Everyone knows that Plato founded a school. This is to say, philosophy has never not been tied to some institution. It is said that Plato’s world was a society of friends, but also that it was a society of rivals. Yet, it seems too simple to say that it was a society of rivals because it was a society of friends. Rivals are not necessarily friends (and vice versa), but as the great rivalries show, they are always representatives of conflicting schools of thought. Sherlock Holmes’s moralism against Moriarty’s amoralism… Rivalries emerge between schools only, like in those classic Kung-Fu movies, stories about offenses and challenges, loyalty and justice. Philosophy is a little bit like that.
If Plato’s world was a philosophical world, it is because it was a time where many schools of thought were founded. In that sense, while philosophy has never not been tied to some institution, it hasn’t ever only been tied to a single institution either. The more the merrier. You need at least two institutions, two schools – the eternal battle between the Academics and the Peripathetics –, to stage a fight. But two’s not yet a party, so you’ve got the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Neoplatonists throwing in their cards, institutions growing like mushrooms. It seems thought grows comfortable with silos of thought, on condition that goal is to break this or that water-jug. Within individual institutions, there can be no rivalry; before anything, a school is a community of friends. If you want to do your own thing, you better go and found your own school, like Plotinus. Everybody’s gonna be better off.
In that sense, the first danger for philosophy was always a reduction of the number of institutions, centralisation, organisation, turning the fateful rivalry into mere competition between bureaucrats on the hunt for the better position. Philosophy does best when the spheres are multitudinous. But you also need, to occupy the tip of an institution, a wise and trustworthy master, serving as a guide (and even Nietzsche, as much as he resisted, became one). The second danger for philosophy is therefore an abstraction of this master-function, being at the mercy of nameless powers. The universities became unable to produce schools of thought once they were integrated into a larger and singular institution. Less than the representatives of schools, philosophers are now competitors on the market, where ideas promote themselves to get funding. To found an institution, you need sponsors, investors hoping to get a cut from the surplus value of knowledge. Success is measured by the spillage of ink, endless counter-quoting, weaving the global network, hoping to stay relevant while the faculty’s money is running out.
That ideas have been commodified is not a new idea, but philosophy has not yet found an appropriate reaction to it. If thought is to be a thing to be exchanged, then, here, is a whole spurious characterization of the activity of the philosopher. But let’s assume it nevertheless. With that assumed, if universities are meant to prepare one for a career, they need to become commensurate between each other, yet this is anathema for any real rivalisation. Still, it would be preposterous of philosophy to ask to be the exception of the rule, to be permitted to keep staging its endless clashes. If there was a task for philosophy today, it’d be to rethink the institution itself and not just for itself, as all the other institutions are serving the very same master; to invent institutions, in which we can be friends again – and only serve the masters of our own choosing.