"Now philosophy is primarily a “job.” When they are done with it, philosophers don’t take it home with them; they leave philosophy at the office, behind locked doors"

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1166&fulltext=1

Philosophy as an Art of Living by Costica Bradatan

November 14th, 2012



All things considered, we should not lose sight of the fact that what I’ve described above is only one way of conceiving the relation between a philosopher’s work and her life. While predominant among the ancient philosophers, as well as among some modern ones (Montaigne and Nietzsche, for example), the understanding of philosophy as an “art of living” is far from characterizing mainstream academic philosophy in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Now philosophy is primarily a “job.” When they are done with it, philosophers don’t take it home with them; they leave philosophy at the office, behind locked doors. The work they produce, outstanding as it may be, is not supposed to change their lives. Today philosophical conversions are regarded with suspicion and strongly discouraged; if they do happen, they tend to be dismissed. The philosopher’s work, on the one hand, and her biography, on the other, are not to be confounded; they belong to two different worlds.