The Market of Philosophy

by Dyske Suematsu  •  July 21, 2005

I’ve always been interested in reading the insiders’ views of the academia of philosophy. Philosophy has always been close to my heart, but I’ve always resisted entering the academia. I believe my ego has always wanted to, but my heart has always rejected it. Being Japanese with deeply ingrained Zen values, for me, an academic pursuit of philosophy was self-contradiction of sorts. When I read that Wittgenstein had always advised his students to leave the academic life and to get real jobs if they wanted to be a real philosopher, I felt vindicated (just another manifestation of my petty ego). Yet, my superficial ego has never been able to resist peeking into the academia every so often, and wondered what it’s like to be immersed in it. I’ve been getting glimpses of that in essays like this.

I’ve always had an indirect relationship with the philosophical academia through the art world. I studied fine arts in the late 80s. At the time, French theories dominated the air of the art world. I’ve read many of the well-known titles, but most of them never resonated in me. Now the only French thinker who has any meaning for me is Jacques Derrida. When I first read his writing, I could not help thinking of the similarities between him and Wittgenstein. The reason why their words resonated in me was because their philosophical perspectives coincide with that of Zen Buddhism. But, oddly these similarities rarely came up in the academia, which puzzled me.

For a while, I could not find anyone speaking of the similarities between Wittgenstein and Derrida. I eventually found a book called “Wittgenstein and Derrida” by Henry Staten, which confirmed that I wasn’t the only person who saw the similarities, and that they were not based on gross misunderstandings of both philosophers on my part. I also had difficulties finding anyone talking about the similarities between Zen and Wittgenstein, but I eventually found them. It appears that it is now becoming a well-established fact. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) My next natural step was to find people discussing the similarities between Zen and Derrida. I emailed Henry Staten, but he didn’t feel that there were any similarities. I eventually found an essay by Steve Odin, a professor at University of Hawaii (very appropriate location to make that connection) where he specifically talked about the parallels between the two.

For me, in many ways, Derrida is a step closer to Zen than Wittgenstein is, at least his intellectual position is. That is, if one were to intellectually discuss Zen (which is not something serious Zen practitioners would do), Derrida would be closer. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was closer to Zen in the actual practice (beyond intellectual pursuit.). It puzzled me that no one was talking about something as obvious as this. In this global village we live in, it seemed odd that people don’t connect two similar things that are right in front of their faces. It’s like two people are looking for the same star, but one only knows where it is, and the other only knows when it is visible. They sit at a cafeteria across from each other, but never talk to each other. Eventually, it became clear to me why this happens, and it has to do with how the market works.

Western philosophy is a market like any other. Just as I am discovering how the art world works, I’m seeing the similar phenomena in the philosophical world. Philosophical ideas that successfully spread in the academia must meet certain criteria which are defined by the market. After all, even the market of philosophy is like any other market; it’s a market consisting of egos. As much as people criticize others of misunderstanding, it plays a significant role in how certain ideas or authors gain currency in the market. And I believe that it has more to do with the pettiness of our egos than the truth or the lack thereof.

I believe many in the academia are driven by their desire to be perceived smart and by the fear of being perceived stupid. In other words, the feelings of superiority and inferiority are their primary motivations. This sounds juvenile, and one would think that people would eventually go beyond this sort of basic human emotions, but from my observations, that appears not to be the case. Many take their insecurities of their achievements to their graves. The market of philosophy, therefore, is largely driven by how certain ideas affect the feelings of insecurity in the philosophers. When a piece of writing is incomprehensible, it ignites both fear and desire in them. It certainly was big part of what drove me to read these books in my 20s, and to some extent, it still is. If you can understand what most others deem incomprehensible, you got something to brag about. If you can’t, you just have to dismiss it as gibberish. In other words, it is not you who is stupid, but the book itself is stupid.

Therefore, misunderstanding or misunderstandable style of writing plays a key role in propagating one’s ideas. It can’t be just any gibberish; it must be misunderstandable in a certain way with a certain style. And, it needs to leverage the symbolic values that have been established in the market place by making convincing connections to the past philosophers and their ideas. (Wittgenstein is an exception to this, but he did make the right people-connections, namely Bertrand Russell.) After all, how many copies of Derrida’s books, for instance, would you think were actually sold to someone who understood it? I suspect that the vast majority of the copies were sold to people who hoped to understand him (driven by the fear of stupidity, and desire to feel superior) but were unable to crack his code, which means that Derrida’s successful career was largely supported by those who misunderstood him. Derrida’s style of writing does have an irresistible combination of poetry, playfulness, evidence of his vast knowledge in philosophy, a hard-to-get attitude, and intimidating analytical skills. It is not uncommon that people respond to why they hate Derrida: “I just hate him.”

Those in the academia are naturally concerned about their careers and achievements no less than the rest of us in other fields. Unless you are lucky, you cannot simply build a career by just doing whatever you find interesting. (It wouldn’t be a career; it would just be an activity that falls in the forest that no one hears about.) To build a career in any market, connections must be made of both people and ideas. A career or an achievement, in the end, is a constellation of these connected ideas and people. This means that the activities of philosophers, i.e. thinking, must be driven by what encourages these connections. And, the best way to promote the spread of any products or ideas is to appeal to our innermost emotions, especially fear. Writers like Derrida and Gilles Deleuze successfully accomplished this. However, this is not to say that their writings are mere gibberish. It is like a TV news item that is delivered with a style that stirs fear in people; independent of the style, there might still be a legitimate reason to feel fearful.

This is where Eastern and Western philosophies fundamentally differ. What drives Eastern philosophers is not a career or achievements. I would imagine that most Eastern philosophers are, at least initially, driven by the pain and suffering of life, their wish to escape them, which is equally superficial and selfish. In both, what drive them to philosophy are their egos. (Our pain and suffering of life are largely created by our egos.) In this sense, Eastern philosophy is somewhere between religion and philosophy. It is not quite a religion because they have no god to worship or a set of moral codes.

Building a career is necessarily about competition, that is, it is necessarily about superiority and inferiority. The point of pursuing anything as a career is to do something better than others. Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, is about doing what everyone else has done before. The practitioners of Eastern philosophy want to be free of suffering, although their teachers will eventually tell them that it is that very desire to escape something that causes their suffering (that there is nothing to escape from or to). They are motivated by a selfish concern to escape their own sufferings. Whether they get credit for that achievement is nowhere in their minds. Superiority or inferiority, therefore, does not concern them; they just don’t want to suffer unnecessarily.

This would partly explain why Western philosophers are not particularly interested in drawing connections to Eastern philosophies. The academia has been established in such a way that it rewards certain connections more than they do others. In fact some connections are even looked down on. The Eastern philosophers, on the other hand, have a more holistic approach, and they encourage making connections to a variety of seemingly unrelated matters. The Western philosophers like to keep things pure. Hence we rarely read anyone integrating, for instance, physical exercise to their philosophies. Ideas are to be kept purely ideas. Anything physical are assumed unrelated and left to other fields. In the East, the truth is to be found in relationships. In the West, the truth is to be found in discrete objects (entities, aspects, categories, fields, etc..).

Because of this, there are no incentives for the academic philosophers to make connections to Eastern philosophies. What they play is a game that has been established over hundreds of years with a specific set of rules. There is a power/authority structure within the academia that needs to be protected. To do so, certain connections are encouraged while others are discouraged, or even punished. Making the right kind of connections is, therefore, the key to getting the attention of the market. This is partly why the modern philosophical books cannot be read without knowing almost the entire edifice of the Western philosophy. It is a game of making connections in the right places. And by “right”, I don’t mean meaningful, interesting, or valuable. It’s “right” in terms of how it can penetrate the market.

The Alan Sokal/Social Text affair was a good example of doing the “right” thing. In my view, why it was so controversial is because it played into the fear and the insecurity of the intellectuals so perfectly. For the supporters, the Sokal affair proved that it wasn’t because they were stupid that they couldn’t understand Post-structuralism; so, it was a huge relief and vindication for them. The fact that there were people who claimed to understand it perfectly well, was making them feel inferior. The need to relive them of this fear and insecurity was already there in the market place before Sokal published his article; so when he did, it spread like a wildfire. On the other hand, the advocates of Post-structuralism had been enjoying their superior positions. But after the Sokal affair, there was a need to defend themselves because the impact of the event was so big that the authority/power structure of the market was being destabilized. It was actually beginning to threaten their superior positions. Even though I wasn’t able to read it (because no English translation was available), even Derrida was compelled to respond to the affair. After many complicated discussions and arguments about what the Sokal affair was about, in the end, it was about feelings. For some, it was an opportunity to get back at the people who made them feel stupid, and for others, it was an event that threatened the enjoyment of the feeling of superiority, and the fear of being perceived as a phony. Thus, it isn’t that people are driven to pursue philosophy to find some sort of truth, understanding, or awareness for themselves. Philosophy is a business like any other; it is primarily driven by the pettiness of our egos.