The Confessional Turn

Something is happening in philosophy, something unexpected, unpredictable, and uncontained. “Starting around 2010,” writes Crispin Sartwell in the LA Review of Books, “there was a striking change, surprising to someone trained in the 1980s”:

Some philosophy professors began to write a lot more personally; they tried to show how philosophical ideas had affected and might affect their own lives. Some started writing what came to be thought of as philosophical self-help.

Sartwell calls this “The New Hellenism,” after the Hellenic tradition of philosophy as a way of life. (On the “Old Hellenism,” he cites Pierre Hadot.) Sartwell makes bold claims both about the stagnation of philosophy before the new wave and about its (potential) significance, citing it in the same breath as the “linguistic turn.” Call it the confessional turn.

I am not a neutral observer of this phenomenon: I am grateful to be mentioned as a New Hellenist in Sartwell’s essay. But I don’t think I am biased in saying that his starting point is true: there’s a lot more philosophy bordering on memoir or personal essay, but written by academics, than there was ten or fifteen years ago. To the writers he mentions, I would add Nick Riggle and Zena Hitz. And if we look to other media, there’s Barry Lam’s narrative-philosophy podcast, Hi-Phi Nation, in which life-stories are entangled with ideas.

Sartwell connects the shift in philosophical prose to “wider cultural and literary developments”—in particular, the inventiveness and prestige of memoir and personal essay in the 1990s. That was certainly an influence on me, though the books that had the biggest impact came more recently: Nicotine by Gregor Hens, Brian Dillon’s Essayism, and The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. John Kaag’s American Philosophy was a bridge text: if Kaag could write memoir and philosophy at once, maybe I could write philosophy as personal essay? At any rate, that was my ambition in Life is Hard.

Sartwell is right, too, about the inspiration of The Stone, Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley’s op-ed series in the New York Times, which both discovered and established an audience for philosophy in a more experiential mode.

But his account of the New Hellenism raises questions, too. It is predicated on a sense of exhaustion in academic philosophy that doesn’t match my experience. “No one was anticipating the thunderclap arrival of the next Wittgenstein or Heidegger,” Sartwell writes; “everyone seemed content to qualify or apply the results of their predecessors, and re-air the debates among them.” I would say yes to the first but no to the second. As I’ve argued, vs. Philip Kitcher, philosophy in this century has become more open, more eclectic, and more scattered—a ferment that doesn’t lend itself to the birth of titans but to creative freedoms in some ways parallel to the liberating developments extolled in Sartwell’s essay.

Nor do I share Sartwell’s view that analytic philosophy is worthless to the personal turn: “As they reconsider the history of philosophy,” he writes, “the new philosophers have ignored the 20th century completely”—except for existentialists and pragmatists disdained by most professional philosophers. I’m not sure if that’s true of Sartwell’s other authors, but it isn’t true of me. One of my aims has been to show how much recent philosophy is of practical use, even if the uses are not often made explicit or accessible. A partial list of philosophers whose work plays this role in Midlife or in Life is Hard:

Robert Adams, Elizabeth Barnes, Walter Benjamin, Havi Carel, Gerald Dworkin, Christine Korsgaard, Ben Laurence, Beri Marušić, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nagel, Susan Neiman, Martha Nussbaum, Derek Parfit, George Pitcher, Frank Ramsey, Samuel Scheffler, Seana Shiffrin, Michael Stocker, Galen Strawson, David Velleman, R. Jay Wallace, Simone Weil, Bernard Williams, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Susan Wolf, Iris Marion Young, and Palle Yourgrau.

Not to mention Iris Murdoch, the patron saint of all my work in public philosophy.

Sartwell ends with a challenge to the movement he identifies:

But as my undergraduate professor in ancient philosophy asked about the old Hellenists, they may have written lovely prose, better than Aristotle, but did they make any progress on philosophical questions? People probably felt better after they read Zeno of Citium or Lucretius, but did they go beyond Plato and Aristotle on the nature of truth, goodness, justice, and beauty? Or was the Hellenistic era, in that sense, a period of decline?

He speculates, optimistically, that the New Hellenists may contribute new ideas “about the nature of knowledge or the free will problem” providing “essential routes of progress for traditional questions”—which I suppose is possible. But I have doubts.

More likely, the contributions will come in the form of new questions, not new answers to old ones, philosophy geared to the problems of living that occupy much of our lives: dealing with parents, friends, children, careers, distraction, depression, anxiety, our sense of political responsibility and powerlessness. If we are asking how we should live, we are “doing ethics” and philosophers face this question in practice as much as they do in theory.

At the heart of the confessional turn is the fact that “What to do?” means nothing different in the mouth of an anxious parent, or patient, or someone who has lost their job, or their spouse, than it does in “moral theory.” Not than anyone ever thought otherwise—yet it can be a feat to reckon the weight of a trivial truth.