two, to the extent that an Independent Scholar might be interested in cultivating a way of life that does not sit easily with public recognition. I think this tension explains some of the contempt that some academics exhibit toward so-called public scholarship.

The second term is scholar-practitioner. This term seems to be used primarily in the social sciences. A scholar practitioner might be a research psychologist who also works as a therapist or a political scientist who is also a policy advisor. In this case, the scholarship and the practice might inform each other productively. As with the term public intellectual, an Independent Scholar might also be a scholar-practitioner, but these are not the same thing. One can be an Independent Scholar without being a practitioner. I would also venture that one may be a scholar-practitioner without being an Independent Scholar.

A third term is scholar-activist. Angela Davis comes to mind as a clear representative of this ideal, to the extent that she was both a trained academic and deeply involved in activist work. Martin Luther King Jr. is another obvious example. Again, being an Independent Scholar is not the same as being a scholar-activist. Indeed, none of these terms captures precisely the same idea, and it is possible to be one or another, or some combination, without being the others. We might capture the possibilities by using a Venn Diagram like this:

I would suggest that what is distinctive about being an Independent Scholar lies in the qualifier “independent.” An Independent Scholar is one who possesses independence in several senses: institutional, intellectual, and financial. This notion of independence is related to the ideal of independence that the tenure system was allegedly designed to facilitate. What I am suggesting is that anyone can have that kind of independence, independently. Tenure, an endowed chair, a professorship, and an institution might be helpful, but they are unnecessary. In fact, my observation is that these frameworks just as often function as impedances to true scholarly independence. There are not a few scholars I admire who I believe might have done even better work had they removed themselves from the university system and chosen to work independently. So, to my mind, an Independent Scholar is one who is dedicated to independence on all levels. To put it another way, Independent Scholarship is scholarship as the practice of freedom. It is taking on the practices of scholarship as a way of life, not in order to get a job or to achieve renown, but in order to cultivate oneself on the deepest level possible.

I said a moment ago that the Independent Scholar cultivates three types of independence: institutional, intellectual, and financial. I’ll discuss these three forms of independence in turn in coming posts.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in being notified about my upcoming intensive, “Cultivating An Intellectual Life,” please follow the link to this form!

In 2022, after about a decade preparing to be a professor at a college or university, I took a job with a company in the commercial solar industry. I had more or less come to the realization that academic employment was both unlikely and perhaps even undesirable, at least for me. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to have a “vocation” as an intellectual but to be employed outside what some call the Academy.

I found myself thinking about vocation because I didn’t regret all the years I spent in graduate school or feel I had somehow made a wrong “career move” in deciding to dedicate some of my best years to studying and to cultivating the habits of a scholar. For me, career was never really the idea. I pursued an intellectual life because I was compelled to do so by an internal force I could not avoid. That compulsion never went away. On the contrary, at the end of the process I had simply acquired the impression that it would be difficult to continue the life I had started to build as a scholar within the institutions supposed to support that kind of life. For me what changed was not my sense of vocation, but the location in which I expected to carry it out.

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Last year I made another leap and stepped away from the corporate position I had taken to build something else, something new... something I wasn’t quite sure how to describe or how to pursue. But I knew I had to take this step. I found inspiration in a passage from a book called The Scottish Himalayan Expedition by William Hutchison Murray. You may have seen it floating around the Internet:

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

1

The context of this passage is generally ignored, but I find it both instructive and entertaining. Murray opens his book by telling how his friend Douglass Scott would regularly propose grand expeditions that never materialized and how Murray had learned not to take his friend’s proposals too seriously. But a time came when something was different. Real plans began to coalesce around a real trip to the Himalayas; an expedition party was formed; supplies were purchased. Still, the challenge of organizing a mountaineering expedition was formidable—resources were few, knowledge of the destination was scant, and uncertainty was great. Murray writes,

Certain difficulties beset us at the outset. For it must be remembered that our proposed expedition was in one respect unique and in several others unusual. It was the first Scottish one, no member of the party had any experience of Himalayan mountaineering, none could speak Hindustani, we had no adequate maps (and indeed they were not to be bought in this country), and we had only eight weeks’ grace to sailing date. The very food that we should require was strictly rationed. How, in these circumstances, does one organize an expedition to the Himalaya?

The situation appealed to my sense of humour. I sat back and relaxed, waiting with no little interest to see what would happen next. The initiative, I felt, was Scott’s. He had spoken first. A week of inaction passed. Then Scott jolted me out of my benign idleness by asking me to take the lead and issue orders.....But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were half-way out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money—booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence.2

This setup leads into the famous passage above about great acts of initiative, Providence, and all the rest. The definitive step of purchasing tickets on a ship to sail to Bombay had been taken. That bold step, Murray was convinced, would generate everything else that was needed. And, for Murray, somehow this proved true!

Well, I share this story because when I quit my job last year, I had no prior experience in what I was setting out to do. If I can use Murray’s example as a metaphor, I had no map of the territory, no knowledge of the language, and limited time to find out how I was going to make my plans a reality. I truly had no idea how to build what I wanted to build. But I knew this was what I had to do.

I took further inspiration at the time from the idea of transformative experiences, developed by the philosopher L. A. Paul. A transformative experience, according to Paul, is one that “teaches you something new, something that you could not have known before having the experience, while also changing you as a person.” Because we can’t know what we’ll learn or who we’ll become by choosing to undergo a transformative experience, we cannot use normal decision-making criteria when confronted with the possibility of such an experience. A transformative experience might not just lead to new and unexpected types of happiness or unhappiness; it can also change our feelings about what happiness involves. The most obvious example is choosing to have a child. Because so much is unknown when deciding whether to choose a transformative experience, one decides whether to undergo a transformative experience based simply on “whether you want to discover how your life will unfold given the new type of experience.”3 Paul writes in her book:

you must choose to have or to avoid transformative experiences based largely on revelation: you decide whether you want to discover how your life will unfold given the new type of experience. If you choose to undergo a transformative experience and its outcomes, you choose the experience for the sake of discovery itself, even if this entails a future that involves stress, suffering, or pain.4

I found Paul’s idea of a transformative experience inspiring, because it helped me to realize that even if I failed in my new venture, I was more interested in finding out how I would have to change to take this new path than I was in staying where I was. So I took the leap and quit my job without much of a plan.

I should also say that I was inspired by a few others who seemed to be following paths similar to the one I wanted to take: , , and all seemed to have discovered compelling ways to make a living online pursuing their vocations as teachers, writers, and intellectuals. I didn’t know how to do what they were doing, but I knew I wanted to try. Each of them has been kind enough to offer me a few words of encouragement for the journey, for which I remain grateful.

So what have I found so far? The experience of stepping out into the void has indeed been transformative. A year ago, I thought I knew more or less who I was and what I wanted to do. I also thought that if I simply gave myself the time, I would be able to start creating the new thing I wanted to build, whatever it was. None of these impressions were entirely wrong. But I didn’t fully anticipate the sense of disorientation that comes from creating something from scratch, the intense vulnerability of putting work out into the void, the difficulty of explaining during a normal conversation what it is that I “do” now, and the challenge of finding the right balance between planning, reflecting, writing, imagining and—actually creating something.

I now have a few projects in various stages of development. I haven’t quite reached my destination. To return to Murray, I don’t think I’ve even landed in Bombay, much less set out into the Himalayas. But I have begun learning the language and studying the maps and preparing for the next stage of the journey.

Recently, I have found myself wrestling with the question: what is it that I am here to do? Not here on Substack or here on YouTube, but here in general. It’s difficult to boil this down to a single idea. But I’ve made some progress, and I think the following statement is part of it: I’m here to invite others to live an examined life through friendship. This is an important part of how I understand the intellectual vocation. I take the idea of living an examined life from Socrates. But the idea that friendship is critically important I take from my own experience, as well as from the work of Aristotle. Friendship is part of what helps keep the examined life from turning in on itself, perhaps losing its moorings in narcissistic grandiosity or nihilistic despair.

So what I want to do next is press further into the question of cultivating an intellectual life alongside friends. I’m planning to do that in a few ways.

• One is by sharing reflections here on Substack.

• Another is by hosting live-streamed discussions on YouTube about philosophical texts. I’ve done a number of these live discussions already and plan to pick them back up. Immanuel Kant isn’t known for being accessible, but he’s one of my favorite philosophers. I’m going to spend a little time in the coming weeks cracking open his Critique of Pure Reason. The link for the first installment is available here. I’ll go live on Thursday, January 22, at 10am CT.

• A third way is a series of 6-week paid intensives on specific themes and topics in philosophy. The first intensive on “Cultivating An Intellectual Life” will begin on Monday, May 4. If you’re interested in being notified, please head over to this form and I’ll update you when more details become available!

Hannah Arendt—one of the twentieth century’s most incisive and controversial political thinkers—is one of the great theorists of this question. Let me state her answer in brief: to resist means, before anything else, to think. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt writes,

“When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action.”[1]

Thinking, Arendt suggests, exposes those who resist evil, not because they choose to take a stand, but because their failure to follow the crowd exposes them automatically, whether they intend it or not.

Why start with thinking? Why not start, perhaps more obviously, with action, with taking to the streets, with mobilizing, organizing, or agitating? The two go together, of course. I don’t mean to denigrate activism—it is essential. But let me suggest two reasons why thinking is equally important.

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I also suggested in my last post that we might turn to René Descartes’ famous and controversial idea, “I think, therefore I am,” as a way of practicing philosophy in this mode of resistance. Raymond rightly pointed out in a comment that making this connection is a tall order. Descartes might be the least obvious candidate in the history of philosophy for an “everyday philosopher.” If there is any single philosopher who tries to construct a fortress of certainties from which philosophy can order all the rest of human life and experience, it is Descartes. Trying to connect these unlikely dots is part of what made it fun to write that post. But upon reflection, I do think there are further substantive reasons why we should think of Descartes’ work as a resource for everyday philosophers.

The first reason is that any thinking at all, no matter the conclusion one reaches, is a powerful assertion of autonomy. Immanuel Kant is often quoted in this regard, and his words bear yet another repetition: “‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.”[1] After Kant, Hannah Arendt defended the political significance of thinking in The Life of the Mind. People who think, Arendt writes, cannot help going against the flow.

Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers….When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. In such emergencies, it turns out that the purging component of thinking (Socrates’ midwifery, which brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them—values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions) is political by implication.[2]

Arendt says that thinking becomes political when the thinking person rejects opinions which cover for injustice. The thinking person doesn’t have to try to be political. Just by practicing thinking, she becomes so.

Practicing thinking at all, then, I take to be a first step toward everyday philosophy. Learning to practice thinking as a habit—not just in exercises of academic prowess, but as a fundamental approach to life—is everyday philosophy in a fuller sense. Descartes is great for thinking, as his famous cogito ergo sum would remind us. So I take him to be a fitting guide to everyday philosophy in that sense. I think Raymond might be able to agree with me up to this point.

My second point is that one of the primary modes of non-thinking in our time is a kind of easy, allegedly-scientific reductive materialism. I think this worldview undermines everyday philosophy by urging us to think of all of our actions as mere responses to stimuli of one kind or another. Raymond points to pragmatism as one way around theoretical dilemmas such as that between free will and determinism. But I wonder how far we can get on a pragmatic level if we reject the ideas of the self and free will, as reductive materialists like Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky do. I think one reason they need to emphasize their ideas so strongly is that it is pragmatically impossible to go about one’s day without assuming the existence of a coherent self and the possibility of free action. Harris speaks of how to “change ourselves” while Sapolsky speaks of “logical and moral reasoning,” activities that philosophers such as Immanuel Kant have taken to be constitutive of human freedom.[3] (Henry Allison calls this the “reciprocity thesis.”[4]) If Harris wants to speak of practices for moral cultivation of the self, it seems to me that he has contradicted his claim that there is no self. If Sapolsky wants to speak of human reason as a normative activity (not just an adaptive survival strategy), it seems to me that the burden of proof falls on him to show how moral reasoning does not imply free action. Neither Harris nor Sapolsky seems willing to follow their own positions all the way to their logical conclusions.

Raymond rightly points out, again, that not all forms of materialism are reductionistic. He suggests Daniel Dennett as an example of non-reductive materialism. Another example that seems to me more interesting and less reductionistic than Harris and Sapolsky would be Thomas Nagel, who is an atheist and a self-described adherent of panpsychism, the idea that “all the elements of the physical world are also mental.”[5] I am sympathetic to this point as well. Believing in God is not a prerequisite for everyday philosophy, or for holding more interesting accounts of the self, freedom, and morality. Both conservative and progressive forms of religious belief furnish a whole catalogue of non-thinking that has caused much harm, not just in recent years but over many centuries. That said, I disagree with Raymond that what he calls the “Platonic tradition” is devoid of liberative potential. So perhaps I owe a further explanation on this point.

My favorite work on this topic is The Politics of God by Yale theologian Kathryn Tanner.[6] Tanner makes a move that is counterintuitive, especially for feminist theology, which has typically argued that if there is liberative potential in the Christian tradition, finding that potential means separating out the Christian wheat from the Platonic chaff. In other words, feminist theology often argues that it is only by developing a non-Platonist form of Christianity that the Christian message can becoming truly liberating. This is usually taken to mean a rejection of masculine depictions of God as the transcendent other in favor of feminine-inspired conceptions of God as immanent, relational, and vulnerable. Sallie McFague is perhaps the most famous exponent of this view.[7] Tanner’s counterintuitive move is to say that the most liberative way of thinking about God is not to bring God closer to the world, but to follow divine transcendence all the way to its most radical possible conclusion. On this view of divine transcendence, God not only transcends the world (God is radically separate from the world), but God transcends all such distinctions as those between near and far, transcendent and immanent, absent and present, male and female. Tanner argues that the benefit of this view is that it precludes any attempt to justify relations of domination by appeal to some feature of God (e.g., God is male, God is a king, therefore you should obey me because I am male, I am a king, etc.). Precisely because God is unlike any creature, no creature may appeal by virtue of similarity to God to legitimately exercise power over another.

I would suggested that this view of God is powerful and needed in a moment when reductive materialism is the most viable popular alternative to conservative versions of Christianity that have become increasingly willing to tolerate fascism and religious nationalism. The problem with reductive materialism as defended by scientists such as Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky is that the further one goes with their position, the more difficult it becomes to make any kind of grounded moral judgments. As Thomas Nagel notes, a consistent reductive materialism not only undermines ideas of the self or free will, but moral realism and the scientific enterprise itself. If human reason is merely an adapted mechanism for biological survival, we have diminished basis for confidence in human reason beyond its ability to promote survival.[8] This not only undermines the basis for insisting that human liberation is a good that cannot be overridden, but undermines the basis for our confidence in the results of science as well.

So while I am sympathetic to anyone who rejects the idea of God on the basis of its use to prevent human liberation, I find the idea itself an essential resource for the project of human liberation and for the practice of everyday philosophy.[9] But let me qualify that statement. I don’t mean to present the idea of the divine as a certitude through which some people can exercise authority over others. I have the opposite in mind. I also wish to emphasize that in such matters, it is the deepest and most challenging ideas which provide the most powerful basis for practicing thinking in Arendt’s sense. This is true whether one accepts or rejects these ideas (Descartes’ cogito being another example). Finally, I find that thinking with and through such ideas is the best basis for philosophical dialogue, even if positions and conclusions differ and fluctuate.

I’d like to explore the idea of God’s existence a little further, with these questions in mind. But in my next couple of livestreams, I’m going to spend a little more time unpacking the ideas of Harris and Sapolsky on the self and free will. I think these topics deserve a fuller treatment and there is much interesting material to explore.

[1] Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?”

[2] Hannah Arendt, The Life Of The Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (Mariner, 1971), 191, 192.

[3] Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Simon & Schuster, 2014), 149; Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Penguin Press, 2017), 479.

[4] Henry E. Allison, “Morality and Freedom: Kant’s Reciprocity Thesis,” The Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 393–425.

[5] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012), 57.

[6] Kathryn Tanner, The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Fortress Press, 1992).

[7] See Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Fortress Press, 1987).

[8] Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 27. A similar argument is made in C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, Rev. ed. (Macmillan, 1978).

[9] I develop this idea with application to environmental ethics in James W. Haring, “Animism, Eco-Immanence, and Divine Transcendence: Toward an Integrated Religious Framework for Environmental Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 52 (2024): 410–38.

René Descartes' I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum) is perhaps the single most famous phrase in all of Western philosophy. It is, however, far too easy to assume we know what the phrase means. It is all too easy to have an equally hasty opinion about whether there is an important insight here or merely a claim so absurd it hardly needs debunking.

What emerges if we slow down and take a closer look? I want to suggest that Descartes' cogito is a productive starting point for thinking about philosophy for everyday life, which is the theme of this Substack. What is philosophy for everyday life? In a comment on a previous post, Raymond Lau described it like this: “philosophy as the practice of freedom in the everyday.” He perfectly captures what I have mind.

I would add that “everyday life” is not an attempt to be popular, not merely so. We can take “everyday life” as a technical philosophical term if we trace it from Michel de Certeau back to the work of Henri Lefebvre. Everyday life for Lefebvre is la vie quotidienne, a translation of the German Alltäglichkeit, used both by the Marxist philosopher George Lukáks and later by Martin Heidegger.[1] This is the site at which both individual liberation and the transformation of society take place. It is the point of contact between philosophy and revolution. For Heidegger, the everyday is an aspect of being human which it is the task of philosophy to analyze. So let these more technical valences sit alongside whatever popular meaning “everyday life” might seem to have. Philosophy might be “for” everyday life in the sense of being ordered in some way toward it—promoting, supporting, or enhancing everyday life. Or philosophy for everyday life might mean to philosophize in such a way that everyday life is taken as a subject, thematized, and reflected upon. Each of these meanings seem appropriate to me.

If this is the meaning of philosophy for everyday life, then why turn to Descartes? Descartes might seem to represent a very different conception of philosophy. Descartes is the poster child for the philosopher as the isolated individual, sweating through hard problems in the isolation of his own thought. It is not uncommon to trace the source of contemporary mistakes—such as a simple mind-body dualism, undue confidence in rationalistic solutions to complex problems, rejection of the importance of the body, indifference toward animal suffering, etc.—to the writings of Descartes. I once heard him described as the whipping boy of modern philosophy. At the time, I did not fully register the irony: a whipping boy is punished for the mistakes of others.

In popular as in scholarly literature, Descartes has too often been interpreted as a simple advocate of the singular power and importance of reason, to the neglect of most everything else. Anthony Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a perfect illustration. Damasio writes of Descartes' cogito:

Taken literally, the statement illustrates precisely the opposite of what I believe to be true about the origins of mind and about the relation between mind and body. It suggests that thinking, and awareness of thinking, are the real substrates of being. And since we know that Descartes imagined thinking as an activity quite separate from the body, it does celebrate the separation of mind, the “thinking thing” (res cogitans), from the nonthinking body, that which has extension and mechanical parts (res extensa).[2]

Damasio is not entirely incorrect in his description of Descartes' position. But this description is too easy, for it misses the analytical and phenomenological richness of Descartes’ argument (for more on this, see below). Descartes’ point is not precisely that thinking is separable from the body, or that thinking is the real substrate of being. Descartes’ point is about the order in which we can have a certain kind of knowledge of certain kinds of experiences. This seems to be lost on Damasio, as on many others.

French scholars have, generally speaking, known better than to simplify Descartes’ position, as contemporary Americans tend to do. I suspect that Lefebvre would have been no exception. In fact, Lefebvre wrote an entire book on Descartes in 1947, though it is untranslated and I have not been able to access a copy. However, Stuart Elden explains that, far from viewing Descartes as a mere obstacle to human liberation in the everyday, Lefebvre viewed Descartes’ emphasis on the individual as an important if incomplete predecessor to the work of Marx.[3] (p. 89). Lefebvre’s work, then, provides a fitting bridge between my theme, which is the practice of philosophy in the everyday, and the philosopher I wish to address at present.

Descartes is relevant to “everyday life” in another sense, for his defense of the existence of the self stands as a counterpoint to popular philosophical positions advocated by scientists-cum-philosophers such as Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky. Harris is famous for rejecting the idea of the self and Sapolsky for rejecting free will. Both make analogous arguments, grounded in cognitive neuroscience, which suggest that both the feeling of having a self and the feeling of having free will are illusions with no neurological basis. There is no room in the biochemical chain of cause and effect for a self or for free will, so Harris and Sapolsky bid these ideas farewell.

I’ll have to save the details of Harris and Sapolsky’s arguments for another time. But both arguments depend, so far as I can tell, on a kind of fashionable reductive materialism connected with moral implications that are difficult to disagree with. Harris offers us a way to emotional equanimity, even enlightenment, through the realization that there is no self. Sapolsky bids us banish any thought of praise or blame toward others (and ourselves), for all actions are entirely determined by prior conditions. This combination of an apparently scientific basis with a morally rigorous output renders the ideas compelling and almost demands sober assent. There are genuinely compelling moral insights here. But how well do they fit with the philosophical position in which they are grounded? For example, doesn’t the very desire to learn different emotional responses presuppose a self that we aspire to change? As Harris himself puts it: “Embracing the contents of consciousness in any moment is a very powerful way of training yourself.”[4]

We can get even more alltäglich than this. It isn’t just that Harris and Sapolsky are public figures who speak to a popular audience. They are also the public face of a particular ideology for a particular social order. Their critique of free will and of the self, whatever they might intend, functions as what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “sociodicy,” a defense for and justification of a certain status quo. How is this the case?

Sapolsky outlines specific technocratic implications of his view: if there is no free will, we simply need to engineer society such that we can get people to behave how we want them to.

How might we do this? Whose interests does this technocratic ideal serve? It may not be an accident that both Harris and Sapolsky hail from Stanford. There is something unsurprising about Stanford producing intellectuals who not only defend, but actively propagate, ideas that fit nicely with the interests of Silicon Valley. These are “organic intellectuals” in Gramsci's sense. In this ideology we see where the interests of Silicon Valley, once ostensibly liberative, come full circle with the authoritarian aspirations of the current regime. For who is already attempting and succeeding at modifying human behavior on a large scale if not the technocrats of Silicon Valley?

I am not the first to suggests that the reductive philosophical position of thinkers like Harris and Sapolsky is socially enforced (it is a habitus in Bourdieu’s sense of that term). Harris and Sapolsky both operate out of what Thomas Nagel describes as “a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics.”[5] I agree with Nagel that “the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.”[6] Figures such as Harris and Sapolsky appear to be priests and prophets of this view, advocating not only its moral superiority but perpetuating a phenomenon which Nagel seems to diagnose rightly: “almost everyone in our secular culture has been brow beaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.”[7]

So Descartes, the former whipping boy of modern philosophy, is now positioned to be a hero of philosophy for everyday life. For his infamous cogito is like a rock that is simply unmoved and indifferent in the face of the reductive philosophical arguments of Harris and Sapolsky. Precisely as a powerful philosophical position, it resists the reduction of everyday life to what Lefebvre calls the everyday, what in English we might call the banal. It opposes the technocratic utopianism that says we have no selves and are nothing more than a bundle of reactions to be managed by a benevolent big brother.

In my upcoming live stream, I will invite an extended discussion of Descartes’ cogito by taking a look at the texts where Descartes develops his argument, before turning to two twentieth-century commentaries: Jaako Hintikka's “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?” and Jean-Luc Marion's “The Original Otherness of the Ego: A Rereading of Descartes's Meditatio II.”[8] These commentaries offer insightful perspectives from analytic philosophy (Hintikka) and phenomenology (Marion) that illuminate why Descartes' cogito continues to hold significance for philosophy as the practice of freedom in the everyday.

[1] Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I, trans. John Moore, with Michel Trebitsch (Verso Books, 2008), xvii–xviii.

[2] Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Penguin Books, 2005), 248.

[3] Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (Continuum, 2004), 89.

[4] Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Simon & Schuster, 2014), 149. Emphasis mine.

[5] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.

[6] Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 5.

[7] Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 7.

[8] Jaakko Hintikka, “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?,” The Philosophical Review 71 (1962): 3–32; Jean-Luc Marion, “The Original Otherness of the Ego: A Rereading of Descartes’s Meditatio II,” in The Essential Writings, ed. Kevin Hart (Fordham University Press, 2022).

In a recent visit to São Paulo, my children and I spent a few hours touring the city with a guide. Brazilian friends had warned us to be careful in São Paulo, not to go out at night, always to keep a close eye on our things. Of course this is good general advice for any large city. But our guide seemed interested in challenging the narrative that São Paulo is a particularly dangerous place. Among other sights, he ushered us into an unremarkable police station on a corner near the central historical district of the city. We were greeted by a wall-sized screen displaying crime statistics from all over the city, and smaller screens which offered a few views of the tens of thousands of security cameras that constantly record nearly everything that happens on nearly every street in the fourth largest city in the world. Far from being dangerous, our guide suggested, São Paulo is one of the safest places we could hope to find ourselves, even if he was deeply ambivalent about the method through which that safety was achieved.

Is there any escape from such intense and totalizing surveillance? Is there any room left for individual actions of freedom, initiative, or creativity?

This will be my final live stream on Michel de Certeau. Why spend so much time on a relatively unknown French Jesuit, social theorist, and philosopher? What interests me about de Certeau is that he provides a framework for thinking about human freedom in contexts like São Paulo, which is only an extreme example of how technocratic social structures are becoming ever more panoptic (Foucault) and are shaping the internal frameworks that guide human action ever more powerfully (Bourdieu). De Certeau takes on the two most powerful social theorists of his generation, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, acknowledging their insights while leveraging a powerful internal critique of the work of each author to open up space for imagining free human action in the context of a powerful webs of social control.

This really isn’t an argument about free will. It’s about the social determination of action. In other words, de Certeau isn’t saying: “look, we have free will after all, because our actions aren’t socially determined!” De Certeau’s argument is not about the metaphysics of free will. It’s about whether a combination of social theory and statistical analysis can ever fully capture the movements of human actors. De Certeau is convinced that there is something brownian about human actions, something which will always exceed attempts to capture it in a theory or a generalization. Even if a probability distribution can describe those movements in the aggregate, each individual movement is entirely unpredictable. But rather than trying to prove the point through a new theory, through deductive argument, or through empirical analysis, de Certeau wants to show us why this is the case, which is the only method that is really consistent with the point he wishes to make.

In the preface to the English translation of his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau writes, “what I really wish to work out is a science of singularity” (ix). De Certeau’s interest in the singular means that although he is engaged in social theory, his goal is not to displace established theories with his own. For that would be a repetition of what de Certeau thinks is wrong with social theory in the first place. De Certeau’s basic criticism of both Foucault and Bourdieu lies in the way that their theories, even as they analyze the structure of power in society, unwittingly replicate that structure on a theoretical level. Instead of repeating that mistake, de Certeau wants us to keep our attention fixed on the singular. He spends the second section of his book destabilizing social theory, attempting to trouble its basic assumptions. But in the third section of the book, rather than developing a new theory, he brings us to particular, embodied ways of performing the same troubling of hegemonic structures, this time in the realm of physical space.

The closest parallel I can think of to this approach to social theory is represented by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Butler claims, for example, that “to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically the relations of domination. It offers the possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement” (p. 40). This idea of repetition without consolidation is precisely de Certeau’s idea of a tactic, which is a way of working subversively on the space controlled by another in terms that work against the power of that other (precisely how de Certeau mobilizes his arguments against Foucault and Bourdieu). Butler goes on:

The critical task is…to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them. (p. 188)

Subversive repetition is an excellent description of how de Certeau thinks of tactics. To take two examples: first, he observes that indigenous populations, who were invaded by colonial powers bringing religious structures that were imposed upon those populations, still find ways to subvert those religious structures using the terms and practices of those same religious structures. There is no ground outside hegemonic structures on which to practice subversion; there are no terms available outside the terms of those structures. The only option is a kind of bricolage, a making-do with the resources that are available. Second, he argues that speech itself—the act of enunciating words in a language and using them for one’s own purposes—can be just as subversive as religious syncretism. We only ever have access to a stock of words available in a given language at a given time and place. But like Butler’s subversive repetitions, we can use those words for our own purposes, even undoing their meanings in the process, subverting those meanings and putting the words to our own use.

De Certeau is convinced that those resources are more powerful than one might expect. He goes on in his preface to explain why:

Only in the local network of labor and recreation can one grasp how, within a grid of socio-economic constraints, these pursuits unfailingly establish relational tactics (a struggle for life), artistic creations (an aesthetic), and autonomous initiatives (an ethic). The characteristically subtle logic of these “ordinary” activities comes to light only in the details. And hence it seems to me that this analysis, as its bond to another culture is rendered more explicit, will only be assisted in leading readers to uncover for themselves, in their own situation, their own tactics, their own creations, and their own initiatives. (ix)

De Certeau wants his readers to discover tactics for themselves, in the singular circumstances of their own lives, an idea that is not so far from one made by my friend in a recent post on Nietzsche. De Certeau also provides examples of what he has in mind. And his discussion of urban walking as a form of subversive repetition is a particularly interesting one. De Certeau suggests that we

can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization. (p. 96)

The city, in de Certeau’s view, is itself a totalizing attempt at panoptic control. But however powerful that attempt at control might be, there always remains an excess. De Certeau wants us to see this, and then to go and find the same types of excess in our own particular settings.

If de Certeau were writing today, I have to imagine he would be alarmed by the proliferation of attempts at surveillance, control, and statistical description that have developed to a degree that would have been hard to imagine in the 1970’s and 80’s, when de Certeau wrote the majority of his work. But de Certeau’s work strikes me as prescient nonetheless. We now spend our days fixated on devices which seem to capture an audio recording of nearly everything we say, feeding us back advertisements curated to match our most intimate conversations. Our movements are tracked not only in physical space, via apps like Google maps, but in digital space, through YouTube and countless other methods. AI now attempts to create new information and new cultural artifacts by predicting the most likely human response to a given input. My temptation is to turn off the devices, destroy them, and retreat to the woods. But it is unlikely that real escape is possible. What then does subversive tactical repetition look like in this particular moment? That is the question that Michel de Certeau would have us ask.

For more on de Certeau, see my previous post on de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu.

I’m interested in exploring what it means to practice philosophy as a way of life (in the sense that Pierre Hadot uses the term, in his book Philosophy as a Way of Life). But I’m also interested in how the practice of philosophy can be a tactic, a subtle ad hoc way of resisting power in its various forms, a way of cultivating inner freedom under any circumstances, and a way of building communities and ways of life that promote such freedom for everyone.

Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life offers a link between Hadot’s notion of philosophy as a way of life and tactics as an everyday means of resisting power. This is my fourth livestream on de Certeau’s book.

I’ve also chosen an unusual format to engage with de Certeau, unusual at least for Substack and YouTube, so far as I can tell. The challenge with an author like de Certeau is that he writes in French academic prose which is often convoluted, to put it generously. One way around that problem is to simplify or summarize his ideas. There is certainly a place for doing so, and in my livestreams I try to offer some general explanations of what de Certeau is up to. However, learning to read philosophical texts is like learning a language. The best way to learn the language is to immerse oneself in the text, rather than relying on a translation or a translator. So my live streams also serve this purpose: teaching those who wish to learn how to “speak” the language of the text itself, rather than experiencing the text only in translation. Jewish poet Haim Nachman Bialik writes: "Reading the Bible in translation is like kissing your new bride through a veil." The same is true for reading difficult texts. Hearing someone else describe what’s going on is like kissing the text through a veil. My hope is to allow readers to encounter the text and its ideas more directly.

This live stream focuses on a section of de Certeau’s book which discusses the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. That makes it a doubly challenging section, for Bourdieu is difficult to read and understand in his own right. Bourdieu pulled off the remarkable feat of conducting detailed ethnographic field work and using it to engage some of the most difficult texts in the western philosophical canon, such as the work of Immanuel Kant. Indeed, if one peruses the tables of contents of Bourdieu’s most important works, the allusions to the work of Kant are difficult to miss. This is a discussion for another time, but it seems to me that Bourdieu views his work not only as offering incisive ethnographic analysis combined with philosophical reflection, but as redoing philosophy in the mode of ethnographically-informed social theory, from the ground up. The project could not be more ambitious.

For the purposes of this live stream, however, I wish only to provide some background to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. I think we can do this best by tracing the development of the idea of knowledge from premodernity to modernity to postmodernity, by means of two other architectonic thinkers: Aristotle and Kant.

If we turn Aristotle, we find this kind of assumption made about the objects of human knowledge: “the knowable would seem to be prior to knowledge. For as a rule it is of actual things already existing that we acquire knowledge; in few cases, if any, could one find knowledge coming into existence at the same time as what is knowable” (Categories §7, 7b1). Aristotle states the common sense view that if you know something, there must be some thing there that you are knowing (this is what Aristotle means by “the knowable”). And presumably the thing which you know existed, and was knowable, before you knew it.

The work of Kant was so revolutionary because its “turn to the subject” challenged Aristotle’s commonsense approach to knowledge. If we wish to mark the transition from premodern to modern philosophy, this aspect of the work of Kant serves as well as any other idea in philosophy. Unlike Aristotle, Kant claims that the objects of human knowledge are always constructed in the process of coming to be known. These objects of knowledge Kant calls “phenomena” or “appearances.” Knowledge is based on the world as it appears to us. “Noumena,” or “things in themselves,” are the world as it is. However, Kant say that we cannot know, experience, or think the world as it is in itself. We can only ever “know” the world as it appears to us. Against Aristotle, Kant is saying: the knowable is not prior to knowledge. Rather, the knowable and knowledge come into existence at precisely the same time. What does Kant mean by this?

Kant’s idea may sound like a rather superficial way of saying that everyone has their own “perspective” on the world. But that would be a misunderstanding on two levels. First, Kant’s idea of “appearance” is much more radical than the typical idea of “how things seem to me.” Appearances are constructed from the deep structures of the understanding, which include principles such as cause and effect, space, and time. In other words, Kant makes the mind-bending argument that it is human understanding which contributes even such basic aspects of experience as certain laws of physics as well as space and time (notably and remarkably, Albert Einstein read and re-read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at a young age). Second, Kant thinks that the structures of understanding are necessary and universal. There is no variation between human experience in the world of “appearance,” even though that experience is distinct from things as they are in themselves. Everyone has the same structures of understanding, because those structures are composed of necessary and universal laws of reason.

This is where Bourdieu’s concept of habitus comes in and where we transition from Kant’s modernity to Bourdieus’ version of postmodernity. Bourdieu agrees with Kant that the knowable and knowledge occur at the same time. What is known is constructed through the mental structures of the person who comes to know something. But Bourdieu disagrees with Kant about where those structures of experience come from. Instead of universal and necessary laws of reason, Bourdieu thinks that experience and knowledge are structured by means of unconscious frameworks that we use in practice to navigate culturally-constructed social structures. That idea is quite complex. But we can think of it as a kind of common sense. Habitus is the tendency to inhabit the world in a certain way that works for a certain social structure. The habitus of a person living in a modern Western society will be radically different from that of a person living in an indigenous tribal society. The way that knowledge and experience are constructed by means of those different modes of habitus or “common sense” will be just as radically different.

Again, we need to avoid the same misunderstandings of Bourdieu that are likely to arise with Kant. For Bourdieu, habitus is not a way of saying that each person has a different perspective on the world. Habitus is deeper than that. It is unconscious and unavoidable. Each person in a given social structure will share the same unconscious habitus. Habitus structures all of social experience and social knowledge.

Can we escape habitus? Bourdieu’s answer appears to be “no.” And this is where de Certeau comes back in. De Certeau wants to pry apart the deep structure of habitus and to suggest that there is room for agency and creativity even within these deep unconscious structures. How and why de Certeau thinks this can be done is the topic of today’s live stream.

For more on Michel de Certeau, see my previous post introducing his thought.

We live in a time when power is being exercised in new and alarming ways all around us. We are witnessing the destruction of political institutions and the rule of law, partly in response to a progressive regime that had its own authoritarian strains, all in the context of technological developments that make surveillance and control of large populations increasingly feasible. What does it mean to resist power in a small, everyday manner? To refuse its encroachment on our lives? I think the practice of philosophy in daily life is one of the most potent ways we can exercise our own autonomy and dignity in the face of forces that would leave us cowed, afraid, timid, and docile.

Five years ago, I posted a video on YouTube that discussed the work of Michel de Certeau, a French social theorist who developed a theory of tactics as small, everyday forms of resistance to the network of power that structures contemporary life. To my surprise, that video continues to be viewed consistently to this day. There is something fitting about the fact that this video on de Certeau has performed better than any of my other videos, because I still view his idea of everyday resistance as a core element of what I want to say in the world. I'm interested in philosophy as an everyday practice because I think it stands to offer us personal freedom under any circumstances. I also think that those who cultivate their own inner freedom will inevitably begin to act in ways that promote the freedom of others as well.

But engaging in a philosophical life is hard work. It is best done alongside a community of likeminded friends. That's the point of this Substack and my YouTube channel. My plan at the moment is to host weekly live streamed philosophy hours, which will involve reading and discussion of a philosophical text. I started last week with Thomas Nagel's essay, "The Absurd." This week, I've decided to return to Michel de Certeau for a second and somewhat deeper exploration. Depending on how it goes, I may continue through his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, for a number of additional weeks. You can access the live stream here. I hope you'll consider joining!

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In the meantime, here’s a little primer on how to read Michel de Certeau.

De Certeau is difficult to read for at least three reasons.

First, French philosophers often have a certain style that can feel simply impenetrable, especially at first go. De Certeau is no exception. I remember feeling simply at a loss the first time I tried to read Jacques Derrida; but at some point I realized that unlike many anglophone philosophers, Derrida's top priority was not clarity or precision. Derrida was playing with language, and this was not simply sloppy thinking. Playing with language was part of how Derrida was making a philosophical point. When I understood this, it helped me to feel less disoriented when reading Derrida. This approach has proved useful for reading de Certeau as well.

Second, like Derrida, de Certeau's writing does not simply make an argument. It also seeks to perform its own argument. In other words, de Certeau doesn't just want to tell us about the practice of everyday life or about the difference between strategies and tactics. He wants to show us that difference in the very way he writes and in how his writing relates to his interlocutors. De Certeau's mode of writing is intended to be a tactic relative to the strategies of established academic discourse. I'll explain these terms later on, but for now it's enough to know that if you find his writing hard to pin down, that's intentional. Recognizing that he is writing in a tactical mode, rather than a strategic one, can help us make sense of the fact that the ground of his argument always seems to be shifting.

Third, I find it helpful to think of de Certeau's book, The Practice of Everyday Life, as structured around a series of analogies. It can feel disconcerting as one reads to jump from military strategy to linguistics to aesthetics to narrative theory to urban walking. But once you see that de Certeau is trying to illuminate certain structural or analogical resemblances across different fields, as a way of explicating a pattern, these moves can become less disorienting. In fact, these analogies are de Certeau's primary method of illuminating each phenomenon he considers. It is by holding up seemingly disparate concepts or activities and showing their structural similarities that de Certeau reveals new aspects of each.

A foundational element in de Certeau's series of analogies is the distinction between speech (parole) and language (langue), originally developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of modern linguistics. Language is the rules and structure of a language, or the abstract system of signs that make up a language. It is the structure one might find elaborated in a written grammar of a specific language or in a dictionary that describes the meaning of each word in the language. Speech, on the other hand, is the way that individual users interact with the abstract system of language. If a language can, in theory, be identified as a fixed abstract structure, speech is ever-shifting. Users can follow the established abstract structure of a language or they can crisscross it, developing their own routes through and around the fixed structure of the language, like pedestrians exploring a city.

De Certeau's book uses the idea of speech as a metaphor or analogy for exploring a whole range of other phenomena. He explains that speech, or enunciation, "is the subject of our study—we privilege the act of speaking; according to that point of view, speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it establishes a present relative to a time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocutor) in a network of places and relations. These four characteristics of the speech act can be found in many other practices (walking, cooking, etc.)" (p. xiii).

The other foundational distinction in de Certeau's thought is that between place and time. If place is analogous to language, time is analogous to speech. Time is the ever-changing, impermanent, everyday use of place. Place is fixed; it represents a series of fixed possibilities, just like language represents a series of abstract fixed possibilities. Time, like speech, is the fluid, unpredictable, and irreducible way that such possibilities are made use of, perhaps even violated or subverted.

Drawing on these two fundamental distinctions, de Certeau develops a third distinction between strategy and tactics. Strategy is that way of being or acting which takes for granted a proper place with a fixed set of possibilities. Strategy is the mode of military commanders with large armies and established procedures, of bureaucrats and managers, of administrators and law enforcement. Strategy is analogous to language, with its set of fixed abstract symbolic and structure relationships. Tactics, on the other hand, are the mode specific to rebels, guerrilla fighters, and terrorists, graffiti artists and anarchists. Tactics have no place of their own, but must use time to work on the terrain of of strategy. Tactics are like speech, which interacts with the abstract symbolic structure of language, but puts it to its own discrete objectives in specific times and circumstances. Here is my original video on tactics, which explains the idea in a little more detail.

In my last two posts, I laid out what I take to be four different approaches to AI ethics and began discussing them in reverse order (see What is AI Ethics? Four Approaches and What is AI Ethics? Human Flourishing Under the Conditions of AI). I started with the fourth approach, which asks what it means for human beings to live a good life under the conditions of AI. I argued that while there may be no discrete answer to this question, the question should still inspire us to a critical posture and to small acts of resistance (tactics in de Certeau’s sense) that violate the subtle constraints that new technologies may impose on human life. I now want to turn to the third approach to AI ethics, which asks whether it is possible to have an obligation to an AI algorithm.

Deciding whether we can have obligations to artificial intelligence requires stepping back to do things. First, we need to clarify exactly what we mean when we say “artificial intelligence,” something I have not so far done in this series. Second, we need to discuss a few possible theoretical frameworks that we might bring to this topic. Let’s start with the first task.

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Let’s begin with a passage from the first volume of the science fiction work Dune, which touches on the topic of machines and human intelligence. In the passage, Paul Atreides is tested by a member of the infamous Bene Gesserit order, to determine whether he is truly a human being.

The passage begins with Paul posing a question to the Bene Gesserit woman:

“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.

“To set your free.”

“Free?”

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

“ ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’ ” Paul quoted.

“Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’ ”

This passage captures some of the subtlety of the unintended consequences of technology in human life. The woman says that humans turned their thinking over to machines with the hope that this would set them free. But their attempt to liberate themselves made them more susceptible to enslavement, not less. Suppose that we have investigated the first three levels of AI ethics, but have not addressed this fourth level. (1) We might decide that AI is permissible in certain areas, (2) we might have resolved questions about the ethics of AI algorithms, and (3) we might have decided whether we have obligations to AI algorithms. But (4) we still might have failed to see some of the most important ways that AI tools will shape human life, for better or for worse.

The questions we ask at this fourth level already contain, in a way, the answers that we will provide. For example, we might ask: “How can human beings get things done faster and more efficiently?” This question already shapes what kind of answers we can possibly generate. We will likely note that AI tools can help us do things faster and more efficiently, and so we might advocate their increasing adoption. But we might also ask: “What is a good life for a human being and what are the conditions for that kind of life?” Asking this second question, we might end up with a different set of possible answers. Perhaps you can already guess where this is going. If our focus is on finding the most efficient way to complete tasks, then it makes sense to maximize the role of AI in human life to the extent that it helps us achieve this goal. But if we want to know how to live a good human life, we might take a different approach, because living a good human life might be about more than getting things done more quickly and more efficiently.

Let’s take an extreme example to illustrate the point. It might be more efficient, in a sense, if human beings used various motorized devices to move about all the time. We could move more quickly, perhaps more safely, by using such devices. We could coordinate our movements using computer programs that would interact with the devices of others nearby. It would all be quite efficient. But of course, if we never or rarely used our own legs and our own minds to move about in the world, we would at some point lose the ability to do so altogether. I’ve already experienced something like this, since like many others I rely heavily on Google maps any time I want to go somewhere. Even when I don’t need Google maps, I usually turn it on. It just feels normal now to have a map on a screen that shows me where I’m going. But now I feel much less confident about where I’m going if I don’t have access to Google maps. So the question is whether at some point, even if we’ve become more “efficient” (so to speak) by adopting a certain technology, we will start to lose human capacities that are not only part of what make us human, but are in themselves delightful and meaningful. Anyone who has had the experience of using their own body to achieve something difficult, skillful, or complex will know what I mean. So it seems to me that there is a real question we must ask about whether there comes a point in relation to certain tools where we sacrifice our humanity on the altar of efficiency.

Consider what a few others have to say about this topic. In his book Shop Class as Soul Craft, Matthew Crawford advocates the importance of competence in the material world, including working as a tradesman or making one’s own things, even if one might have purchased them more cheaply and quickly. Crawford explains that his book is “concerned…with the experience of making things and fixing things.” But he also asks the same question that I have been posing here: “What is at stake when such experiences recede from our common life? How does this affect the prospects for full human flourishing?” (pp. 3-4). Crawford’s question is my question: what happens to the potential for human flourishing when we abandon ways of living that might on one level seem old-fashioned or inefficient? Crawford advocates using tools to produce material objects in the world as an irreplaceable form of flourishing which simply isn’t available through what we now call “knowledge work.”

Of course, Crawford is investigating territory that has been explored by other writers such as Wendell Berry, who asks what happens to us when we outsource our production of food in the name of efficiency. Berry thinks that the industrialization of food production has been disastrous for human flourishing, just as Crawford thinks that stepping away from manual labor has been. Berry writes, “The industrial eater is…one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim” (“The Pleasures of Eating,” in The Art of the Commonplace, p. 322). Like Crawford, Berry is skeptical that the more “efficient” ways of growing food that involve industrialized processes actually result in a net benefit for those who consume such foods. At a minimum, they alienate us entirely from the processes through which food is produced, so that in a sense we have no idea what we are eating. But of course this food often also poisons our bodies and creates all kinds of other side effects on ecosystems, land, soil, and persons, of which most of us remain blissfully unaware.

Another version of this critique is expressed by Jacques Ellul in his book, The Technological Society. Ellul writes at the end of his book, after many pages of analysis:

We have completed our examination of the monolithic technical world that is coming to be. It is vanity to pretend it can be checked or guided. Indeed, the human race is beginning confusedly to understand at last that it is living in a new and unfamiliar universe. The new order was meant to be a buffer between man and nature. Unfortunately, it has evolved autonomously in such a way that man has lost all contact with his natural framework and has to do only with the organized technical intermediary which sustains relations both with the world of life and with the world of brute matter. Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is "no exit"; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.

The new milieu has its own specific laws which are not the laws of organic or inorganic matter. Man is still ignorant of these laws. It nevertheless begins to appear with crushing finality that a new necessity is taking over from the old. It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives? In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thraldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops which allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities. (Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. 428-29)

The key point from this long quotation is the idea that in our attempt through technology to gain victory over the brute natural forces that have made human life difficult, we have unwittingly subjected ourselves to even heavier forms of oppression and constraint. Ellul notes that we have liberated ourselves from what he calls “natural necessity”—that is, from exposure to the elements, the need to spend most of our time looking for food, danger from predators, etc.—but we have in the process replaced natural necessity what he calls “artificial technical necessities.” My dependence on Google maps to find my way about is a good example of the kind of thing Ellul seems to have in mind.

Ellul’s argument calls to mind Max Weber’s famous idea of the iron cage, from his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In that book, Weber explains how the Puritan approach to work—which was originally inspired by a sense of religious duty to honor God through hard work, thrift, and saving—created the modern capitalist system which is now completely divorced from those original religious motives. The completely unintended consequence of the Puritan work ethic was to create a social system whose logic is inescapable, even for those who are entirely unaware of its religious origins. Weber calls this the “iron cage.” The full passage reads as follows:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view [Richard Baxter was a prominent Puritan writer] the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Parsons translation, p. 181)

Ellul’s artificial technical necessities and Weber’s iron cage provide apt concepts for the concerns we might raise about the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence on human life. The basic question these texts provoke is whether, in seeking liberation through technical means, we will in the end generate technocratic constraints that limit human freedom in ways that we would now find unacceptable. There are other modern texts we might consider to expand even further on this topic—Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity in particular comes to mind—but I will save those discussions for another time.

The question of the impact of new technologies on human life is a very old one, however, and I want to turn now to one of the earliest written discussions of it. That discussion is found in Plato’s dialogue called the Phaedrus, where Socrates discusses the dangers of one of the earliest and most radical human technologies: writing. Writing is important here both because the same worries that have been raised in relation to AI were first applied to writing and because widespread inability to write will likely be a consequence of the general adoption of AI.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates recounts a legend about a king of Egypt named Thamus, who is visited by a god named Theuth. Theuth presents to the king an array of inventions designed to improve human life. The story goes like this:

Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and, above all else, writing.

Now the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus, who lived in the great city in the upper region that the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes; Thamus they call Ammon. Theuth came to exhibit his arts to him and urged him to disseminate them to all the Egyptians. Thamus asked him about the usefulness of each art, and while Theuth was explaining it, Thamus praised him for whatever he thought was right in his explanations and criticized him for whatever he thought was wrong.

The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” (Plato: Complete Works, pp. 551-552)

Thamus is skeptical of Theuth’s art of writing, which Theuth had claimed would increase wisdom and improve memory. Thamus argues that writing will produce the opposite effect. It will induce forgetfulness, since those who use it will rely on writing rather than their own memories. So writing is not an enhancement to memory, but simply a way of reminding, and the wisdom it grants is only apparent. Those who learn through writing will sound learned, but will not possess true understanding.

It seems that the implications of the widespread adoption of AI would inevitably follow a similar logic. What will happen when we outsource not only memory, but writing and thinking as well? We may lose not only the ability to remember, but the ability to understand what we are reading, to know whether or not we have understood. Wrestling with written expression forces clarity and precision of thought. It provides a record of the paths our minds have traversed. It can function as a source of self-expression and self-formation. Just like the imaginary human beings who rely on motorized equipment to move about but lose the use of their legs in the process, real human beings who rely on AI to think for them will almost certainly lose their own ability to think. In the process, we will certainly become more susceptible to control and exploitation as well. So Frank Herbert’s Dune seems to be on the right track when it suggests that handing over our thinking to machines will not set us free, but will enable those who own the machines to enslave us more easily. The same holds true if we consider the possibility that AI tools will not only replace human writing and thinking, but intimate relationships as well. It is in the fire of relational challenges that new emotional depth, insight, and authenticity are formed. What will happen to human beings who develop their most intimate relationships with machines that never push back, have no real desires of their own, require no compromises, and acquiesce to our every whim?

Ellul and Weber have already suggested that there really is not much that can be done to slow the process of technical development and adoption. The forces of technological domination have a kind of inexorable logic. But I do believe that small acts of resistance are possible, in the spirit of Michel de Certeau’s tactics (see his book, The Practice of Everyday Life). Buy a hard copy of book and read it at a park. Even better, buy the book from a used bookstore. Use a paper map to get somewhere you don’t know how to go, or just wander, without a map and without your phone. Write your thoughts by hand on a piece of paper. Get rid of your smart phone, if you dare. Violate the rules that the march of technological advance impose on us in whatever small ways you can.

It is also significant in its own right that we name this process for what it is. Artificial Intelligence is not inherently evil, any more than smart phones, computers, automobiles, railroads, or gunpowder are inherently evil. But the consequences of each of these technologies certainly can be and have been evil. I do not mean this in the simplistic sense expressed in phrases like, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Technologies like Artificial Intelligence are not simply tools that can be picked up or set down at will. Once they enter our lives, they change us permanently. Once we come to depend on them, they become, in a sense, part of us. Removing them requires a kind of surgery, one which is likely to be painful and which may not always be possible. But we can still continue to name these realities for what they are, with the greatest precision of which we are capable.

So what are the possibilities for human flourishing under the conditions of AI? The truth is that none of us fully knows. Humanity seems to have survived the invention of writing, which may have been just as radical a leap forward as the new technologies we are encountering today. But we should remain alert to the unintended consequences of these technologies as we willingly or unwillingly adopt them. This, to my mind, is the first step in developing an adequate AI ethics. It consists primarily in an awareness of the potential for self-deception and unintended consequences, a refusal to be taken in by shiny new objects, a readiness to assess their impact soberly, and an inclination to defy their requirements when possible. Wendell Berry put it powerfully in his poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” and I conclude with his words:

     every day do something
     that won’t compute.

The next installment is available here!

For the purposes of this Substack, which is the everyday practice of philosophy, one of the key questions I want to ask is how and whether different technologies support or hinder the philosophical life. Obviously, here I am using the Internet to put my voice out into the world. So I cannot consistently claim that technology is simply an obstacle to being an everyday philosopher. On the other hand, it does seem, as many have noted, that devices are fracturing our attention and reducing our capacity for deep thought. This is at least one reason to be deeply concerned about the potential implications of AI for cultivating a philosophical practice.

I would like to begin by suggesting that when we speak of AI ethics, there are in fact four different things we might mean:

1. First, we might ask about the permissible use of AI. The basic question here is: when is it permissible to use AI tools? Or: how is it permissible to use AI tools? There are a whole range of more specific questions that fall under this category. For example, how should teachers think about the use of AI by students in writing assignments? Or how should we think about scholars using AI to generate scholarly work? What about journalists using AI to assist them in research and writing? More broadly, what does AI mean for questions of authorship, intellectual property, or the replacement of human workers by AI tools? How do we evaluate when it is permissible to use AI and when it is not? This is the first level of AI ethics, and it is certainly an important level. But it is not the only one.

2. A second level of AI ethics has to do with moral aspects of AI algorithms. One question that has been raised, for example, is whether AI algorithms have a racial bias. We might find that the training data used for AI algorithms contain a certain racialized viewpoint that is reflected in how AI tools generate content. So there is a moral aspect to how we train AI tools. On a deeper level, we might ask about the moral principles that guide AI algorithms. Is AI capable of moral reasoning? Is there a moral theory that we should use as a basis for training AI decision-making? This is another set of questions we might designate with the term “AI Ethics.”

3. Third, when we speak of AI ethics, we might be referring to the question whether we have obligations to artificial intelligence. Can an AI algorithm be an agent or person? Can it have consciousness? Can we owe it anything? Can it set ends or goals for itself? How we answer these questions will determine whether we think that AI is just a “thing” that we can treat however we treat other things in the world, or whether we have any special responsibilities to AI as a genuine form of intelligence or consciousness.

4. Fourth, and finally, we can ask how AI impacts the ability to live a good human life. This level of AI ethics is related to the first, in that it asks about what it means to use AI tools well. But while the first level asks about when it is permissible to use AI tools, this level asks what I think is a more subtle question: even assuming we have decided that it is permissible to use AI in a certain way, are there impacts, perhaps unintended or unconscious, that AI will have on us if we use it in this way? Another way of putting this question is to ask: how does AI shape our lives, our sense of what is good, our innate capabilities, and even our imaginations? This fourth level is, I think, more fundamental than the other three. I think that if we forget to ask this last set of questions, we will miss some of the most central challenges that AI raises for human life and our reflections on each of the other levels will be less insightful than they could be. But I think that from the perspective of this fourth level, we can revisit each of the other levels of AI ethics based on the insight derived here.

Given this way of framing the topic, in my next posts I’ll work backwards, starting with the last type of AI ethics and from there returning to consider the other three. The next installment is available here.

I’m new here. But I’m not new to teaching. I completed a PhD at the University of Notre Dame, where I taught a course I created in environmental theology. I previously taught at the Ohio State University, and before that I taught philosophy to high school and middle school students. I’ve also done my share of academic publishing (you can see my work here).

After about a decade preparing to be and working as a professor, I left as soon academic career for a job that let me live in the same city as my kids and reliably paid the bills. I worked at a company in the renewable energy industry for a three years, and I learned a ton. However, two months ago I decided it was time to return to work that was more aligned with my internal sense of purpose and vocation.

My intention with this Substack is to develop a community of folks who are interested not just in learning about philosophy, but in practicing philosophy as a way of life. Practicing philosophy certainly includes reading texts and discussing ideas. But it also means asking what it looks like to live a philosophical life and pursuing that life through friendship, dialogue, and collaboration with others on the same journey.

If this idea sounds appealing to you, please subscribe! And please let me know if there are specific books or practices you’re interested in exploring.

I look forward forward to hearing from you!