In this brief note I will attempt a phenomenology of the type of discourse found in academic philosophy, although it could just at easily be applied to other disciplines, e.g. literary theory, the theory of history, or the social sciences. To begin, I offer some definitions of roles played by individuals within academe, and of the activities they engage in:

(a) A person X who explores, explains, and tinkers with the ideas of past thinkers I shall call a Historian of Ideas, or, more simply, a Scholar. The activity engaged in by the scholar is, of course, Scholarship.

(b) A person Y who studies the history of thought, but then tries to say something new and interesting, I shall call a Philosopher. The activity engaged in by the philosopher is Philosophy.

(c) The rare individual Z who puts forward a startlingly new perspective, a world view pregnant with insight, we can call a Genius. There are, naturally, very few geniuses within academic philosophy.

All of the above can be taken (at least for the time being) as non-evaluative terms, expressed in ordinary language so as to avoid all hint of obfuscation.

It takes no great powers of observation to note that the hegemony of discourse within academic philosophy - in departmental colloquia and other discussions, at conferences, and in most publications - is a hegemony of scholarship. This discourse involves, for the most part, groups of people discussing the ideas of individuals who are, for the most part, long dead, or at minimum far removed from the physical locale in which the discussion takes place. One group might ardently support the ideas of dead philosopher (or genius) Y, another just as ardently oppose them. Indeed, it is common for scholar to identify themselves by their allegiance to one or another theoretical position, as when someone says "I'm a contractarian" because they have accepted the tenets of social contract theory as unassailable. In short, the scholarly self is submerged in the pool of ideas wherein it works, and defines itself in terms of the pool wherein it has chosen (or been cajoled, persuaded, or pushed) to swim in.

Rarely, and almost always through the publication process (since the hegemony of scholarship exerts such a powerful dampening influence on all other venues, such as conferences), a philosopher breaks through the hegemony of scholarship, and forces his or her way into the philosophical canon (at least provisionally: only time and an almost endless repetition of their ideas can guarantee their long-term membership in the canon). This intrusion of the philosopher into the quiet calm of the scholar's universe causes a ripple of excitement if not consternation, and is usually met with a panoply of critical replies (witness the scholarly industry that sprouted up following the appearance of Rawls' A Theory of Justice in the 1970s and later). Eventually, after the critical smoke and noise has subsided, the philosopher may be admitted to the canon on a more permanent basis if the republic of scholarship has deemed him or her worthy of such an admission.

The type of discourse employed by the scholar (or "proto-scholar", in the case of the neophyte undergraduate or master's student) is a working-on discourse. It is a discourse that re-presents or re-produces the ideas of dead or distant philosophers. For example, when two scholars unacquainted with each other encounter each other at an academic conference, they almost immediately and inevitably switch into this working-on discourse. Let's listen in on a dialogue between Ann and Charles, two doctoral students attending a conference:

Ann: Hello, I'm Ann. I'm a Ph.D. student at Western.

Charles: I'm Charles, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto. What are you working on, Ann?

Ann: Actually, I'm working on extending Rawls' contract theory along feminist lines. I hope to show that his Liberty and Equality Principles don't sufficiently deal with how gender differences create injustices in our societies. My thesis is tentatively entitled The Need for a Third Principle in Rawls' Theory of Justice. How about you Charles, what are you working on?

Charles: Well, my thesis is called Nietzsche's Moral Dualism. I'm looking at how Nietzsche's distinction between master and slave morality has been incorrectly interpreted by several key critics. Say, would you like to go to the cafe across the street and discuss our mutual projects?

Ann: Certainly, I'd love to.

As we leave Ann and Charles to their quest for cappuccinos, it should be evident that this "working on" discourse implies that past thinkers or forms of thought are like raw materials that can be legitimately mined ad infinitum by scholars. The working-on discourse is to a degree modelled on the sort of discourse we find in the natural sciences: the scholar is presented with a certain amount of experimental data (i.e. the philosopher's texts), certain interpretations of this data, certain "theories" about what it means (i.e. past criticism and commentary), and with a certain number of problems to solve with respect to this data. If he or she can solve these problems, there is a sense in which the scholar in question has achieved a positive result, has accomplished something along the same lines as a scientist when he or she puts forward a hypothesis that deals with a hitherto unexplained anomaly in his or her experimental data. Naturally, this sense of accomplishment for the scholar, this sense that problems are being "solved" analogously to the way that problems are solved in the natural sciences, is strongly motivated by the need to justify their way of life both to themselves, to others around them, and most importantly to money-issuing organizations (the university, research foundations, or the general tax-paying public as a whole) that economically support this way of life.

The working-on discourse has at least a tripartite structure of possibilities. Given a limited amount of philosophical raw material, the scholar is left with three basic options (or combinations thereof):

(a) Unearthing: The rediscovery of that which was lost, for example, the bringing to light of unpublished material, the translating of untranslated material, or the illustration of how thinker X was influenced by or influenced thinker Y, Z, and so on.

(b) Reshaping: Taking issue with the critical canon surrounding a given thinker or movement, either by "arguing" with other critics, or offering a new critical interpretation of the thinker or movement in question.

(c) Applying: Applying theory X to problem Y, for example, applying contract theory to the moral admissibility of censoring pornography.

Scholarship focusses on these three sub-forms of the working-on discourse, and perpetuates these forms through the control of social, cultural, and financial capital within the academic system.

One result of the working-on discourse is the cult of the great scholar. We see this cult in various forms, for example, when the eager young graduate student rushes off to the University of W to work with Great Scholar X who is him or herself working on thinker Y. Thus the cult of the great scholar reproduces the working-on discourse in reflected form, at one remove: the graduate student plows through the works of the philosopher he or she has chosen as worthy of interest under the direction of scholar X. The great scholar mirrors the thought of the philosopher to his or her acolyte. Under these conditions, scholarship becomes the palest of imitations of philosophy.

Unfortunately, allied to the cult of scholarship is the creation of what John Ralston Saul calls "impenetrable dialects" within the discipline, allied to each of the several paradigms of philosophy that are currently popular in the discipline.⁽¹⁾

Again, as Saul notes, these dialects act as "gatekeepers" forbidding entrance to all but the most enterprising of acolytes to the "corporation" of philosophy. The fragmentation of the discipline of philosophy into paradigm-following sub-groups whose dialects are to varying degrees impenetrable to those outside the group has lead to a "tribalization" of the discipline. The most famous of the various tribes within the discipline are the analysts and the continentalists, although we can also distinguish many smaller tribes to which each individual scholar owes allegiance.

One important effect of this tribalization is a corrosive relativity of standards with regards to the adjudication of conference papers, publications, and student marking and scholarship allocation. As should be evident to anyone who has ever participated in these processes (either as a judge or as the person whose work is being judged), the acceptability of one's scholarship is to no small degree contingent upon the degree to which (a) it is written or spoken in the academic dialect that the judge is most comfortable with, and (b) it draws conclusions with respect to the issue under debate not radically at odds with the judge's own. If the piece of work fails tests (a) and/or (b), it is judged to be "unoriginal" or "inadequate". If it violently conflicts with both (a) and (b), then it may even be judged "unphilosophical".

Empirically, I estimate that 70-80% of people teaching full-time in North American philosophy departments and 90% or more of graduate students in the same departments are scholars (although, it goes without saying, not always good ones). This should not be in the least bit surprising. The hegemonic status of the working-on form of discourse is clearly a product of the system whereby a young person rises through the ranks in academic life. As one moves from undergraduate to master's student to doctoral student to junior faculty or postdoctoral associate, one is expected to "produce" a certain amount of "good work" to keep this process of ascent through the academic hierarchy on the rails. Those that do not produce sufficient scholarship to keep it going fail to ascend beyond the level wherein they have been deemed to have failed.⁽²⁾ Hence the presuppositions of those making judgments as to the "goodness" of the undergraduate or graduate student's work loom large in determining whether that student is given a chance to enter the academic elite. And one of the most common elements in the judges's presuppositional matrix is the primacy and legitimacy of the "working-on" form of discourse as the academic discourse par excellence.

Finally, dropping the mask of the dispassionate phenomenologist, the hegemony of scholarship is something that must not be left unquestioned. As Richard Rorty says of Bloom, we feel the horror of death most intensely when we imagine ourselves perishing without leaving anything unique behind. The relevant horror here is the horror of finding oneself at death's door as no better than a copy or replica of past thinkers.⁽³⁾ This is the horror that the scholar either lives with in shame, represses, or, in the limit-case of those able to live entirely in self-delusion and bad faith, never feels at all. Rorty calls for some notion of a strong poet, who, unlike the majority, see the pursuit of philosophy as not just one more ride on the "same old dialectical seesaw", but as an attempt to imprint the distinctness of their mind on their medium of choice before the adventure of life is over. This is what the philosopher does, and this is what the scholar debates about and critiques.

Saul warns us that under corporatism "real expressions of individualism are not only discouraged but punished. The active, outspoken citizen is unlikely to have a successful professional career."⁽⁴⁾ This strikes me as a sad but true fact of life, at least within academe. The system which produces academic discourse too often looks like an infernal copying machine which has been switched "on" by some long-dead operator, year after year spewing out endless slight variations on some dog-eared original firmly housed within its works. Like the proverbial infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters, it may from time to time produce something of merit. But this is more the exception than the rule.

In conclusion, if my analysis of academic discourse is not too far off the mark, then a rousing call for the liberation of academic thinking from the iron grip of the hegemony of scholarship would not be out of place. The scholar may not have a world to win, but certainly has an array of intellectual chains to lose.

1. See Saul's The Unconscious Civilization (Concord: Anasi, 1995) for an insightful discussion of the current state of academe, especially pp.161-162, where he discusses the baneful influence of philosophical professionalism and the dialects that it produces. He also makes the important point (p.54) that the sign of a healthy civilization is the existence of a relatively clear language in which everyone can participate, the sign of a sick one "the growth of an obscure, closed language that seeks to prevent communication." This critique of the obscurity of language encouraged by philosophical professionalism is echoed by Camille Paglia in a more rhetorical and passionate tone in her Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1992).

2. This is more true now, when we live in conditions of an over-supply of people who wish to rise through the system. A generation ago, which in Canadian terms we can pin down to the mid- to late-1960s, there was clearly an undersupply of qualified university graduates and teachers in the humanities, hence the influx of American and British academics into our system. The influence that this influx had is by no means a benign one (but that is a subject best left to some future discussion).

3. See Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge UP, 1989), Chapter Two.

4. The Unconscious Civilization, p.32.