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ENTP Career Interview #2

Interview by Ryan Smith

Hi Fred. Thanks for taking the time to do the interview. Before we begin, what is your background for identifying as ENTP?

I have no idea what those letters mean. I know that you're interviewing me for your personality website, of course, but I don't know anything about personality psychology and I've never taken a personality test in my life.

Well, luckily, the two of us are friends, and mutual friends of ours and I all agree that you are ENTP.

Haha, well, if you say so. I won't protest.

I guess it's settled then. What is your education and what do you currently do?

I have a Ph.D. in Literary Studies and currently I work as a professor of philosophy at a prominent university.

Your Ph.D. is in Literary Studies, but you're a professor of philosophy. How did that come about?

Well, I enrolled at Literary Studies, but I thought it was too vacuous in many ways. Now don't get me wrong, I love literature, and I love writing about literature in a technical and qualified way, but the whole culture that tends to spring up at Literary Studies departments is typically very affected and doesn't have much in the way of science, academia, or literature to back it up. So I found myself drifting toward philosophy and the more philosophical parts of literary theory instead. That happened even while I was still in graduate school.

I thought about jumping ship and switching to philosophy proper, but doing so would just have penalized me way too much in terms of the credits that could have been transferred and so on. So I made the most of the situation and pushed my projects as much in the direction of philosophy as I could.

Finally I graduated with a Ph.D. in Literary Studies, even though in practice I had mostly been doing philosophy for the last four years of my life. I got into my first real job, which was working as an instructor teaching Literary Studies at the university. Besides my day job at the university, I also landed a supplementary job which consisted of reviewing books for a small-time newspaper.

Like the university, the newspaper had hired me to handle fiction - novels, poetry, and so on. I asked them if they had other kinds of books I could review and they said no. But then one day, when I happened to be snooping around their offices, I found a room where they had stacks of non-fiction books lying around. These books were sent to the editors with the intention that someone should review them for the paper, but no one ever did. So I grabbed some of the more interesting titles and brought them home with me and reviewed them.

I was expecting to have to invent some kind of excuse of feigned confusion if the editors were to reject my reviews, but nothing of the sort ever happened and they just printed my stuff off the bat. And then the same thing happened with the next batch of non-fiction reviews that I sent in. And then another and another, until soon the editors started sending me philosophy books of their own accord. [Laughs.] That's how things work in large organizations sometimes: Everyone thinks that someone else has okayed a move, so if you do it right, you can step in and spin that confusion to your own advantage. I don't think I'd ever have been allowed to review philosophy books for the newspaper if I had tried to plead and reason with the editors in order to get them to let me do so.

In some sense, you could say that I was lucky. But on the other hand, I did work pretty diligently on the reviewer job. I wrote at least one review a week, even while I was still teaching, researching, and writing academic papers for peer-reviewed journals in order to advance my academic career. I blasted away at that for about eight years until I landed permanent tenure as an associate professor of Literary Studies. Now officially, the only thing that matters when one is being considered for tenure is one's academic publications and citations, but lots of people have those. For my part, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have gotten tenure as early as I did if it had not been for the fact that I was a minor intellectual celebrity because of all the book reviews I had been writing for the paper.

I've heard a lot of academics say similar things. Even in fields like physics and chemistry, it seems that having a public profile makes you stand out in the sea of qualified candidates.

Oh, don't get me wrong. You have to have journal publications and academic citations as well. It's just that being famous never hurts.

Got it. How did you go from being an associate professor of Literary Studies to becoming a full professor of philosophy?

I took some twists and turns. While I was still an associate professor at the university where I am now a full professor, a less prestigious university offered me a full professorship. But rather than just accepting it, I said: "Okay, I'll accept if you guys make it a chair in Literary Studies and philosophy." They were pretty puzzled by that, but in the end they said yes. Then, some years later, I published some papers that unexpectedly got very major traction within their field, and the more prominent university kind of begged me to come back and be a full professor with them. So I said: "Okay, I'll accept if you guys make it a chair in philosophy." Period. No Literary Studies. They weren't really keen on doing that, and they'd probably also have incensed some of their other professors of philosophy if they had just made me one of them without further ado. So in the end, they invented this artificial construction with a micro department that's basically only me, which is really a way to make me a professor of philosophy in everything but the exact name.

What kind of work are you doing now?

I've just finished a huge project about how to rethink the humanities from scratch. For their studies, most humanities students get handed a book on the different intellectual fashions and currents from, say, the Age of Enlightenment and up until today. This will give them an idea of which basic theories belong to each current and movement. I was thinking to myself: "Perhaps that isn't the only way to do it? What could I do to completely reinvent the way students are introduced to the humanities?" And so I wrote a book about method and abstraction in the humanities, dealing with more general methodical and epistemological problems that are unique to the humanities. It's being printed as we speak.

It's interesting that you're writing along these very broad or abstract lines, because one thing that seems to have happened with the humanities is that there has been a move away from general outlines and towards studying individual phenomena up close. As Rebecca Goldstein has said, there's a lot of studying the trees and not a whole lot of studying the forest going on these days.

I'd say that's correct. It has to do with the transformation that academia has gone through where publishing a lot of articles in peer-reviewed journals has become the only way to progress in your career. Writing books meant for an educated public technically doesn't count for anything when someone is being considered for the position of professor or associate professor. So it's no great wonder that we're seeing fewer and fewer of the "great works" in the style of the 1920s through 1970s. Today, with a few rare and pleasant exceptions, we see either very technical journal articles or books written in an overly popularized format like, say, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. It's hard to imagine something like Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy being written today.

And yet you mentioned that there are a few rare exceptions - what are they?

Well, for one I would mention Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment. That's a book of about 800 pages, and Israel has said that he could never have written it if he hadn't had tenure. Of course, if he had not had tenure, he could have published those same contents as 80 journal articles instead and gotten some kind of academic credit for that. But the overarching argument that runs through the book could never have been presented as coherently and convincingly in a bunch of journal articles as he was able to do in the book format. You have to have the argument in that form, running through 800 pages and applying itself to a wealth of phenomena and philosophers in order to understand its full magnitude and import. If Radical Enlightenment had been a series of journal articles, no one but specialists would have read and understood Israel's argument, which would have been a shame. And perhaps even the specialists wouldn't have been able to stitch together every piece of the argument, since most researchers don't sit down to read every article they can by a certain author. So maybe you'd have 80 different researchers, all fumbling around on the floor with a sliver of the argument each, and no one but Israel would ever have understood the full scope of the argument the way he did.

That's why I think it's just as important to write books as it is to write journal articles. I'm not saying one is better than the other; in an ideal world, I'd just like them to be placed on an equal footing when candidates are considered for promotion in the academic world.

I believe that the trend with focusing exclusively on peer-reviewed papers started in biochemistry or medicine or something like that. Naturally, if you're going to work with a certain molecule, it makes great sense that you can then look up a short paper that details a lot of objective properties about that molecule. So that's also the approach that philosophy has tried to emulate in the same spirit of being scientific, but I don't think it works very well in philosophy. For example, you might have a paper published on "Spinoza's View of Custom," where the author really drills down to tell you a lot of details about what Spinoza thought of custom. But in philosophy, things are just very different from how they are in the natural sciences. Where you might say that in biochemistry there's a bottom-up approach where processes are determined by their constituents, in philosophy (and in much of the humanities in general) it's rather a top-down approach where the constituents are determined by one's interpretation at the broadest level. So in the future, someone might come up with an interpretation of Spinoza that relegates custom to a completely different place in his philosophy and so that might shake up everything we thought we knew about "Spinoza's View of Custom" as well.

Let's return to the topic of personality tests. Almost everyone who knows you says that you have an unusually broad range of academic interests. But you've never heard of Jungian typology or the Big Five?

No. I guess I'm pretty skeptical about psychology. I'd say I have an anti-psychological stance.

Why do you think that is?

Well, some of my big heroes - Frege, Pierce, and Husserl - are really anti-psychological as well. They make some very cogent arguments for why psychological speculations don't tell you anything in the way of truth and how psychological interpretations of phenomena are not knowledge claims, but just a series of hypotheses that are all more or less unqualified.

That's not psychology, that's psychologism.

Psychologism, right. But a lot of licensed psychologists behave that way as well. I don't really take them seriously as intellectuals. Of course there are exceptions, but in the main, psychologists tend to lack critical thinking on the matters they theorize about. At one end of the spectrum, you have psychologists trying to pose as hard scientists: "Language is just a structure in the brain - I can tell since neurological scans reveal that certain areas of the brain flare up when people are solving linguistic puzzles." Oh, really? And how did you get from the observation that a certain brain region is active to making claims on the nature of language itself? That's just a dumbfounding leap of sloppy reasoning.

At the other end of the spectrum, psychologists also go wrong when they're striking the soft-science pose and trying to theorize about the actions and motivations of specific individuals. Psychologists will often get high on their own interpretation of someone's motives and completely forget that all they've offered is an unfounded - and ultimately unprovable - hypothesis. Again, they tend to lack critical insight and caution regarding the species of claims that they are making.

Or if they do have caution, it's the wrong kind of caution. Often it's just a vulgar form of solipsism where the stress is constantly placed on how something is "perceived" or "experienced," with the implication being that there's some kind of intrinsic value in one's personal perceptions, and not on how your perceptions should (at the conventional level) serve to inform you about something instead of just wallowing in themselves. "Look at me, look at me, I have perceptions!" That's something a toddler might be proud of.

Another reason might be to signify that they're open to the possibility that their own perception might be different from that of the other party, and that they want to communicate that they're receptive to a perspective that's unlike their own?

Right, but then you get the other blight of psychology, which is relativism: "There's no good or evil, right or wrong, better or worse; we're all just what we are; there's nothing wrong with anyone, and whatever people feel like, that's true for them." I can't stand that kind of thinking. If you take that kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, then there's nothing wrong with Osama bin Laden or Anders Breivik either - they probably had a bad childhood, and "society" probably didn't do enough to help them either. Psychology can be so cheesy sometimes!

Haha, that reminds me that I have a study of Osama bin Laden lying around that I need to finish up. I agree with you that relativism is an unfortunate, often unintended, consequence of the psychological approach, though it's hard to see how one could conduct serious psychological studies without withholding moral judgment, at least until the analysis was finished.

Yeah, so in that sense, psychology is kind of between a rock and a hard place: With the relativism, it's cheesy, and without the relativism, it doesn't get very far. That's one reason I'm suspicious of people who only study psychology and never evince an interest in linking their craft to a wider philosophical foundation. There's something dishonest about them in my eyes.

Haha, well, be that as it may, what you said ties nicely into the point that I wanted to end with, namely that your students say that you're unusually liberal when it comes to allowing insights from all kinds of subjects into the academic work that you're advising. Even though they might be submitting a thesis in philosophy, you encourage them to use insights from other fields, while their other professors actually discourage that.

I've always found that kind of thing depressing - specialists wanting to confine "what can be said" to neat little sandboxes where only certain arguments can be allowed in. Real knowledge isn't like that. In my work, I've always tried to break down those artificial constraints and connect observations from lots of different fields in order to come up with completely new insights and arguments (and you can see that in my publications too). That's also what I've tried to do with my students: At every turn of my career, I've tried to exploit my standing within the system to break down boundaries and conventional thinking. I want to be that kind of Viet Cong, guerilla academic who crosses lines and keeps things fresh.

Notes

  1. Previously in this series, the job as a university instructor has been defined as: "The lowest of the low among academic faculty; there's no job security and the salary is terrible."

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ENTP Career Interview #2 © Ryan Smith and IDR Labs International 2015.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and MBTI are trademarks of the MBTI Trust, Inc.

IDRLabs.com is an independent research venture, which has no affiliation with the MBTI Trust, Inc.

Cover image in the article commissioned for this publication from artist Georgios Magkakis.

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