Philosophy is meant to matter. It can matter in many ways; even the most abstract or technical philosophy has the potential to inform our overall knowledge, influence other fields, or trickle down to daily life. But philosophy matters most when in some sense it is public. After all, philosophy names the search for wisdom. While professional philosophers may have formal training or academic posts, their search belongs to us all.
At its best, public philosophy is two-sided: at once philosophy for the public and philosophy of the public. It involves a set of intellectual practices—reading, writing, thinking, speaking—that have, as both their form and their end, public-facing critical reflection on identifying, pursuing, and achieving common goods in and for our common life. This is why philosophy knows no disciplinary bounds; why its practitioners treat it as the cornerstone, or crown, of every domain of knowledge.
Our own public life is not devoid of philosophy, though you might expect it to be based on comparisons with continental Europe or stereotypes of American culture. Think for a moment about major public intellectuals from the last three or four decades, figures who have intervened directly in prominent outlets or whose ideas have defined debates about religion, politics, ethics, and civic order. A bounty of names comes to mind: John Rawls and Alasdair MacIntyre, Noam Chomsky and Charles Taylor, Francis Fukuyama and Martha Nussbaum, Michael Walzer and Cornel West, Jeffrey Stout and Judith Butler. The list could be expanded—across one ocean or another, one thinks of Peter Singer, Roger Scruton, and John Gray—but even this short list is instructive. Anglophone philosophers to a person, none of them is scribbling in a corner. Their voices are not limited to the seminar room. They have been thinking out loud about what matters most for a long time, and many in our society have taken notice. The conversation that constitutes our common life, about what makes it good and what might make it better, would not be the same in their absence.
There is someone else who deserves to be on this list. He passed away in 2023 at the age of 85. His work exemplifies the vocation of the public philosopher. What he lacks in name recognition he makes up for in temperament, sincerity, intelligence, and depth of concern. He wrote about everything, most of all what it means to live well in a technological society. He was not a culture warrior. He made no grand pronouncements, much less declarations of war. He was a scholar’s scholar who nevertheless wrote widely and accessibly for the sake of the public—a public whose common good he understood philosophy to serve. His name was Albert Borgmann.
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Borgmann was born in Freiburg in 1937. He lived there through college, beginning his undergraduate studies at the University of Freiburg but completing them at the University of Texas. Apart from a few years in Munich in the 1960s, where he received his PhD in philosophy, he spent his entire adult life in the United States. In the preface to his 2006 book Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country, he writes:
I first came here in September of 1958. I had worked my way over as a dishwasher on the passenger ship Arosa Sky. We steamed into New York Harbor. I saw the Statue of Liberty. Someone met me at the dock and took me to the trailways depot to put me on a bus to Austin, Texas. Did I want a return ticket, valid for a year? I said yes. The man at the window began to write the ticket. I thought about it and said to my guide: No, one way. She said to the ticket writer: He changed his mind. Had I not, I would not have met Nancy; we would not have three daughters now and six grandchildren.
In 1970 the young Borgmann family moved to Missoula, Montana, where they lived for the following five decades. A naturalized citizen, Borgmann taught at the University of Montana for the whole of his career, becoming Regents Professor in 1996. His wife Nancy passed away in 2009, and, fourteen years later, Albert joined her, leaving behind more than a half century of prodigious scholarship.
Before he died, Borgmann completed his final book manuscript, the seventh of his career. (More on that in a moment.) Since 1977 Borgmann averaged about one book every seven years, in addition to hundreds of articles. The book that made his name came in 1984. Titled Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry, it became a touchstone of writing on technology alongside works by Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, and Ivan Illich. Heidegger looms large in Borgmann’s early thought, though not so large as to crowd out clarity or originality.
Two other books are worth mentioning before expanding on Borgmann’s project. The first is Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992), a brilliant meditation on postmodernism’s transformation by technology into the “hyperreality” of “hypermodernism” and the consequent need for a path forward. He called what lies beyond “postmodern realism,” which he defined as “an orientation that accepts the lessons of the postmodernist critique and resolves the ambiguities of the postmodern condition in an attitude of patient vigor for a common order centered on communal celebration. What can invigorate the attitude and provide a center for celebration is reality.”
Borgmann’s animating concerns might be summed up in that one final word: reality. Variations on the term appear in more than one of his book titles. For Borgmann, reality is not only what is real, as opposed to what is artificial or fictional. Reality is what is given. Hence, by its nature, it is common, shared, public. As he observes:
How can anyone hope to set down ethics for so large and populous a country as the United States? Well, you have to remember that the great philosophers of the modern era meant to define ethical principles not just for this continent and our time but for all times and all places. Such universal principles, however, have got to be thin or false. An ethics that matters must have a more definite compass. How narrow should it be? Somewhere, presumably, in between the universe and Missoula, Montana.
I quote at length to give readers unfamiliar with Borgmann a sense of his style, his voice on the page. It is calm, unhurried, wry, and disarmingly lucid. Even at his most critical, he doesn’t lapse into screeds; his fingers are never shaking over the keyboard. At any rate, Crossing the Postmodern Divide—in truth, Borgmann’s whole oeuvre—belongs alongside other canonical attempts to think with and after modernity: MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Taylor’s A Secular Age, Stout’s Democracy and Tradition, Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, and John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory.
A final book worth noting came in 2003: Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology. Borgmann was always interested in religion, but this book put that concern at the center. Borgmann could be difficult to place on the religious map. He often reads like an old-school member of the liberal mainline, but in mid-career he began to write more openly about his Roman Catholicism (though his pronouns rarely move from the third person plural to the first). To be sure, his use of Christianity is more than instrumental, but it’s not always clear where he sees his primary membership: with fellow believers or fellow Americans.
In any case, divine presence enters the scene because human need cries out for it. The malaise of modern women and men—“stricken,” as he writes, “with a subclinical malady of doubt and sometimes despair”—lies beneath the surface of technological society. Above the surface, we see “liberty and prosperity,” but these hide “a sense of captivity and deprivation.” Perhaps, Borgmann reasons, the waning of faith is superficial. Once our condition is better understood, “there will be good news again.” For this reason, “Making room for Christianity is in fact the most promising response to technology. We should neither try to demolish technology nor run away from it. We can restrain it and must redeem it.”
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Whatever the state of his faith, Borgmann was above all a democrat. He believed in the ideal and the practice of ordinary citizens coming together to adjudicate their common life. Yet he knew the ideal is often unrealized in practice; or rather, he knew that the practice will never flourish if it’s held to an inhuman and therefore impossible ideal. Here’s a representative swipe against the proceduralism of Rawls and Habermas:
The champions of good procedure post guards at the doors of city hall to prevent undemocratic types from entering. Inside, the tables and chairs have been arranged to achieve an order of equality and openness. But no one, in fact, enters, sits down, and begins to converse. The concern with the antecedent conditions of a participatory democracy or an ideal speech situation is an attempt at so controlling the common setting that genuinely democratic transactions and results can be predicted safely. But the preparatory efforts forever get in the way of what they try to make room for.
At the same time, while Borgmann may have been a critic of liberalism, he argued that “it should be corrected and completed rather than abandoned.” In this he reads as a less polemical Christopher Lasch or Wendell Berry, fellow democrats whose political vision—consisting among other things of family, fidelity, fortitude, piety, honor, honest work, local community, neighborliness, and thrift—is likewise invested in preserving and respecting reality. Such a vision is simultaneously homeless on the national stage and the richest fruit of the American political tradition.
One of Borgmann’s central ideas is what he called a “focal” thing or practice. Here’s his definition:
Focal things and practices are the crucial counterforces to technology understood as a form of culture. They contrast with technology without denying it, and they provide a standpoint for a principled and fruitful reform of technology. Generally, a focal thing is concrete and of commanding presence. A focal practice is the decided, regular, and normally communal devotion to a focal thing.
To illustrate the point, Borgmann contrasts a musical instrument with the stereo. (Turning always to material culture was one of Borgmann’s greatest strengths as a philosopher and critic, one not all of his peers share with him.) The result of the stereo’s dominance, to say nothing of Apple and Spotify, is that “music has become a disembodied, free-floating something, a commodity that is instantly, ubiquitously, and easily available.” In sum:
Music has been mechanized and commodified. These two processes are really one. Music can become available as a cultural commodity only if there is a sophisticated and reliable machinery that will produce it at the consumer’s will. I have called the conjunction of machinery and commodity a technological device. The stereo as a device contrasts with the instrument as a thing. A thing, in the sense in which I want to use the term, has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement. A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption…. Things constitute commanding reality, devices procure disposable reality.
On Borgmann’s view, modern technology composes not an aspect or subset of society, but a culture as such. It is our culture. Its paradigm is the device, whose increasingly hidden machinery delivers to us some discrete good with greater efficiency or convenience, but minus the whole social penumbra that focal things generate and sustain. Focal practices have a hearth at the center, a fire or table or kitchen island at the heart of a household around which family and friends and neighbors gather for meals, for music, for spontaneous play, for special celebration.
“The great meal of the day,” writes Borgmann, “is a focal event par excellence.” In a culture whose “normal condition” is “technological eating” it lies “within our power to clear a central space amid the clutter and distraction. We can begin with the simplicity of a meal that has a beginning, a middle, and an end and that breaks through the superficiality of convenience food in the simple steps of beginning with raw ingredients, preparing and transforming them, and bringing them to the table. In this way,” he concludes, “we can again become freeholders of our culture.”
This, in a word, is the spirit and the aim of Borgmann’s philosophy: to discover how all of us, together, can become freeholders of a culture that we might reasonably and gratefully call “ours.” To do so, even to attempt to do so, is just another name for the good life.
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The title of Borgmann’s final book is Moral Cosmology: On Being in the World Fully and Well. As the subtitle shows, it is a legible outgrowth of his lifelong concerns, but it is distinct in more than one way. Not counting endnotes or a long appendix mostly made of math equations, it comes to about 70 pages total. More than half is the opening programmatic and deeply philosophical chapter; much of the rest dabbles in relativity and quantum mechanics. On the whole, the book is a sketch, a gesture, a question posed for others to answer. That he believed an answer could be offered is clear. But he was less clear about the substance and specifics of the answer, almost as if he were setting an agenda for a successor to take up.
Moral cosmology is a feature of every traditional or premodern society. The truth about the world is inseparable from, intimate with, and mutually informed by the truth about human life. Humanity’s place in the cosmos is at one with humanity’s source and end. “The European Enlightenment,” however, “divided moral cosmology into physics and ethics. Physics tells us what is, ethics what we ought to do.” The two amount, as in Stephen Jay Gould’s proposal, to non-overlapping magisteria. What once was joined has been put asunder.
The result is social disorientation and moral confusion. It is a given for Borgmann that humans quite simply cannot live well if they cannot live fully in the world. To do either requires a moral cosmology that truly—no useful myths or noble lies here—locates human beings in the world as it is without divorcing that knowledge from ethics. As he puts it, this “leaves us with the task of discovering a cosmic moral center that is compatible with physics to be sure, but also enables us to be in the world fully and well.” In short, the task entails a “search for one world,” not two; “our only world,” in Wendell Berry’s phrase.
The book that results is both a minor tour de force and, if I may say so, rather undercooked. Where Borgmann is good, he’s great. His narration of the severing of physics from ethics, the consequences for social life, the rise of industrialism, and the lessons we still have to learn from the Romantics is exquisite. His facility with quantum physics, his ability to render it in plain English, and his resolve to interweave it with social history and public philosophy is masterly. For example, in one place he writes that “when ethics is severed from physics, truth goes with physics, and ethics is left with arbitrariness or at best with mere personal preference. On that assumption a moral cosmology can never be more than the best current physics (having the best claim on truth), embroidered with moral predilections.” That’s a damning indictment. Or consider his overarching diagnosis:
We lack a moral cosmology and seem to be unable to master the inevitable first step toward a comprehending and comprehensive cosmology, that is, to grasp the incisive and rigorous cosmology that modern physics has uncovered. Yet we are reluctant to give up on what used to anchor moral cosmology. We are suffering from an incurable nostalgia for a centered, animated, and storied world. To call something nostalgic these days is to dismiss it as lacking in vigor and relevance. That’s how social theorists use the term. To ordinary folks, nostalgia feels like a subliminal ailment.
This ailment “seems to cripple us when we’re challenged to appropriate conceptually, if not also mathematically, contemporary astrophysics. If we can’t cure our nostalgia,” in other words, “and get at least a rudimentary conceptual and mathematical grip on the cosmology of astrophysics, there is no prospect of a moral cosmology. There is of course,” he adds, “no sense in trying to find one if physics and ethics are disjoint and knowledge of the cosmos has no moral point.”
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Moral Cosmology is Borgmann’s venture that the cosmos does have a moral point, and that in fact the non-pointlessness of the universe and of our lives therein is so primordial in our mundane activities—math and science included—that it’s not even up for debate. In the book’s final pages, Borgmann asks the question that he explored for fifty years: “What is the good life in a technological society?” He then writes, “The premise of this book is of course that a moral cosmology is needed for a satisfactory answer. If the premise is warranted, we should find reflections of physics in the ordinary experience of the world. Since physics is written in the language of mathematics, we find physics in ordinary cosmology wherever we find mathematics.”
Not every reader will share Borgmann’s premise; more than a few would prefer it demonstrated, not assumed. (Here I would point to philosopher Robert Koons’ recent book Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete?, a defense not only of Aristotelian philosophy of nature but of its consonance with quantum theory.) More interesting, I think, is Borgmann’s willingness to bite the bullet: Ethics after Einstein, as he might put it, must be ethics fit for humans who inhabit a world accurately described by general and special relativity and quantum mechanics. Accordingly, he outlines such an ethics “at home” in a such a world, based on a rough but ready knowledge of contemporary physics.
If Borgmann hoped to accomplish a kind of marital reunion or vow renewal for long-separated partners, then I can’t say he succeeded—or at least, the success is so minimal as to cause this reader to wonder what the point is. An ethics merely compatible with physics or at most compelled into awe by it seems a far cry from a full-blown moral cosmology (compare this, for instance, with the opening chapters of Genesis). And if focal practices provide the necessary lens for life at human scale, balanced between the equally inconceivable subatomic and cosmic scales, then one wonders again whether ordinary people require a cosmology that takes into account anything at all actually taught by physicists. Something like folk cosmology that accepts, without grasping, the marvels of satellites and GPS and ChatGPT and the Hubble telescope seems adequate.
Borgmann ends with gratitude, and rightly so. But gratitude to what and for what? For the wonder of human life, surely. To what, he doesn’t say. Skeptical readers may wonder if religion has been smuggled in at some point. But elsewhere Borgmann is quite clear: “we need to lower the wall between church and state.” For to leave it intact “is to reduce the force of religion in everyday life to an often ineffective overlay of moral exhortation. Meanwhile the material culture on the secular side of the barrier is left to the commandments and blessings of the device paradigm.” It seems that moral cosmology requires a deity to be grateful to, a creator whose love, in Dante’s words, “moves the sun and the other stars.” That’s a world fit for humans.
At the very least, this is the unspoken answer left for us by Borgmann. One of our great philosophers, he saw clearly that we cannot have the good life without one another, without the world around us, or without God. Lacking any of them, human reality is lost. Yet even in a technological age, Borgmann believed we can still have what is real, if only we’d extend our hands—not to take it, but to receive it. The secret of reality is that it’s a gift.