Dr Brainerd Prince
A quick review, ofwhere we have got in this story so far,might be useful in setting the context for our next steps. We began with being in a posture of an authentic search in which we find our children under the bridge or the event or the series of events that opens up a problem worthy of research in our life. Then we saw how through reflective thinking and narrative writing of that event, we could abstract a theme worthy of research, a theme from the real world along with a set of problems that is worth investigating and solving.
We finally looked at how the academy historically came into existence with Plato setting it up outside the city of Athens. From then on there has been a divide between the city that lives and the academy that thinks. Another way of capturing this could be to see it as the divide between the world of texts or the world of literature as Ricoeur would say and the world of life, or the life world as Husserl would term it. Sloterdijk captures this division very succinctly in his short book ‘The Art of Philosophy’. What is in fact being said is that knowledge rests within the academy and the texts they produce, while life happens in the city outside the gates of the academy. The academy has the true knowledge which then is played out in the real world. This is because the process involved in the creation of knowledge is radically different from the process that is at play in building the world. Over the centuries, we have seen that this division between the academia and the world has grown.
In this piece I want to examine three things: first, a short critical meditation on this divide between the academia and the world, with a view to acknowledge that there is a legitimacy to this divide. Secondly, to share a few key characteristics of the academic world and finally, to find out a path from our experience of the children under the bridge in the city to the foothills of the academic mountain.
I think the image of a mountain is apt to represent the academia, for several reasons: firstly, from the mountain one can claim to see the city in its entirety and theorise about it. Secondly, there is a distance between the mountain and the city which has been seen as necessary for the theoretical life. Finally, this distance represents a central characteristic of what consists of valid knowledge which is that it is objective. While, all these reasons will be contested during the course of our investigation, they still have some merit. In a sense, the evidence lies in them having survived centuries of resistance and critique.
Sloterdijk gives an expansive account of how this divide originated and finally has been demolished in our modern age. He gives it another set of names – the divide between theory and practice, the theory of the academy versus the practice of the city dwellers. Sloterdijk recounts how there were ten attacks against this divide, and how this divide got bridged in our modern age. He writes, ‘the liquidation of the ancient European subject of theory was by no means the work of a lone killer. In fact, it resulted from an abundance of parallel polemical developments, each of which contributed to the overall result. I have counted a total of ten assassins. Each gave his own reasons for settling accounts with the ghost of the man of theory.’ This resulted in a ‘re-embedding of theory in practice’.
Having read his account carefully, one is still able to consistently make the difference between the world of theory and the world of practice. In other words, the issue that is being discussed is how these two worlds were separated and now how they have been re-united. However, in no place does Sloterdijk propose that theory to be replaced by practice, or that practice should give way to theory. This means that the theoretical and practical processes have their unique roles to play. As Sloterdijk himself concludes, ‘in many areas, there is still a deep consensus between asceticism and discourse culture, even if the metaphysical exaggerations of the past have lost their credibility. Even in today’s world, regardless of many problematic developments, philosophy and science are practiced as noble exercises of conscious life.’ My extension to Sloterdijk’s project is that there is a genuine authentic social and even cultural context for the practices of these noble professions. Both Plato’s academy as well as what I am calling as the academic mountain, not unlike the ashramas and monasteries, create a context for optimally doing theoretical work.
What makes the academic mountain a home for theoretical work? Why is a university campus, a campus mostly on the outskirts of the city, or on a hillock, more amenable to do academic work? I would like to suggest three postures of the academic life that is deeply linked to life lived on the academic mountain. Firstly, academic work is not merely observational work. Matter of fact, observation is just the beginning, and then comes reflection, experimentation, analysis, interpretation, critique, argumentation et al. All of these require time. City life just does not permit this intense focused concern with knowledge making. Academics like to live in the campus of their institution as it gives them undisturbed time for the academic work of producing knowledge and for cultivating the habits and practices necessary for such production. Secondly, the flow of life with its constant pulls and pushes, does not allow for the method of enquiry to be practiced within city walls. Reflection and experimentation have sophisticated methods that need to be practiced without the noise of the city. Knowledge making is not merely a result of observing something, but as listed above, it has a method and process and that requires a certain quietness. Finally, academic work is not done in isolation, rather there is a community of academics who work together. From an undergraduate student to a full professor there are people at different levels within the academy, and they together produce knowledge. In today’s world, the academic community is like an institution or an organization or a company in its own rights.
Despite Sloterdijk’s critique, Sloterdijk himself would not be averse to the academic life or the academic community on the mountain doing academic work. His critique was against the idea of academic theoretical work being reduced to an intellectual activity that considered the body dead. But that is not what we are advocating. For us the academic mountain houses academic communities who are very much made of flesh and blood. Furthermore, the academic community one belongs to distinctively influences the way one does theoretical work. The perspective of a sociologist is very different from that of an anthropologist, or the premises of a physicist is different from that of a biologist. Presently with the proliferation of knowledge, even within these broad disciplines, there are specialised discourses each one doing unique academic work with their own perspectives, premises, methods and sources of knowledge.
In our story so far, we are still in the city, under the bridge, and we have seen the children whose predicament demands new knowledge and solutions. Our claim is that academic work and research is necessary if we are to find a long-term solution to this problem. For that we need to climb the academic mountain. But what does it mean to approach the academic mountain? What is required of us if we choose to climb the academic mountain?
The academic can be contrasted to an activist. The activist wants to immediately engage the problem and find a solution immediately. He is primarily interested in those particular children under that particular bridge. In some sense he feels he knows what the problem is already and how it needs to be solved. He is interested in actions that will enable him to solve the problem. He may read, write and even do research, but his concern is only to solve the problem at hand.
On the other hand, the academic who now has a problem and theme at hand derived from her experience of the children under the bridge, feels a primary urge to find out how this theme has been addressed in the past by other academics. What language and vocabulary did they use to describe the theme? What is the thematic? How much research has been done in the past, so that one does not have to re-invent the wheel while looking for solutions? Furthermore, what exactly is the problematic? Are there aspects and dimensions that one’s initial observations have missed or left out? Most importantly, what aspect of the problem am I really interested in to work on? All of this requires a rigorous engagement with other academics who are living in small communities on the academic mountain.
It is with this desire to thoroughly investigate the problem and embark on a research journey, which will truly transform the ‘children under the bridge’, that I approach the mountain. The research model that I will propose will seek to take forward Sloterdijk’s idea of the mutual ‘embeddedness’ of the world of texts and the world of life.
Dr Brainerd Prince is the Associate Professor of Practice, and Director, Centre for Thinking, Language and Communication, Plaksha University.
