Why Are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy? | Hacker News Reader

Why Are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy?

philpercs.com

35 pointsluu62 comments

My suspicion is that philosophy is a dead field. Psychology and neuroscience are coming out with fascinating new results backed up by facts and studies.

For instance Jonathan Haidt comes from social psychology, and his work on moral foundations is far more interesting than anything that's come out of philosophy departments this century. Even though morality is supposed to be on of their core issues.

Once they get tenure they're forced to face the fact that they have no more career goals and can't do any meaningful work.

There are philosophers doing experimental work in conjunction with neuroscientists, e.g. the Churchlands and Metzinger.

There's a lot of work done in analytical philosophy.

There's still good work being done in all different kinds of philosophy. See Thomas Nagel.

I did not know who Thomas Nagel is so I looked him up and read about his philosophy work.

I'm not deep into philosophy, but to me that backed up the argument of the grandparent: it would certainly make me depressed if this was regarded as very prominent progress in my science discipline. Maybe I missed it, but I did not read anything on the connection between his philosophical theories and reality, using experiments or neuro-scientific analysis as proof.

It seems neuroscience and evolutionary biology give much better insights what things like self-consciousness, morals, subjectivity, spirit really are, and not much has been added to philosophy since what philosophers like Daniel Dennet wrote 20 years ago.

I don't mean to slight Nagel's recent work, which I haven't read, but (honest question here, because I don't have a clue) would you say that Nagel's recent work is generally considered as important or groundbreaking as what he did 30 and 40 years ago? Because my impression is that Nagel's most impressive work was done decades ago, which, if true, doesn't support the idea that philosophy is currently a vibrant field with lots of groundbreaking work going on.

This isn't a direct response to your question, but people often refer to the last few decades (or even centuries) of philosophy as "current". 40 years may be ancient in experimental science, but it's practically yesterday in philosophy.

That's true, but I don't believe the vibrancy of philosophy 30 or 40 years ago would play much of a factor in professional philosophers' current job/life satisfaction. They would probably need to see lots of great work being done over the past two or five years, or at most ten years, to feel excited about the state of their profession. (With some variation based on specialty, e.g., a professor of ancient philosophy probably wouldn't care as much about recent activity as a specialist in modern analytic philosophy, who in turn would probably care less than a philosopher of science.)

Philosophy of mind and consciousness are just fields within the overarching study. They're commonly brought up as "typical" pursuits in philosophy (there's really no such thing), but they aren't an embodiment.

Automobiles might have been bad for horses, but it didn't make cows less useful.

(FWIW, philosophy studies aren't limited to works of philosophy. I've read Haidt and Holder for both moral and political philosophy.)

There's a lot more to philosophy than you think, and a lot of foundational work being done right now in the philosophy of math and science, I think.

This is maybe the stupidest HN comment I've ever seen...

Perhaps Thoreau can shed some light[1]:

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. ... There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."

[1] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/walden/hdt01.html

Thoreau called out eastern philosophy in that book at several points. Even Baudrillard isn't that original from this standpoint. Shoulders of giants to be sure.

Most are atheists, which denies them access to one of the few institutions shown to promote happiness and sociability and provide meaning and consolation once life's major goals/distractions are past, and you have to stop and look existence in the face. Downboat away, HN, but it's a major cause of unhappiness: "He doesn't exist, the bastard."

Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.

I think the entire existentialist movement would strongly disagree with your last point. (To say nothing of Absurdists and their ilk.)

What? That is an absurdly binary thought. You're saying that you either have to believe in God or be nihilistic to be happy? Give me a break.

I think the argument is that nihilism follows from atheism and that nihilism is depressing.

Seems like a very hard thing to suggest, really. I'm an atheist and nihilist and I've actually found myself to be _much_ less depressed than I was when I was an academically studied and strong christian. I've baptized, preached, converted, etc. I was like a superstar christian and now I'm an atheist and much much less prone to depression.

I feel like I don't attribute the depression as much to my religious affiliations or lack thereof as I do to my hormone levels settling down due to older age, but my specific experiences of religion did a lot to promote the idea that it's healthy to acknowledge your guilt in all things.

I was super religious as a kid.

When I bump into people who spend all day fretting that their best friends are going to be tortured for all eternity for their poor life choices I feel pity. How do you breathe with that clear and present danger in the corner of your mind all day every day?

You trust that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, but ultimately fair God knows what He's doing better than we do. It's called faith for a reason.

On the flip side, how does a physicalist tell victims of atrocities like rape warfare? That life is random, so don't take it so hard? While glossing over the fact that the evil people will probably never be brought to justice?

But, really, how do you pity the religious when it's all involuntary chemicals and electrical impulses in their brains? It's not like they have a choice anyway. And many of them like it.

>On the flip side, how does a physicalist tell victims of atrocities like rape warfare? That life is random, so don't take it so hard? While glossing over the fact that the evil people will probably never be brought to justice?

Well, mostly, we try to bring the perpetrators to justice and provide rehabilitation for the victims.

>But, really, how do you pity the religious when it's all involuntary chemicals and electrical impulses in their brains?

Who said we pity them? Besides which, "involuntarily" doesn't mean that. Some of those chemicals and impulses are under conscious control, because they're the ones that implement conscious self-control. You are in fact affected by your experiences and can in fact change your beliefs, should you choose to.

I live in the middle of one of the most highly concentrated christian areas in the south of the US (at one point we were the most concentrated christian area in the world a few years back). I've baptized more people than probably 99% of the christians you know. I've done mission work in probably more countries than 99% of the people you know have even visited. I was exactly what the church wanted me to be and that didn't make me happy. I believed in God with such a strong conviction and faith that I took it by his words to test the spirits and that's the only reason I allowed the thought into my mind that God might not be real because I decided to test the spirits like instructed in 1 John 4:1.

Only outside of this self persecution of faith that tells everyone they aren't worthy and they should relinquish all ideas that they could ever handle something on their own just builds guilt upon guilt. Jesus take the wheel? Oops I drove my own car today, I guess that's just one more subtle way I didn't have faith, because remember just a small amount of faith can move mountains but I don't have even enough for God to drive my car.

Luckily, I'm outside of that now and it's pretty easy to see all the subtle emotional warfare the church perpetuates regularly and without shame.

"You're useless without me"..."If you don't love me I'll allow you to suffer (in hell none the less)"..."You need to understand how stupid you are and how the beginning of you ever knowing anything is to accept how insignificant you are and that I'm all that matters"

Sound like church or an abusive psychopath? Hard to tell the difference when you put all these subtle common church teachings side by side.

So forgive me when I call total bullshit on you for suggesting that faith is a sure way to find happiness, because I had more faith that anyone I know and I can say that while being surrounded by more christians than you know (likely, statistically speaking).

edit: also, what do you tell rape victims? God wanted that to happen to you? Do you tell them he knew it was going to happen before they were even born and that it was part of his plan? Do you tell them that he was capable of preventing that kid from being born with a disease that killed him slowly and painfully, but he allowed it to happen?

I'm not interested in your opinions. I'm interested in what you actually tell the victims, because I'm confident you apologize and console them and say that was bad while fully acknowledging your God knew that would happen before he even created mankind. Your idea of God is portrayed in many places as making/allowing good people to suffer because that's part of his plan - but yet you never tell rape victims to chin up because maybe that was supposed to happen, do you?

> I'm interested in what you actually tell the victims, because I'm confident you apologize and console them and say that was bad while fully acknowledging your God knew that would happen before he even created mankind.

I tell them I love them because God loves me. I pray for them. And I be there for them as well as an imperfect human can be. And I tell them I do it because God loved me first.

If we're all random atoms, that's a huge waste of time though.

(can't reply to your comment because hacker news hates discussion)

so you only tell victims nice things to make them feel better? Interesting. That's exactly what everyone does regardless of faith. It's almost as if that's a universal human trait and not something exclusive to your religion.

But keep telling yourself that your actions make sense because you have the context of christianity and no one else has any idea wtf is going on in this world.

The fact that mankind shares common decency doesn't invalidate any particular theology. If anything, it sort of undermines physicalist philosophies, since common decency is just an illusion or evolutionary trait (and at some level involuntary) if reality is just random matter plus time.

Socialization is perfectly adequate as a basis for everything you've talked about, though. Otherwise, you couldn't trust your dog not to kill and eat your family the moment your back is turned. And some ongoing research has even suggested that pure altruism exists in a cross-section of the animal kingdom.

No need to postulate supernatural forces when we can't say we fully understand the natural world yet.

What about the ones who are not atheists?

So then nihilism or hysterics? I guess, with few exceptions, everyone choose hysterics.

You don't really provide an argument in favour of your point.

I, for one, question the notion that life must have a "meaning". Life is action, a sequence of distractions, one after the other.

If your meaning leads to you to the "praise the lord" course of action, I'll contend that other course of actions are not worse, nor devoid of "sense" (however you define it). Spending your life building things, immersed in a study of some sort, or simply enjoying time with your family and friends doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.

> Spending your life building things, immersed in a study of some sort, or simply enjoying time with your family and friends doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.

Well, at least your brain chemistry thinks so. And eventually some mixture of idiots and bullies will be in charge of the people you love and things you created. And, if not, there's always the heat death of the universe to look forward to. Or the next supervirus if you're impatient.

>Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.

Nope. You can't base a sound theory of value in mere supernatural human-like minds.

Philosophy of religion departments are mostly staffed by theists, so there's an easy check on that hypothesis. I've never heard any of my philosopher acquaintances offline or online mention that the philosophers of religion seemed especially happy.

You're getting downvoted, but I think you're at least correct that it would make sense to control for the usual correlates of happiness and see if tenured philosophy professor happiness isn't already explained by those factors. Religiosity might be the big one.

This is the most productive response. However, if we're granting the OP's premise that his N=8 sample needs explanation, then it doesn't seem that anything so simple as religiosity can explain the allegedly dramatic data.

Anyways, the grandparent comment ought to be downvoted because his minor contribution does not nearly make up for the damage it does to the tenor of the conversation. If you want to save his contribution, repeat it in a top level comment and link to him for attribution.

I didn't downvote him until I read the last line of his post ("Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.") He doesn't need a God, because he obviously carries an omniscient one with him in his own mind.

Atheists aren't especially unhappy, so this completely fails as an explanation.

Yeah, I'd love to see some data to support that theory. I know atheists are much less representative of the prison population and things like teen pregnancy - all things I would think would be strongly correlated with an unhappy population.

> Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God

Why are those my only choices? I am neither a nihilist nor a theist. I'm just kind of enjoying being alive while it lasts. Do you think I'm doing it wrong?

You're not a philosophy professor though. To steelman the OP a little, it's possible that spending your entire life grappling with seemingly unanswerable questions and not really getting anywhere could be pretty depressing.

Absurdism is great if you've got something to distract you from it...

> You're not a philosophy professor though. To steelman the OP a little, it's possible that spending your entire life grappling with seemingly unanswerable questions and not really getting anywhere could be pretty depressing.

I would expect philosophy professors not to believe such questions are unanswerable, and in fact to believe that they possess, at the very least, a solid start on coherent and true answers.

No, you're doing just fine. You see, some theists cling to their religion so strongly, that they have difficulty imagining how they would interpret the world without god. So right and wrong, come from god. Meaning of life comes from god. etc, etc. The op even imagines happiness requires god.

So they take that point of view, remove god from it, and then apply what they imagine to atheists. And it's never good. You get these ridiculous ideas like atheists must all be nihilists; must be immoral; etc.

The people who actually know better are too busy doing other things to piss in the wind by arguing with a theist. Absence of disproof in this case doesn't equate to proof. It may just mean that nobody is willing to give you constructive criticism.

There's a concept in Buddhism called the "Dark night of the soul" which is a touchy moment when your world view is essentially nihilist and depressive and you have to pass through it. A little dangerous for depressive people looking for meaning to be in a state where they believe there is no meaning.

I'm told it passes for nearly everybody.

The expression "dark night of the soul" comes from Roman Catholicism. I don't think it refers to what you're talking about either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul

Then it has been stolen. Wouldn't be the first time. And it's not particularly different. The players are different but the story is the same: existential crises are a bitch.

Aside from the fear and trembling eventuated by religion, we have happy atheistic philosophies. This just came up from the fortune program, for example:

    If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing
    of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur
    of this life.
                    -- Albert Camus

That pretty well describes my philosophy, and I'm reasonably happy.

Yeah, when reality gets depressing you should retreat to insanity...

If you're that desperate, try meth; it's less harmful to society.

He makes 8 points, but the last 7 are all things that are presumably true throughout a person's career in philosophy/academia. The only condition that changes when one gets tenure is #1, and I believe that's the root of it. But I don't look at it in terms of freedom, but rather of adversity -- adversity as a BENEFIT, that the tenured faculty (or the miserable lottery winner) abruptly LOSES. Adversity is what gives life meaning, improves us as people, and (paradoxically) creates happiness. You are a knife and adversity is the rock against which you sharpen yourself. Not necessarily because you need a sharp knife, but because a knife is best when it's at its most knife-like. Heirs, except when they reject or are excommunicated from the family fortune, usually have no concept of adversity and grow up to be shitty, weak people. They never have to strive and hence never learn what they're made of. Once you get tenure, that is what you lose.

It's not really true that the only thing that changes once you get tenure is decompression. The other thing that changes is that your workload switches from lots of tenure-qualifying stuff to lots of administrative stuff. As his other point highlights, you still have an unreasonable workload, it's just that now you aren't directly fighting for your job. You can slack off, meaning do a mediocre job at the many, many tasks assigned to you.

And that goes to problem #3, especially the impossibility of teaching well when a huge load of administrative BS is required and great teaching isn't required.

I think talk about "the impossibility of teaching well" is stretching things a bit. In my own experience, I had some philosophy professors who were phenomenally great teachers and some others who were downright awful. Some of the difference might have come down to innate talent for teaching, but I'm quite sure that none of the difference was attributable to the amount of non-teaching duties they had. The best teachers I had were professors with heavy administrative and advisory duties, while the two worst had comparatively little non-teaching work to do. The main reason they were terrible teachers is because they just didn't give a shit; they were clearly just phoning it in.

> Adversity is what gives life meaning, improves us as people, and (paradoxically) creates happiness

And one must imagine sisyphus to be happy?

I suspect, the attacks is what gets boring. Attacks that you need to fend off which have only an impact on your imagined legacy, not your present state of existence.

Fighting something you should be ignoring (rather, can ignore without consequence to your next day) is just soul crushing.

It's the same sort of reaction to writing a random comment and reading the responses, most of which do not deserve a response from you - but it's so hard to let it go and live your life when someone's being wrong on the internet.

That is an adversity without meaning - experience being willfully misunderstood by people. I would imagine it would dull me, if I forced myself to explain my mind ad nauseam.

I have to wonder if tenured philosophy professors are any more or less unhappy than, say, newly tenured literature professors or economists or chemists.

I ask because 1, 3, 4, and 5 seem like the most persuasive reasons, but they're also the ones that aren't specific to philosophy.

At least 2 other top-level posters here have suggested that philosophy might be dying due to their relevance being superceded by fields like physics and neuroscience.

I have a similar notion. But what I feel most lacking in philosophy are not its everyday relevance, but its methods. Mathematics has communicated with the natural sciences and continues to contribute by providing a watertight framework. The natural sciences have had empiricism and the scientific method; and most academic fields are today exploring new data-driven methods and computational analysis to develop new insights.

Much work that I've seen in analytic philosophy, on the other hand, continue the tradition of thought experiments and simple classical logic, rarely venturing into more expressive models and arguments, perhaps computational.

I personally think that the strong reliance on inexpressive logic rather than creating more expressive mathematical models of philosophical frameworks actively hinders it. Philosophers should be actively and profusely creating metaphysical and ethical frameworks in mathematics, not unlike physicists and economists.

I don't think this is specific to philosophy, or even to academia in general. Trying to get tenure isn't all that different from trying to get rich, famous, powerful, or so on.

If you see tenure (or any of those other things) as a goal in itself rather than the product of doing meaningful work and living a purposeful life, then you may have just climbed to the top of the ladder and realized that it was against the wrong wall.

To all kinds of philosophers. It might sound pep-talk+patronizing but hear me out:

- What is science? natural philosophy!

- What is mathematics/computer-science? modern philosophy!

The journey from continental to analytic philosophy didn't end there. Today natural philosophy and modern philosophy are reaping the rewards of 'the culture of thinking' promulgated by the untiring work of philosophers of history and present.

If you feel any emptiness in your life, please consider spending time learning mathematics and/or programming. IMO it's the highest form of exploration of abstractions and information-structures.

You might ask? "but what's the point? and how does it help with unhappiness".

Well, here's the rub. The holy grail of computer-science is artificial intelligence!

There is a mad rush to achieve it from all walks of life and I believe it's going to happen very soon (within the next 10 to 30 years). You might want to be part of that!

What's the other big thing? biological longevity! There's an equally mad rush about to begin to extend healthy human lifespan to 100, 150, 200 years (and beyond) if possible.

AI and longevity don't end the existential gloom, but they change the game of which existential questions are asked.

There is another connection. The way math and CS is the natural continuation to analytic philosophy, transhumanism is the natural continuation to atheism! There is a connection because AI and longevity are exactly the two issues that are front and center in transhumanist thought.

Why transhumanism? Because once you're an atheist and an existentialist, and you realize there is no purpose in life, and that we make our own purpose, there are a few possible outcomes:

- nihilism/suicidal thinking (screw everything)

- religion (you go back to "thinking-less" life)

- absurdism (just accept the status-quo)

- superficialism (you give yourself some purpose just for the heck of it)

All four are unsatisfying. Well guess what, transhumanism is the fifth option. It challenges you that the drudgery of work (to make a living) and the thought of inevitable impending death (not to mention sickness and frailty) are at least as existentially significant as the meaning-of-life question (probably more so in the current state of human progress). It doesn't promise to answer the last one but it encourages to reach a life that is free of the first two.

Even if all of this is not convincing enough, consider one final thought. If we humans are biological machines programmed to have certain feelings and emotions which result in the existential gloom, and if we conquer our biology to get rid of sickness and death, what makes you think we would still be unable to switch off our feelings of existential gloom? feelings of boredom? What makes you think we won't be able to sleep as long as we want, instead of ending our life, and still have a shot at enjoying life when we wake up?

(P.S.: One parting word, space (the final frontier)!)

> What is science? natural philosophy!

It was, back a long time ago, but the natural philosophers fell away as more technical knowledge came to be required to advance the field.

> What is mathematics/computer-science? modern philosophy!

Not really, no. It doesn't provide any guidance for life and it doesn't grapple with any of the big questions, even to say they're meaningless. It isn't philosophy as anyone defines the term.

> The holy grail of computer-science is artificial intelligence!

That's the "holy grail" of one sub-field, maybe. Not the whole field by a long shot.

Well if you're up for nitpicking, I wouldn't be surprised if you're able to find 30 problems in my comment rather than 3.

I urge you to read it while practising the principle of charity.

Because they're philosophy professors..

Sounds like a great philosophy class.

Funny thing about this "God" concept of yours. If I take two people from the same church -- even if they're sitting next to each other in the same pew, singing from the same songbook and sharing the same Bible -- and interrogate them in two separate rooms, their accounts of who God is and what God wants will eventually diverge.

That's a bit awkward for those who find pleasure and comfort in rigorous thinking, isn't it?

I didn't say you had to pick God, bro.

I didn't say I did.

I didn't say you had to pick God, bro. I didn't say I did.

Well, you've said elsewhere you're a "conservative." That suggests you're not a nihilist, since it implies that order and tradition are touchstones of your personal value system.

That leaves doors #2 and #3, God and hysterics. Like everyone else, you know nothing about God that you didn't hear from other men... but by all accounts, one thing most Gods have in common is that they don't like people who waffle about standing up for their beliefs.

So, hysterics it is, I guess. That's believable.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651711 and marked it off-topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com