by Joe Miller
My graduation card from my undergraduate advisors joked that it wasn’t too late to change my major.
As the second-most-quotable Homer once observed, “It’s funny because it’s true.” At various points, I planned to major in political science, chemistry, law, economics, physics, history and literature.
The second semester of my junior year I discovered that you could stick the words “philosophy of” in front of just about any noun and you’d find someone doing serious academic work about it.
So, I did that until I ran out of degrees to earn.
Growing up, I was forever reorganizing my bookshelves. I want my books grouped in a systematic way. The trouble is that there are way too many potential systems.
Consider John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the subject of my PhD work. I can shelve it with the rest of Mill’s collected works. But it also belongs beside foundational texts in the history of liberalism, like John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.
It’s also an important book in contemporary discussions of liberalism, so maybe it belongs with John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia.
On Liberty is also part of a tradition of moral theory called utilitarianism, so maybe I should shelve it with other utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer. Mill’s utilitarianism is fairly unique, though, so maybe I should place it with other heterodox utilitarians like David Hume or G.E. Moore.
Or I could just shelve them all by color.
Now multiply all these possible arrangements by hundreds of books across a crazy range of topics and, well, it’s a lot of possible combinations.
A few years ago, I came across a little book titled Intertwingled, which contains essays discussing Ted Nelson’s pioneering work on hypertext.
Intertwingularity is Nelson’s term for describing the fundamental interconnectedness of knowledge.
Nelson argues that every piece of knowledge is deeply interconnected with lots of other knowledge—so much so any attempt to impose categories on knowledge is ultimately “forced and artificial.”
Humans, Nelson says, keep trying to impose structure where none exists.
I think Nelson is basically right. Knowledge doesn’t fit into tidy little buckets. Academic disciplines and classification schemes are arbitrary. Edge cases proliferate.
Is Ted Lasso a workplace comedy or a sports drama? It’s both! Sometimes it’s also a workplace drama and a sports comedy.
Most things defy easy categorization, at least once you start really pushing.
I’m fascinated by all those interconnections. A central thesis of my book (to the extent that it has a single thesis) is that ideas live in the spaces in between texts.
We generate new knowledge when we find novel ways in which things are intertwingled.
I default to looking for the connections between ideas. My columns mostly work this way. They start with something concrete (a TV show, a book, an anecdote) and gradually abstract away to some general principle, then apply that principle to something else.
This one is doing that right now.
Making connections is a useful skill for some very specific tasks.
I had a reputation as a tough grader, and yet I won teaching awards and received outstanding student evaluations. Students liked that I could link difficult philosophical concepts (like Descartes’ evil deceiver argument for skepticism) to more accessible ideas (like the machines hooking humans to pods in The Matrix).
It also makes me very good at my job as an information architect, where a large part of the job is sifting through huge bodies of technical material and linking them together so that people can find what they need, even when they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.
But seeing the world as a set of connections has its limits, too.
I was a good philosophy teacher but a fairly undistinguished philosophy researcher. The profession rewards thinkers who focus narrowly but deeply. In my five years as a full-time professor, I published 10 academic papers covering seven different topics.
John Rawls, by contrast, had a total of two ideas and he spent 52 years developing and refining them. He’s widely considered the most important political philosopher of the 20th century.
Rejecting disciplinary boundaries has led me to four different professions (academic, journalist, communications director, information architect) in the 21st century alone.
A charitable reader of my career and my intellectual interests might describe them as “eclectic.” I often worry whether “dilettante” is a better description.
Ultimately, though, I left academia because I worried that it had over-indexed on the Rawlsian approach to thinking.
For starters, not many people have the luxury (or, frankly, the desire) to spend 52 years unpacking all the nuances involved in arriving at justice as fairness through a process of reflective equilibrium.
More generally, though, anyone who has seen Billie Eilish comment on politics or looked at Elon Musk’s Twitter feed is familiar with the experience of seeing someone with paradigm-shifting expertise in one sector make comically ill-informed pronouncements about issues outside their area of expertise.
There’s value in understanding a topic well enough to grasp its most important implications and its fundamental challenges and then explain how those things relate to the most important implications and fundamental challenges of an entirely different topic.
It’s a form of translation across domains of expertise.
In the best cases, that translation can help experts find solutions from different fields.
In the worst case, it can make for an interesting newspaper column here and there.
