PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS, ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHERS, AND YOGIS

Justin E. H. Smith, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("The more recent incarnation of the Courtier is the 'sell-out.' or, to put it in somewhat more euphemistic terms, the 'public intellectual,' who  unlike the Gadfly is out their in society, not in order to change it, but in order to advance himself and his own glory." Id. at 17.  "Ironically, one of the mechanisms by which universities are destroying themselves, or at least are seeking to remove their own humanistic hearts, is by forcing philosophers to conceptualize their own work on the model of the positive sciences: by forcing philosophers to apply for large grants, for example, with explicit 'methodologies' (which can no longer be simply reading several books and thinking about them) leading to concrete research 'results' (which can no longer be simply interesting and compelling observations about the world and our place in it). But what the administrators and the faculty alike miss in their mutual misunderstanding is the depth of the historical relationship, indeed the identity, between what is now being called 'science' and what has for a much longer time been called 'philosophy.' It cannot be that philosophers must retain their independence from the sciences, for it is a simple historical fact that this independence is a recent invention, and not necessarily a justified or useful one. Science, too, use to be motivated by impulses other than grant seeking. . . . " Id. at 234-235. "Given that there seem to be some expectations about what the body must be doing in any given philosophical tradition, we might suggest that Yoga is but the fullest development of an expectation that is always there in some degree in any tradition of philosophy. Yet at present, in academic philosophy, this expectation is minimal. Ironically, today many academic philosophers will, at the end of a workday, go off to a yoga session in order to not do philosophy. They contrast the physical exercise of philosophy with the mental labor that is by definition, their profession. What an impoverishment of both sides! Philosophy as a job is now balanced by yoga as a lifestyle, and the millennia-long history that has united contemplation with a strict discipline of the body is scarcely recalled in other segment of the day." Id. at 169.).