(The following, composed 16 February 2005, is imported from the first incarnation of Maverick Philosopher. It makes some important points that bear repeating.)
On the masthead of The Ivory Closet, now defunct: "Life as a Closet Conservative Inside Liberal Academia."
From the post Liberal Groupthink is My Cover:
My dissertation, which I'm still working on, focuses on a contemporary French philosopher who is known in academia primarily as a radical Leftist. Generally speaking, academics seem to just assume that you agree with and share the same views as the figure you focus on in your dissertation. So, everyone just assumes that since I'm writing on a radical Leftist that I must be a radical Leftist. I keep my mouth shut about my conservativism. Often I have to bite my tongue when I hear disparaging remarks about conservatives. But, so long as I manage to do that the liberal bias of academia makes it all too easy to stay in the closet. Everyone just assumes your [you're] a liberal.
The author points out something verified in my own experience. Because I had written a dissertation on Kant, some former colleagues assumed that I must be a Kantian. One of these people was an old Thomist who had published a grand total of one article in his long and undistinguished career and needed a reason to dislike a young upstart. So he assumed I was a damned Kantian opposed to the old-time metaphysics that he learned out of scholastic manuals way back when. Another colleague, who didn't get tenure, was a libertarian who hated Kant for Randian reasons. He pegged me as a metaphysician who was a Kantian and who therefore held that the sense world is illusory! (Rand's misrepresentation of Kant is a travesty I have documented elsewhere.)
Another bonehead of a former colleague under the sway of Heidegger and Gadamer assumed that I must be a Thomist since I had published articles critical of Heidegger in such journals as The Thomist, New Scholasticism, and International Philosophical Quarterly.
So the Thomist makes me out to be a Kantiasn, the Heideggerian makes me out to be a Thomist, and the libertarian, noting that I taught both Kant and metaphysics, jumped to the conclusion that I must be a Kantian in metaphysics.
A libertarian, chess-playing, mailman friend of mine was once shocked to hear that I was conducting a seminar on Nietzsche at a Catholic university. He must have thought that one cannot teach Nietzsche without espousing Nietzsche and that teaching at a Catholic university must be indoctrination.
Paul Edwards once accused me of being a "semi-shepherd" because I had argued that Heidegger's Being question was immune to objections he had raised. I was not a full-fledged "shepherd of Being," but a "semi-shepherd" in his parlance, a species of varmint that Edwards found just as objectionable as the full-fledged variety.
In each of these five cases, there was a failure to grasp an important truth: Philosophy is not ideology. Philosophy aims at truth, not at ideas useful for the end of gaining and acquiring power, or useful for the end of maintaining and legitimating existing power relations. We do not study Kant and Nietzsche and Heidegger to refute them or to agree with them, or to satisfy a need to have something to believe in, or a need to belong to a movement, or a craving for action-guiding beliefs. Philosophy is inquiry: an attempt at arriving at the sober impersonal truth to the extent that this is possible for such limited beings as we are.
Edwards betrayed a particularly disgusting feature of ideologues, something we could call 'hostility to the moderate.' One who offers a balanced appraisal of the thinker the ideologue despises is attacked for being soft on him as if philosophical discourse were a species of polemic.
It is not that there is no place for polemic. There is. There is no life without struggle and strife and enemies need to be defeated with words and deeds. I do my share of polemicizing against those I deem pernicious. But there is no place for polemic in philosophy. And just as there is no place for polemic, there is no place in philosophy for its opposite, apologetics. Philosophy is neither polemical nor apologetic because it is not a species of ideology.
We need to examine the question whether a 'philosopher' who holds fast to his ideology no matter what, and uses the tools of philosophy merely as means for defending himself against what he often mistakenly construes as 'attacks,' is really a philosopher. I would say he isn't. For he is not inquiring into the truth. One who thinks he possesses the truth has no need of inquiry.
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