How to Do Things with Philosophy

As I began to read Nancy Bauer's book, my first thought was: is this philosophy? By that I didn't mean: how does this thing deserve the honorific “philosophy”? Instead I meant: could philosophy, a thing I love but whose instantiations often fill me with boredom and despair, be like this thing, these essays crafted with ethical sensitivity, and wit, and attention to the things that philosophy by its nature (we often think) must obscure—the particular, the contingent, the actuality of the world as it is, to us, here and now? How could a philosopher speak with such ease about sexual fetishes and hookup culture and the creative genius of Lady Gaga? And not just with ease but without any air of the worldly alienation that philosophers, perhaps in an attempt to police the boundaries of their own intellectual purity, often evince when they attempt to talk about the world as it is for ordinary people? I had a similar experience during my first encounter with Bauer's work, when I read her piece “Pornutopia” in one of the early issues of the Brooklyn‐based literary magazine n+1. That piece is reprinted here as the first chapter of Bauer's book. The essay is a provocative call for us to grapple with the phenomenology of pornography, what it means and what it gives to the people it turns on. It is keenly argued and keenly felt, with none of the embarassed distance that, as I have already said, often characterizes philosophical writing. It was first published in n+1 in the winter of 2007, when I was a senior in college. I had just decided to go to Oxford to do graduate work in philosophy. Meanwhile, some of my fellow students were moving to New York to become writers and critics; many would end up working at and writing for n+1. Watching them across the ocean from England for the next several years, I sometimes felt envy. Here I was, writing tutorial essays on the metaphysics of causation and brains‐in‐vats, and there they were, writing about American hegemony, an unfolding economic crisis, and what it might mean to be political for my generation. I consoled myself with the thought that i f I was going to have something worth saying to the wider world outside analytic philosophy, then it was important to learn how to think more carefully and rigorously, for which philosophical training was especially useful. I still believe this to be true. But at times, I feared that being a philosopher and being a public thinker were simply two different things, involving two different and incompatible orientations toward the world, and that for better or worse, I had made my bed in the academy and now had to lie in it. But Bauer's early n+1 piece, and indeed all her work, shows that this dichotomy is a false one. Or rather that it's a dichotomy that, while perhaps all too real given the way philosophy is currently practised, need not be real, with a reorientation of philosophy toward the world. Bauer's book is about many things—most obviously, feminist debates about pornography, what Austin was really up to in How to Do Things with Words, and how the former misconstrues the latter. But most of all, Bauer's book is about how we might do philosophy, and what philosophy might be. In particular, it offers a vision of how