>> RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Intellectual life in America, certainly in the end of the 19th
century was much, not primarily rooted in the university.
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>> RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Even if you go back to the origins of philosophy before the pragmatists,
you know, when people were reading Hegel and Kant, very frequently they were informal groups
like the Ohio Hegelians. These were doctors and lawyers and people working in public affairs.
Increasingly it's become the case that there is very little space in this country for a
person who is interested in intellectual ideas if he or she is not associated with the university
and that's part of the story of professionalization.
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>> MICHAEL HODGES: I think that the role of the philosopher in American life has changed.
Quite a bit.
>> RICHARD BERNSTEIN: There used to be a time, even in my lifetime where there could be people
in publishing. There were serious journalists, you know, like a Walter Lippmann who was terribly
intelligent. You had figures like Reinhold Niebhur who could write for the public and
even though, you know, before he got a university position, when he was just a preacher, this
hardly exists in America now.
>> MICHAEL HODGES: If you look at the place that Emerson held.
>> RANDY AUXIER: Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom I arise as the quintessential American philosopher.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: Emerson, in his day, became a widely read author.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: He wasn't a world traveller, initially.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: He was not a wealthy man.
His father died when he was nine.
He and his brother had to share a coat in the sense that one day one would wear it to
school and another day another would wear it to school.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: He seems to be even on his own account a kind of a tame, withdrawn kid.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: He was, I think, fifth in the line of ministers in the Unitarian
church and trained, went to Harvard College and trained to be a minister. Went to the
divinity school.
>> ANNE ROSE: he was part of this center of the Unitarian world.
He is the minister of the 2nd Church of Boston. A big deal. But he didn't want to administer
communion. But he couldn't do it. He didn't hear that message so he gives it up.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: He explains that his problem was that he didn't think that he could be
the intermediary between the divine and human beings and that's the position that he was
supposed to be placed in by his position in the institution of the church.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: What he does is he gives up the ministry to become the writer that
he was.
And he decided that because, and you know, this is the core of the divinity school address
is, I can't do that old theological stuff in that way any longer. I'm gonna continue
to preach, now with small "p" in quotation marks, but I'm going to do it from my own
divine sources and tell my own stories.
So that's the experience that really drove him.
>> RANDY AUXIER: If there's one categorical imperative in Emerson's thought, it is that
the development of an original relation to the universe is a moral requirement for any
persons or any people who would live a truly meaningful and worthwhile existence.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: So he created a new profession for himself, or entered a profession that
was developing then, that of the Lyceum speaker and lecturer.
>> RICHARD BERNSTEIN: There wasn't a sense of philosophy as a distinct profession.
We sometimes forget that two of the people that we recognize as the greatest of American
philosophers, Peirce and James, never had formal training in philosophy.
And there clearly is a sense of a kind of, of the role of the intellectual dealing with
a whole variety of issues and with the span of culture so that the kind of narrow professionalism
which is so characteristic today of philosophy was simply nonexistent at that time.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: William James, in 19 what 4, delivered these essays, delivered these
popular talks to a thousand, later published as the volume Pragmatism. And this is a...
he thought he was developing a method that could be used by all thinkers to make clearer
what they were trying to say.
>> RICHARD BERNSTEIN: These were grand traditions of people arguing about all kinds of issues
and reading books. I don't mean the books that just come out in Barnes and Nobles but
serious books was common.
>> MICHAEL HODGES: I just don't think that there are any philosophers who have that kind
of impact. Some have set out to.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: Philosophy is an activity done by professionals for professionals. And
part of the endeavor of the APA was to bring this about.
one of the places where you can see it very explicitly is in Lovejoy's presidential
address. So we're about 1915, 1916.
He gives this presidential address that philosophy needs to start thinking about making progress
and to stop re-solving and re-solving old issues that we just can't really answer.
And if they turn out to be unsolvable then we should dump them as being badly formulated
and get better problems.
His belief was that philosophy, if it's ever gonna make any progress, is gonna have
to get out of the edification racket. You know, sort of making people feel good, you
know, sort of Emersonian sort of stuff, I guess. And think about solving problems.
And this, of course, is a nice physics, math model for how a humanities discipline should
be run. And it's completely inaccurate.
New issues come up. We think about ways of dealing with them. But you never get to the
point where this particular issue is now buried and that was one of Lovejoy's examples.
He kept saying, we thought we killed this one.
[suspenseful music]
And it came back. We thought we had finished it off and we buried it and now it's back
here again.
[suspenseful music]
What are we gonna do? What's wrong with us?
So one of the sentences goes something like, "What kind of a business is this in which
experts can't agree on fundamental issues?"
And again you can sort of compare this in your mind. In medicine, if we had fundamental
issues in medicine that people couldn't agree on we could at least figure out a way
to come to an agreement.
>> MAN: Doctor.
This whole business has me all upset.
Can you prescribe something for me?
A tranquilizer, perhaps?
>>JAMES CAMPBELL: But philosophers can't do this. So some people think that there is
a god and some people think that everything is predetermined and some people... and we
can't seem to solve any of this.
>> DOCTOR: Medicine helps sometimes, but let's wait a while.
You may not need anything once you understand what's bothering you.
>> MAN: All right.
>> JAMES CAMPBELL: And consequently we need to do something else that we can solve and
get rid of these sorts of issues.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: and it's become such a Mandarin discipline.
Pardon me.
Such a Mandarin discipline.
Philosophers talking to other philosophers, bottled up in their little world, their little
bubble of what constitutes the dominant members of the APA and there are enough members of
the APA to have a publishing industry, you know, publishing for each other, as long as
publishers are willing to be content with a non-Random House a non-Random House existence.
But the field has been pretty well spoiled in many respects.
>>RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Philosophy goes on being very technical, very professional, very narrow.
But there are also a group of thinkers who I think are much broader than that and my
sympathies are with those who are much broader.
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>> SCOTT PRATT: We as philosophy teachers have to open up what we take to be philosophy
and get people to ask even more questions than they have.
it's strange that philosophers when they talk about their work often say that we're
ignored.
At the University of Oregon last year we had 3,000 students in our philosophy classes.
3,000 out of 20,000 students came through our classrooms, right?
That's a lot of people.
And we had the opportunity over the course of the year with our students in our classroom
to get them to step back and reflect on the commitments they've made, the commitments
that society makes and so on.
It's not the case that we're not listened to.
I mean the fact is that if philosophy departments are teaching students and especially if they're
teaching a lot of students in a way that engage them and bring them back and when a student
walks out of the class they're asking questions they weren't asking before, we're having
an effect.
The fact that we don't' have, our journals aren't read by one of four Americans is
ok.
Because in a lot of ways we have people in interaction with us on a much bigger level
because we talk to them for weeks and weeks and weeks [laughs] and they come out often
remembering philosophy classes as the moment in their college education where something
different happened.
So we can underplay the impact of philosophy.
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