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Show Chapter I. General Introduction to the Project: The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics 22 confront and face down the wrath and resistance of their elders in order to prevail. By finally rejecting the views of those whom they have studied and by whom they may have been mentored and protected in the beginning stages of their career, younger scholars will often provoke disapproval, rejection or punitive professional retaliation from those who feel betrayed by their defection. They may risk their professional survival, advancement, and the powerful professional networks that the authoritative support of their mentors has supplied. This is of course an exceedingly painful and intimidating prospect for all concerned, elders and prodigal sons8 alike. It is nevertheless necessary in order to advance the dialogue and ensure the intellectual health of the discipline. This requires that the egocentric urge to professional self-preservation at all costs be subordinated to the demands of transpersonal rationality. The elders will survive this defection with their stature intact - as did Russell, Moore, Quine and Popper; and eventually come to recognize their own example in that of their defectors. After all, they, too, were once defectors, and took the terrible risks of transpersonal rationality they now discourage their own disciples from taking. Thus those disciples need to demonstrate their respect for their elders, and the depth of their influence as role models, by similarly having the attachment and commitment to their own ideas, the energy and courage to probe their deepest implications, and a confidence in their value firm enough to impel them to this confrontation, despite the clear dangers to their professional self-interest. Otherwise these ideas become little more than disposable vehicles for promoting professional self-interest, of questionable value in themselves. One might argue that this brand of naive intellectual bravado is in mercifully short supply under the best and most professionally secure of circumstances. But nerve fails all the more quickly as the threat of professional extinction becomes more real; and this failure of intellectual nerve has by now so completely pervaded the field of philosophy that it has generated its own set of professional conventions - a virtual culture of genuflection, relative to which merely to embark on the confrontation with one's elders is a serious and sometimes fatal breach of etiquette. So, to take a few examples, when I was a junior faculty member, a very senior and very eminent colleague reprimanded my efforts to defend the position developed in this project by informing me that it was "not [my] place to have views." I lost the support of a leading senior philosopher, and thereby a peer-reviewed I use this expression advisedly, since those who survive the confrontation are overwhelmingly male. The field numbers approximately 10,000 members. At last count, women occupied eight percent, and African-American women .003 percent, of all tenured positions. The punishments inflicted for their philosophical insubordination are correspondingly more virulent. 8 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
