Philosophy student trapped by elitism

As a philosophy major, I know that there is a certain stigma surrounding the study of philosophy. There are likely to be playful jabs from friends and classmates that philosophy never accomplished anything, and that once one wades through the quagmire of semantics, philosophers are little more than idle minds who muse about unanswerable questions.

I take slight offense to this view. Philosophy students do not spend their waking hours cogitating and contemplating trivial platitudes. Rather they analyze, criticize and interpret questions and arguments that have persisted through out the ages. This view that the field of philosophy is lawless, trivial and equivalent to “make believe” is juvenile and uninformed, and I feel that most philosophers ignore it.

However, having gained an insider’s perspective, I would like to offer my own criticism of what I have seen of philosophy undergraduate students at Rice.

I will try to be blunt: I believe that there is a certain tendency among philosophy majors at Rice to act more like Enlightenment-era socialites than university students. Let me paint a brief picture of the two to see how they compare. The socialite spends his or her time gossiping about the newest movements within the court or salon, feels that he or she is above the common peasant — both intellectually and socially — and makes everyone around him or her acutely aware of that knowledge and/or relationships with figures of authority, wealth or power.

The philosophy student at Rice is guilty of many of the same tendencies. The philosophy major makes catty remarks about persons whose work he or she has read and name drops others in order to impress those around him or her. The philosophy student has an air of intellectual snobbery or elitism that seems to stifle discussion in a classroom setting, especially in classes outside the philosophy department. This is not what I would expect from the average university student, and I admit to the reader that I cannot escape my own criticism in many respects. I have found myself making judgments about class readings based on the traditions they arise from, much like a socialite gossips about one’s ancestry or noble ties, and I would like to posit that perhaps the history of philosophy as a discipline lends itself towards this type of thinking.

One cannot deny that many of the fathers of philosophy were outright elitists. From the ancient Greeks, to the scholastics, and even the enlightened Europeans, the fathers were enamored with the idea that they had somehow grasped a truth that none outside of their circle had accessed. This exclusivity naturally lent itself toward philosophies and ideas that formed hierarchies within society, which unsurprisingly placed the philosopher at or near the top. Philosophers themselves were notably high on the pecking order: Many of them spent their leisure time in a court of nobility that favored their ideas, and the discipline was constituted almost entirely of upper-crust white males.

This characterization of philosophers persists to this day. Although the aspects of wealth and chauvinism have been mitigated to some extent, the philosophy students and philosophers of the 21st century are still very culturally and racially homogenous. It seems that the traditions of old, the salons of France and the courts of Germany and England still bleed through our contemporary notions of social equality and egalitarianism. I would hope that at this point in the history of philosophy. One would be able to divorce the taint of elitism and exclusivity from the notions of truth or enlightened thought, but I think this is wishful thinking. Without self-realization and reflection on these problems of elitism, whether unconscious or inherited from the tradition, these issues will persist through many more generations of philosophical thought and thinkers.

So to the philosophy student at Rice, ask yourself if you fall victim to these generalizations. Are you eager to dismiss others with a flippant remark about their philosophy or writings? Do you hold yourself above those non-philosophy students in discussion or just in general? Have you mentioned Heidegger, Nietzsche or any other authoritative mind in order to exclude and impress rather than inform or further discussion?

I believe that this endeavor should not be taken as insulting or hurtful, but rather an outgrowth of the tradition of criticism in which philosophy students are raised. I take this criticism of philosophers seriously, and I encourage the reader to question my assumptions and offer their own criticisms.

Brett Snider is a Hanszen College senior.

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