Faculty Featurette
Brian Lisle

Initially I had proposed a dissertation project focusing on Hegel and Sartre, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which specific readings of Hegel’s philosophy gave rise to Sartre’s thesis in Being and Nothingness. I had wanted to drill down on the “problem of recognition” – as it’s sometimes called in contemporary philosophy – but didn’t want to focus on the ethical problems associated with that theme. I wanted to explore Sartre’s methodological innovations that arose from his interpretations of Heidegger and Husserl, with an anchor fastened onto the problem as it came out of Hegel. For years I had been obsessed with the writings of Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche, but when I encountered a professor at Loyola named Ardis Collins, I became more interested in reexamining Hegel. Professor Collins was just so darned good at analyzing those notoriously obscure arguments Hegel produces in the early 19^th century; and I had been previously well versed in Kant’s epistemology, so Dr. Collins’ classes radically opened my eyes to the immense influence of Hegel on 20^th century thinkers. Moreover, I had the great fortune of studying Heidegger with Adriaan Peperzak and Kant with Andrew Cutrofello. In the early 2000’s Loyola had some stellar faculty: Patricia Huntington’s Kierkegaard seminar was fabulous, and David Ingram’s courses were always stimulating (he studied with Marcuse at UCSD!). I am forever grateful to those folks for allowing me to pretend I could even hold my own in their presence; you know … there are those who can “do” philosophy and those who really are scholars, original thinkers in their own right. Those names I just mentioned are all in that latter category: original thinkers of the highest caliber! But, somehow, they’re all amazingly down-to-earth, humble, generous people, and I was just so fortunate to have been accepted into that Ph.D. program. I doubt I could have survived in a place where grad students are pitted against each other in competition for “favored student” status, due to the overblown self-importance of a department’s “leading scholars.” I’m sure you’ve heard such horror stories. Loyola Chicago was definitely the right fit for me.

But back to your question: the reason I ended up writing on McDowell was primarily due to the wise direction of my dissertation advisor—Andrew Cutrofello. He and I had been sparring back and forth for some time, and he was determined to talk me out of working on either Kant or Hegel, as the amount of relevant scholarship on both is truly massive. Dr. Cutrofello’s advice came down to a simple questions of pragmatics: “do you really want to spend 3 – 4 years just getting acquainted with what’s been written on those figures in the last 20 years? … it just isn’t feasible” [paraphrasing him, of course]. I honestly had very little interest in the contemporary thinkers who emerge out of a pragmatist interpretation of Hegel, figures like John McDowell and Robert Brandom. But with some persistence and a little existential arm twisting (“if you’re going to finish a dissertation it’s going to have to be a feasible project”), I agreed to take up McDowell’s text titled Mind and World. And then, miraculously, my initial interest in the methodological innovations of Sartre’s work seemed to fit quite neatly into the way Dr. Cutrofello was reading McDowell. To be embarrassingly honest, I would never have had the insight to understand McDowell’s work in that way had Dr. Cutrofello not shown it to me. In all seriousness, he saved my butt, and he was exceptionally generous with his time and support. When, in 2008, I finally defended the project, one of the professors on my committee said, “well Brian, it’s not the most amazing piece of literature I’ve read, but it does what a dissertation is supposed to do … congratulations Dr. Lisle.”

One significant change I’ve noticed is a positive one: the amount and quality of support for students has dramatically improved on our campus. I often find myself proselytizing to students about the career center, writing center, Auraria Library, counseling center, and, of course, THE BREWERY. But seriously, I get a bit defensive when I hear complaints that the Auraria campus feels “cold” or alienating to students. There are so many high-quality support systems around here that it makes me envious when I compare to what my campus was like as an undergrad. And I am just now discovering the wonders of the Salazar Wellness Center. It is a bit expensive for faculty and students, but the Center has some terrific fitness classes, and it is a clean, well-designed facility.

As to the changes in students, I find it difficult to generalize. However, one broad generalization I feel safe to make is within that common area of complaint voiced by so many educators these days: the deleterious effects of spending so much time on screens and living wholly digital lives. It seems that many of my current students have been cheated out of the basic, human experience of wonder. Because of the availability of powerful search engines and endlessly available websites with infinite content, students often get the false impression that they’ve “done research” on a topic. But in the humanities, there really is no shortcut for actually reading the text and struggling with it a bit. Many of my students seem perplexed if I say “yeah, I used to really bang my head against this text … it took me a very long time to feel comfortable with it.”

As you can probably imagine, I’m struggling mightily with the advent of such technology. Last summer I spent several hours reading articles in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and numerous articles forwarded to me by other educators. It quickly became clear to me that the general attitude is one of capitulation. We, as educators, either learn to integrate these tools into our teaching methods or we will be shunned as Luddites, holdouts from a bygone age who don’t understand the positive value of algorithmic data generation and “machine learning.” I’m convinced that there are some wonderous benefits of such technology, at least in areas such as medicine, engineering, data science, programming, linguistics, and the like, but in the humanities these technologies appear, for now at least, to function as convenient methods for skipping the real work. For example, I can’t imagine directing a student’s master’s thesis or dissertation these days. From my limited understanding of the way ChatGPT works, it is currently impossible to know if a student’s work is truly the result of their own efforts or a machine generated substitute.  

Some of my colleagues are currently doing work in an area called “transhumanism,” which, to me, seems like a thrilling mixture of science fiction and philosophy. As a committed Luddite, I feel the need to sound the alarm and run for the hills. One of my favorite authors is Henry David Thoreau, and in the spirit of Walden, I prefer to walk in the actual woods, dip my feet in the actual pond, breathe the actual air, and feel the joys of contemplation and human interaction in such natural environs. If I miss out on the virtual world because of my parochialism, then so be it. I seriously doubt that organic life will be improved if it’s transmogrified into digital form. Yuck!

But, yes, of course, you’re touching on a real issue. When I was studying French poststructuralism years ago, I was shocked by the claims of figures such as J. Baudrillard and F. Lyotard, who announced the advent of “virtual reality.” They feared we’d be living in a hologram-generated simulation of organic reality—the “simulacrum.” At the time I thought such worries were not much more than speculative fiction, or that the whole thing was a metaphor for the psychological effects of everyday alienation, which was understandable given the cold war politics of the 50’s – 70’s. Of course, for them, it was getting more and more difficult to distinguish real human relationships from politically motivated manipulations: everyone was easily perceived as a potential spy working for the enemy or for the authoritarian state. But now I must confess that I completely missed the point of that movement. It wasn’t a metaphor for the alienation coming from cold war propaganda. The notion of the “simulacrum” was to be taken literally. It is simply an early version of what became “cyberspace” and now the advent of “transhumanism.” I guess my biggest worry stems from the optimism of Silicon Valley and this current, relentless push to transform all social relationships into digital substitutes. Who really wants that, and to what end? Why don’t we emphasize a more earth-bound aesthetic, whereby we yank kids away from screens and get them hiking, exploring, climbing trees, and talking to each other face-to-face?
 

I can’t survive in a perpetual cycle of reading, writing, grading, and preparing for classes. On weekends, I desperately need to get “out of my head.” I prefer activities like hiking, biking, golfing, playing tennis or just walking dogs in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, our two “rescue dogs” rarely want to walk in the same direction. They’re lovely beasts, but my favorite way to “walk” them is to trick them into a light run, so they’ll stay “in sync” with each other. My greatest pleasure these days is when my two college-aged daughters drop in us, and we cook together or just lounge and catch up on their endeavors. I feel truly blessed when I’m with them, as they’ve grown into such complex, interesting young adults.