View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/05/robert-frodeman/
What is Philosophy?
Philosophy is engagement in the world. Attentive engagement in the world. It's everywhere, all the time. The first thing I probably say in every philosophy class is "how did we ever get this reputation for being abstract and impractical?" Every other thing you study is a little piece of your life: business or chemistry or whatever. Philosophy is everywhere all day long. Look at that cat sitting in the sun, right? It's a moment of aesthetics, it's a beautiful thing to see that cat turned-up in the sunshine. That's an incredibly beautiful moment if you attend to it. The day here. I get the sense, this is my first time in Copenhagen, I get sense that people are about to hunch down for winter. Yesterday it was a little cooler and people were wearing jackets and raincoats and mittens and it was like too much, too much. But it's like "oh here it comes" and they're already as we say in English "battening down the hatches." And to attend to those moments just as you're watching the bicycles go by, right? This is philosophy.
Questions of justice. Questions of appreciating, how old is your daughter? [1-1/2] Every moment is precious then. Gone, gone forever. I have a daughter who is your size. She's 22. She is a college athlete. She plays soccer. Futbol you say, right? She plays women's soccer. She was born a little bit early, premature. There's a picture of her in that hand. She fits in this hand and I'm holding the entirety of her in this hand. Pfchoo. . .gone, gone forever, except we captured through one of those things. [points at video camera]
You say philosophy should not be seen as a closed discipline. Could you unfold that point? What should be the role of philosophy?
It seems to me that philosophy is about simple points. Not simplistic, but simple and very profound points like our cat and things like this. Here's a simple point about 20th century philosophy: for philosophers and humanists in general, the 20th century was the period of historicism where we deeply appreciated the historical nature of phenomena. You can date this back to Hegel and then look at Heidegger's "Being in Time" and you can just trace through in literature and philosophy and history, this increasing awareness of the profound affects that one's moment in time has. Gadamer, right, all this stuff. All right, why did philosophers not apply this insight to their own institutional structure. That philosophers are housed within Philosophy departments. Why are we in Philosophy departments? Why are we not scattered across the university? Why is the only job that a philosopher can really take up as a philosopher to go back into another Philosophy department. Why are the only people that can evaluate philosophic work people trained in philosophy? Aren't we all philosophers all day long?
Now I'm not saying if you have a technical treatise on epistemology, these people probably don't have much to say. But there's a lot of questions in philosophy that these people have something worthwhile to say on, at least potentially.
Just when you asked that question, you know what the cat did? The cat was in a normal position and the cat was like a kind of commentary by the universe, right? Because the cat then went like that and stuck up in this ecstatic, aesthetic moment.
The Danish term "kollaboration" is something slightly different -- working together with the enemy and taken from the second World War. But I thought that two meanings working together in a different, specific way and the whole synergy process of working together in a collaborative way and then this like working with the enemy because I felt at the time being at the Department of Philosophy at a very conservative university that I really wanted to work outside the Department of Philosophy but it was not recognized at all. Actually there was, long story, but it was really hard to get your work accepted if you involved other tradition, other people because then they will say it's not proper philosophy.
And that is what I spend my time attacking and critquing. I am happy to defend the notion of what I call "disciplinary philosophy," what goes on in Philosophy departments all over the world. But only as a complement and co-equal with a de-disciplined approach to philosophy where you're out. I was referencing the people here but actually these are not where I want to work. I want to work, I have a term that I coined that is very unpopular among philosophers but I love it. Think about how Plato would think about the Philosopher King, right? I argued what we need to become today are not Philosopher Kings but Philosopher Bureaucrats. Oh my goodness, who wants to be a bureaucrat? But get serious, we live in bureaucratic structures today. We live in systems. Let us embed philosophers within systems: government agencies, private businesses, whatever else so over time you can gradually influence what's going on. You're not going to come in there and be a king but if you can just redirect the conversation, deflect a little bit. It's like the Queen Mary, right? The Queen Mary if you can just shift it one degree, some point out there you're going to have a real difference.
Miles Horst [?] he was saying he did not want to discuss paradigms and disciplines, he said new way is business proposals and Latour would say that's a very post-modern way of seeing philosophy. It's a very performative way of seeing it. Of course there are restrictions but I do not see that they really challenge the restrictions. If you go back to Latour, he actually have the idea about the parallel way of doing science instead of just doing the performative way. When you come back to the philosophers I think there are a lot of opportunities to create parallel logics today inside the systems. It takes some work of course probably you have to create a network of real human beings that can adopt it into something real but then again I actually feel there is a lot of space of doing that.
I was in a similar position for four years which I really enjoyed because it was an occasion to try to institutionalize philosophic ideas and the term that I came to embrace was "ameliorate." You know that word in English? It means to make less bad. It became clear to me that you can't really fix problems, right? Problems will always be there. In fact if you try to fix a problem sometimes it blows up in your face. Perhaps we could think of George Bush in Iraq in 2003 or something. But you can make it a little bit less bad and that's why I like this. I like taking the long view. This is one of the things I took from studying Geology. The core concept of Geology is time, is deep time, seeing things over incredible stretches of time gives you a different perspective. And so all I want to do is deflect things, I mean no, I want to make radical changes but my goal here in a given situation is to deflect slightly or ameliorate and wait and wait for time to work.
You also write that we now live in a time where the goal is not just creating more and more knowledge.
At least it shouldn't be. I think it is the goal of academia which is why academia is in such a mess these days.
It seems like we really need to collaborate but then again if this is our operation we're actually making the symptoms of the post-modern society is increasing because of that. But if it's not just creating a lot of knowledge or a lot of peer-review articles. It's also cool you say that there's a clearing work that's a lot of the work in the paradigm and now we have so many paradigms I don't thinking that the work for collaboration and collaborators have lost those working with collaboration as also kind of doing some of this cleaning of work instead of just creating more, more recipes.
And that's amelioration. That's ameliorating things. It's as if we don't think about the philosophical implications of collaboration. We have this absurd, what has become an absurd bias toward the epistemic, toward knowledge, when our problems are really personal and political more often these days. We're drowning in knowledge but what is hard, I mean nuclear physics is easy compared to politics, right? Working with someone trying to get them to see and get yourself to see an enlarged universe of possibilities. To set aside self-interest on occasion. This is incredibly hard work. But instead we create the iPhone 6. If we put the intelligence that we put in the iPhone 6 or in that camera, right?
That's a good point from Hediger as well: we want to have everything. On the radio we want the music instantly, we want to have global dialog, we want to have the politician close, we want to have the whole world in our living rooms. Then he's saying the whole paradox is that the goal is disappearing of course he means that our experience of the real world. Also with the plane that you can go from here to Sandhem or whatever in a few hours and be there but just 100 years back we had to maybe sail into Sweden and take horses and be part of the journey in a different way, you meet people, the sun will shine sometimes and the rain and stuff like that. And the same paradox but of course the Internet that in immediately they have everybody just in a finger click away, easy to manipulate the world that way with increasingly big networks, yes some disappear that doesn't matter we can find another point so what I'm talking about is getting the community back. I think going back to Kirkegaard and stuff like that. But I think there's a point in that. That is somehow we have easy access to a lot of things and the technology of course is a part of that but not just like the kitchen or traveling but also other people, the social is kind of on the surface, easy, accessible. But then in a deeper way it's also now transformed into a game, something else, a marketplace.
Yeah, it's Eros run amok. Which is why I like dividing up when you think about modernity and post-modernity I like thinking about it in terms of Eros-enabled, Eros supercharged by science and technology. Eros versus a kind of Buddhist instinct is how I like dividing up modernity versus post-modernity. There's a wonderful book written by Albert Borgmann, who's just retired at the University of Montana and the book's 20 years old or so, called "Crossing the Postmodern Divide" and he makes the point here that much of what we call post-modernity is really modernity with like a silicon chip, a kind of hyper-modernity, a kind of supercharged modernity where we even less control our desires, everthing is instantaneous and we can grasp it right now as you're saying. And what I think, for the health of our planet and the health of our souls, I'm hoping for a kind and age of Buddhism where we understand that Eros needs to be controlled, tamped-down, disciplined. There's not a lot of signs of this yet but I'm hoping perhaps a small or a medium-sized disaster or two might awaken us to the need to control our desires.
I mean, that's what, I don't like libertarianism, right? I have a kind of instinctual reaction against it because it seems too damned willful. "I should be able to do whatever I damned-well want." Well, maybe you shouldn't want what you want. Not because of some external issue of control but it's not good for your soul to want what you want.
There's also a point in that, when you go back to Latour and the [?] report in '79, you do not know very much about what's going on in Silicon Valley in that time, talking about this information machines and '79 we already had the computer and stuff like that. Anyway, it seems like today we're facing some grand narrative, maybe even more than that, but one is the of course climate change and one is that the way that technology is really evolving in a way that it's everywhere now, it's not something you can just put on one side and say "okay, that climate change is just a closed phenomenon" but of course our reaction is from so many sides and so many disciplines and if you talk about collaboration, you talk about another society of global change from the perspective of business, or whatever, it's not the same thing they're talking about. So it's not really like the word in itself is referring to something in the world but to our understanding. In order to react or just confront ourselves with that fact that global climate change. And if we reflect as like philosophers, this kind of grand challenges. If now they put them as "grand challenges" or before it was more like burning platform but that made people very like, so it's too much. Now we call it grand challenges because it's more like the positive vibe. But which role would philosopher or humanities have in that?
I see the philosopher's role as being a kind of theoretical chiropractor. You know chiropracty? A chiropractor adjusts your spine because your spine's out of whack, right? The spine of our culture is out of whack. You see this with this talk about grand challenges. Yes, climate change is a grand challenge but to get at it at this point in terms of science and technology, through climate science, is like trying to push a rope. It's very simple what's going on today. We have plenty of evidence that we are likely to have a severe affect on the climate and upon landscape and rising sea level and all the rest, right? And what are you going to do if you live in Bangladesh or Denmark or Amsterdam. People simply don't want to control their desires. This is not a complicated point and it's not a scientific point.
Four or five years ago I was at a, six years ago I was at a workshop with some people from government agencies about the future of climate science and a I do research on this stuff so I was brought in. And they brought in climate scientists and philosophers and policy people and at this meeting I said "I think we should stop funding the U.S. global climate change research program." Okay? Which is over two billion dollars a year and has been that much since 1990. And everyone looked at me with disbelief and said "are you a climate denialist?" I said "no, I'm not a denialist, but the scientific moment has passed."
First there's this epistemic absurdity that if you look into the climate literature across time we are in this kind of epistemic double-bind where we both know more and less over time. We know more because we have more data and information and the climate models are more complicated and more complex and the grid boxes are smaller. So we know so much more. We know so much more about the ocean-atmosphere interface so then we can put this in differential, use differential equations to include this in our climate models. At the same time we know less because these things they get more and more complicated and the uncertainty bars grow. They don't shrink. The world gets more complex and the range of the bad things becomes more complex. So why are we pursuing, why are we spending two billion dollars a year in the U.S. now on climate science to increase the uncertainty? Well at the same time we're increasing certainty, I'm not, you know, glaciers melting and whatever else.
This is no longer primarily a scientific issue so why are we trying to get at it in scientific means. It's a philosophic and sociological and political issue. Yeah, isn't that an absurdity? So it's a grand challenge, yes it is a grand challenge, but let's go fund the damned humanists and the social scientists, not the natural scientists. If you go look at the funding, I don't even remember the numbers anymore from the U.S., yeah I do remember the numbers, I believe it was a few years ago, 50 million dollars which is in some sense a lot of money, but 50 million dollars was set aside for the societal dimensions of climate change out of a two billion dollar budget. Reverse that.
My university, Roskilde University, is based on the idea of cross, interdisciplinarity, you know the way this intentions, but now they're trying to get back to the start. So they have this university and it's common for many of the universities in that time trying to build-up the new thought of interdisciplinarity.
Bilefeld for instance.
Also like Latour in 1979, this is the last point, he wrote that collaboration can only take place in the head of philosophers and this interdisciplinarity the way it's taking form after '68 [?] and they are too focused on the pragmatic way so they're not getting it in order. So saying this is like you know pinpointing good ideas and stuff like that and fast-moving ideas but he's very critical of the term "interdisciplinarity," maybe collaboration, and what does that mean today?
First, I would say, effectively we didn't have, institutionally-speaking there is no need for an interdisciplinary moment until you have disciplines. And disciplines are the creation of the academic-industrial complex of the late 19th century. And so you find the first usage of the word "interdisciplinarity" in 1929 in a journal, in a social science journal. It was the Social Science Research Council that used the term in 1927 or 1929. And so it is a reaction to the knowledge-management technique where we break things into more-or-less discrete moments, or regional ontologies to speak with Heidegger, and that is a, institutionally-speaking, that's something that happened in the late 19th century.
If you look at the medieval university where you had a lower faculty of Philosophy and then three higher faculties, most universities in 1500 were built in this way, of Law, Medicine and Theology. What you saw across someone's career is someone as a young man would be in the lower faculty of Philosophy and then he'd move, 10 years later he'd be in the faculty of Law and 10 years later he'd be in the faculty of Theology, right? So this is a kind of de facto interdisciplinarity. You didn't just specialize in medicine you were evolving through this. And this did not end until the end of the 19th century. And so the first urges toward interdisciplinarity you see in the first decades of the 20th century. Then you have the tumult of the 1960s and the 70s.
There's something illicit or nonsensical about the term "interdisciplinarity" because who gives a damn if we are working between Chemistry and Physics, I mean why is that important?
Or for that matter Physics and Philosophy. Where the rubber meets the road, where we get traction, where something important happens is when we leave behind the ivory tower as our only peer group and we start engaging with one or another of our trans-academic audiences. That's all that matters. Especially given the sense, as I've argued in my book recently, that disciplines don't really exist as epistemic phenomena. And so you could just, when you have a Paleontologist just talk to an Ore Geologist, that's interdisciplinary in nature even though they're both housed in the Geology department right now. And so we've got to focus on what's real and what's real is dealing with the public or the many different publics and that is of course what academics don't want to do, or most academics don't want to do.
A few do. Very, very few. But that's what's at stake. And that's what gets people angry or upset, academics upset because they're going to have to change their way of life. "I'm sorry, you no longer get to write treatises about Heidegger's 'Kara' or something, you're going to have to figure out how Heidegger can inform or be informed by the National Science Foundation." That's where it's going I think.
Even Heidegger or Dreyfus are talking about how philosophers should go out in the world but they leave at the point talking about how it should be done. The whole tradition of phenomenological processes.
It gets silly. I mean this is why this term that some of us have stolen from the first Iraq war where there would be embedded journalists, right? Or journalists would be with the soldiers going out. And so we talk about embedded philosophers or embedded humanists. Put a philosopher in the lab working, not visiting, actually in the lab day-in, day-out. Or in a government agency day-in, day-out. And that's when interesting things start to happen.
Back to the roots of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, what happened in the 60s?
It's a complex phenomenon of course but this is when you see if the first moment of interdisciplinarity was with General Ed. requirements and some sense that we are segregating one type of knowledge from another and that's dangerous. If the first moment was the 1920s and 30s, that manifested itself at Columbia University and some other places, the Great Book Series or whatever. The second great moment of interdisciplinarity was 1960s and 70s when you saw a sense in which our socia institutions were inadequate to the challenges we faced and one of the challenges was within the university. And so you saw the growth of things like area studies, right? Studying the Near East or India or Chicano studies or woman studies, environmental studies. These were all interdisciplinary moments where we understood that the disciplinary structure was inadequate for the challenges we faced.
But the point you were making a few moments ago is the point we're at now. That it is not enough to simply turn this into an area study. We have to frame this in terms of the coproduction of knowledge upstream, midstream and downstream. Upstream at the very formulation of a research project go out and figure out who's going to be useful and invite them in to look at what you're doing. And, you know what, a lot of times they're going to say "this is silly, this is academic silliness." And that should have an affect on the funding program that you're designing or the research project or the dissertation. Take the idea of a dissertation. I think that before you can, typically you've got to go defend your dissertation topic, you write like a five or ten page proposal perhaps then you bring your committee in and you have to defend it and then you go off and write it. I think we should have at least one person from an outside group. Somebody in the community, a stakeholder's group, an NGO, a business, a public sector who comes here and says why they would care about this research. And until they would care about this research, you are not authorized to go write the darned dissertation.
What I see is challenging the whole new era of interdisciplinarity and collaboration is the new stakeholders. In the 70s this was very much based and also the critical idea that people research or whatever they could actually change something. And was a very critical idea against some power structures of society. And today, in Horizon 2020 and a lot of other places, it's the policy-makers that are making this power critique and saying "no, we have to work interdisciplinary because otherwise we cannot solve the grand challenges." It seems to me the core challenge of the more anarchistic approach that are rules we follow as scientists. What do you think about that?
I am a child of the 60s and my basic sense of the 60s, even when I was very young, was their intuitions were correct but they hadn't done their homework. And I have been trying to do my homework. That's why I got an education in history of ideas or history of philosophy. I wanted to understand how we came to the present situation and came to divide knowledge up in the way we do and how we came to produce all this wonderful knowledge that nobody uses. It sits in libraries or now online. And so that's the challenge. We're still in a certain sense in the moment of the 1960s: we have not figured out how to adequately answer the challenges that the 60s threw out.
CollaborativeSociety.org is a site which explores the thinking of researchers, academicians and thought-leaders on the topic of collaboration, among other things. Thanks to Alfred Birkegaard and Katja Carlsen for providing the video content. The contribution of The Collaboration Project is these transcripts.
