"So You Do Theory, Do You?"

Abstract

We have all seen it done, even if have not actually done it ourselves. I mean, of course, we who work higher education. And I am referring to advertising for ajob about which have not yet come to a departmental consensus. There are many ways of handling that deep dilemma, but surely most interesting is to prepare a sort of wish-list, to advertise your search for someone who is fact three people, or more, someone who can do any (and all) of things that anyone (and everyone) department wishes to see done. That way, you get a better sense of what's out there, and probably get some free assistance narrowing down your own search along way. One way to learn what it is that you really want is, after all, to see it embodied someone else, to see that person doing it. I noticed such an advertisement recently from a department of Religion with which I am well familiar. I telephoned a friend of mine to express my perplexity about advertisement, asking him what it meant, and what world they were really looking for. Basically, he told me, we're looking for someone who does Theory. Someone who does Theory, I mused, as though Theory (with a capital T, clearly) were something one did, rather than something one thought about, as though one needed a specialist to understand what counts as Theory these days (the capitals and quotes intended to make this precise point, I suspect). The more I thought about it, more perplexing my own thoughts became. In Andrew Bowie's latest book1-he has published extensively areas of post-Kantian Continental philosophy,2 focusing his attention especially on rich legacy of German Romantic thought, from Kant, through Jabobi and Fichte, to Schelling3-we find rich resources for mapping contemporary theoretical terrain, as well as a rich guidebook through some of that complex territory. One of real virtues of this book, and they are many, is that Bowie patiently walks us through rougher terrain, and simultaneously re-draws some of important trails and boundaries that have governed earlier exploration. is precisely because border between what is revealed by art and what is revealed by needs to be constantly renegotiated (p. 298), Bowie tells us, that he has taken up task of this most recent book. It comes as no real surprise that find ourselves wanting someone these days-whether a professional colleague, or an especially clear-thinking and clear-writing philosopher-to help explain some of nuances of contemporary Theory to us. Bowie's book performs that important service, and a great deal more. The book is an intellectual feast, spanning, as it does, nearly two hundred years of post-Kantian thinking about nature of truth a world that has grown uneasily aware of its own subjective and theoretical limitations. If Kantian critical managed to depict human consciousness painting itself into a corner, then two hundred years of speculation after Kant have been dominated by varying attempts to deal with that dilemma, to find a way out of room without tearing out a wall, or worse. Bowie calls this the crisis of reason (p. 28), and it is, like most significant crises, one with a long and complex history. As Qoheleth framed matter his curiously biblical version of Hellenistic speculative philosophy, God has put eternity [ha-olam] into human minds, yet has done so a way which ensures that have no access to it (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We do not, Preacher insists, because are dust [ha-adam], not divine, not privileged with access to divine beginning or divine end of things [me-rosh vad-soph]. We are trapped, as it were, trapped in middle. This can be read as one essential, if not essential, Romantic and hermeneutic insight, according to Bowie. In Schlegel's words, philosophy always begins middle, like an epic poem (p. …