Philosophical Plumbing
By Helen De Cruz, originally published at Wondering Freely. De Cruz is a Belgian philosopher and Danforth Chair of Philosophy at Saint Louis University who specialises in philosophy of religion, experimental philosophy, and philosophy of cognitive science.
I feel we are at a precipice, at a momentous time. We are struggling societally, morally, spiritually. We need a new beginning. We need a new spiritual anchoring. Everyone is browbeaten into apathy, and there seems to be a joyless sameness all around. Also, everyone is perpetually overworked, even in jobs formerly considered luxury positions (such as academia). People have lost hope, limping from unresolved crisis to crisis: the financial crash, covid, the climate crisis, Gaza, the rise of authoritarian regimes…
What can philosophers do in all of this? We are central to finding a way out of our present, unsustainable, planet-guzzling, soul-crushing trajectory.
Our old philosophical plumbing, as British philosopher Mary Midgley calls it, is not up for purpose anymore. We tend to think of philosophy as extra—the cream of the crop, the idle speculation we can only indulge in once all our basic needs are met. Midgley’s humble plumbing metaphor challenges this. Rather than the ornate wallpaper of the house, philosophy is its rumbling unglamorous heart. It is what creates the conditions of our fulfillment of basic needs. It is, like plumbing, an invisible but crucially important infrastructure that underlies all our doings in society: how we relate to each other, how we relate to animals, plants and the natural world. As with actual plumbing, we usually only begin to notice it when it goes wrong.
[…]
American pragmatists such as Jane Addams and John Dewey have argued that we should examine our present situation and see if our philosophical ideas are still fit for purpose. There are situations where our everyday routines break down, where, as John Dewey (1939, 33) put it “there is something the matter”; this is a situation where “there is something lacking, wanting, in the existing situation as it stands, an absence which produces conflict in the elements that do exist.” In Jane Addams’s view, each generation, and the problems it faces, is confronted with a fresh test to “judge its own moral achievements” (Addams 1902, 2).
As Addams points out, behavior that used to be sufficient to lead a good life can fall short at later times. She pointed at wealthy ladies of her own milieu (Republican upper-class women) who thought you were morally fine if you did not steal your dinner. But the inhumane conditions under which immigrant families in Chicago lived in the early 1900s were clearly somehow related to how these fine ladies lived. Simply not stealing your dinner isn’t going to cut it, in moral terms. Similarly, we are under severe threat of catastrophic climate events (some of which already happening) and it is clear that just living normally, as a society, will not suffice to ward this off.
At this very crucial juncture where the long-term stability and existence of our structures is under threat, we will need philosophers (inside and outside the academy) to envisage alternative ideas for us. This is to engage in what Eric Schliesser calls “Philosophic prophecy.” Borrowing from Quine, who echoes Midgley, philosophical concepts are “devices for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” To engage in philosophical prophecy is to “create a shared horizon for our philosophical future.”
This does not mean that we can just wipe the slate clean and forget all the previous philosophy. Far from it. One beautiful aspect of philosophy is that Plato, Mengzi, or Nagarjuna can be just as relevant for us today as they were in their time. But we cannot do it without translation: we need philosophers who can help “disclose the near or distant past,” (as Schliesser puts it), that is, to help to show us how these older philosophical ideas are relevant and can help us address current problems. We can flexibly reinterpret, reimagine, add our own ideas, subtract.
Philosophic prophecy is not so much about predicting the future (always a perilous business) but about creating possible futures: by envisaging these futures, by showing that they are among our possibilities, we can help to create them. In this respect, they can be sometimes self-fulfilling. But they can also fail.
And so we can imagine different conceptions of work, play, how we govern ourselves, how we approach the climate crisis, how we deal with communicable diseases, how we treat housing shortages and unhoused people. Even if you fire every philosopher on the planet, philosophy will stick around, and there will be ideas at the background (on fairness, benevolence, the relationship between economy and people) that will have a huge impact on how we approach these things.
This article was originally published at Wondering Freely and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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Professor Helen De Cruz has passed away.
Oh sad news! She was still young