306
PARTISAN REVIEW
more bloated publishers' catalogues filled with ever more exaggerated
descriptions and endorsements. Inevitably, again, it becomes impossible,
except by sheer luck,
to
find the good stuff, and.... But I won't bore you
by writing the previous paragraph allover again!
And, as more and more books are published, the audience reached by
each book has dwindled. Better, from the point of view of sheer self–
preservation, let alone of impressing deans, etc., with one's "scholarly
productivity," not to spend too long writing a book. And better, too, from
the point of view of making oneself heard, to wri te the kind of book that
might interest a trade publisher, or at least will get reviewed in the non–
academic press. And this too favors the simple, startling idea; even, or
perhaps especially, the startlingly false or impressively obscure idea.... But
I promised not to bore you by writing that paragraph allover again!
Like books and journals, conferences might be, and occasionally are,
important channels of communication. But we are all familiar with the
reality that your home institution will pay your expenses
if
you give a
paper; with the conference announcements which discreetly let it be
known that, so long as you pay the large registration fee, your paper will
be accepted; with the stupefYing programs day. after day of umpteen par–
allel sessions; with the twenty-minute, the twelve-minute, even, oflate, the
ten-minute presentation; with the extent to which conferences have
become less a matter of communication than of "contacts," of "exposure,"
and, of course, of expenses-paid trips to agreeable places.
Under pressure of preposterism, we grossly over-rate the usefulness of
what we like to call "stimulation," and grossly under-rate the need for
time, peace of mind, mature reflection. I think of Santayana's character
sketch of Royce: an "overworked, standardised, academic engine, creaking
and thumping on at the call of duty or of habit, with no thought of spar–
ing itself or anyone else." Preposterism can only too easily turn the best of
us into just such overworked, standardized, academic engines-and turn
the worst of us into purveyors of philosophical snake-oil.
Two tendencies in recent philosophy, on the face of it radically
opposed to each other, both result in part from our adaptation to a
"research ethic" more appropriate to the sciences: scientism, i.e., linking
philosophy too closely, or inappropriately, to science; and radical critique
of the sciences as no more than ideology masked by rhetorical bullying in
the form of appeals to "rationality," "objectivity," and so forth. The for–
mer is the effect of envy, the latter of resentment, of the success of the
SCIences.
Scientism comes in three main varieties: mathematical or logical pseudo–
rigor, which is a kind of affected obscurity; the hope of turnjng philosophical
problems over to the natural sciences to resolve, which covertly changes the
questions in hopes of quick solutions; and overt repudiation of philosophical
