wunderbar!
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Philosophy in the Popular Imagination
(Andrew Taggart is philosophical about a widespread misperception of philosophy.)
In my life nothing good has ever come of the “What do you do?”
question. Once off my lips, the line “I work on moral philosophy, on
ethics,” can lead in only one of two directions. Either my acquaintance,
unschooled in philosophy, will be almost preternaturally interested in
what I have to say – as if she’s happened upon some sublime creature
only thought to exist on blanched parchment – or she’ll be absolutely
dumbstruck by the stupidity of a life well wasted. Although it could go
either way, let’s suppose she’s alighted on the latter path.
“Philosophy… It doesn’t get you anywhere,” she replies, reveling in a
truth that she believes is as certain as the claim that night follows
day. And I’ve yet to come up with a truly satisfying rejoinder, probably
because there’s no such thing. Try a joke, you think? “Oh, I don’t
know, it certainly gets you into debt.” Or a plea for clarification? “I
suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘get you anywhere’.”
The truth is that neither response will do. For if my conversational
partner already thinks philosophy a waste of time, perhaps through
having a mistaken conception of philosophy, then she probably (as my
former English landlady was fond of saying) “can’t be bothered” to
listen to a full rebuttal, and she won’t brook a sharp counterexample
either. Like so many others, she’s already made up her mind – or, better
put, her mind has already been made up for her.
To do philosophy in the public sphere today is to be immediately put
on the defensive, and in most cases, to stand in the wrong. And yet, how
we got to this point where philosophy has been put on all fours –
either
fetishized as being beyond the real world or
vilified
for playing no part in it – still needs to be explained. A first modest
step would be to get straight in our minds how many lay people conceive
of philosophy, and why this (mis)conception should matter to those of
us who believe, somewhat antiquely, in the life of the mind.
One place to begin is with my interlocutor’s saying that when
philosophers discuss something, they never get anywhere. She could mean
one of three things by this: first, that philosophers get mired in
endless debate, never yielding anything in the way of concrete
resolution; or second, that they continually make something out of
nothing, causing all parties involved to be brought to a state of mental
confusion due to the endless jostling over definitions and the petty
squabbling over overnice distinctions; or third, that in the game of
philosophy there’s no way to resolve who’s right and who’s wrong. These
three doubts, collectively or individually, present considerable
challenges to philosophy’s basic self-conception. The first doubt would
have it that there can be
no authoritative conclusions drawn from a set of competing claims; the second that
no mental tranquility can be gained; and the third that there can be
no certain judgments concerning winners and losers in the truth game.
Rather than respond to each of the doubts in turn, it occurs to me
that it would be wiser to ask what assumptions lie behind my
interlocutor’s worries. I suspect that she deeply feels the
culturally-widespread loss of faith in the power of reason to help us
understand ourselves and our world. She needn’t be a relativist or a
deep skeptic to believe this. She may simply believe, for instance, that
some combination of emotions, instincts, past experiences, hunches,
friends’ advice and expectations, is better than reason at determining
how we should act. Against this attitude the philosopher’s belief that
reason has its own power to help (as well as its own inherent
limitations) requires a profound attitudinal shift: humility must be
cultivated where there was once impatience. The light of reason can only
shine after we’ve discovered how to quiet our minds and distance
ourselves from our ‘empirical selves’ – the chaos of our everyday
experience. There’s a long education – an itinerary of sorts – which
ultimately leads to this state of mind: a path that the uninitiated
hasn’t known or hasn’t taken, and in consequence, can’t find value in.
My interlocutor might concede that if philosophy has any value, it’s
philosophy in the sense that everyone has their own personal philosophy.
A personal philosophy, she might suggest, is a fundamental set of
beliefs that one lives by. Think of a book subtitle like ‘The Personal
Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women’. In this sense of the word,
we’d be justified in saying that a coach has her own coaching
philosophy, a company its corporate philosophy, a party its governing
philosophy, etc.
I’m not so sure that the notion of personal philosophy gets us very far in vindicating philosophy
per se,
for three reasons. One is that it’s not clear to me how far anyone
espousing a personal philosophy is really committed to that set of
beliefs. How do we know that he lives his life so that it lines up with
his own ‘philosophy’, or that when the sea looks stormy, he won’t jump
ship? How far his beliefs line up with his actions has yet to be
demonstrated. Another reason is that we would need to know whether his
personal philosophy is
worth standing by. Merely saying “This I
believe!” can’t be the end point of any probing inquiry, but must
instead be a starting point. And the last reason, already more than
hinted at, is that, whatever it is, philosophy must be more than a
doctrine, it must be a certain
style of thought – a way of
examining one’s life with the goal of determining whether the life I’m
leading amounts to anything good, for example. But when someone
expresses their personal philosophy, the question of why it’s a good
thing to have a personal philosophy still remains unasked, as if it were
enough just to
have one. So personal philosophies are frequently unphilosophical in nature.
“All right. But if you’re going to dismiss talk of personal
philosophy as hopelessly ‘unphilosophical’, you’ll have to come round to
agreeing with me that philosophy is otherwise useless,” my
non-philosophical friend might (philosophically) argue. “After all, the
philosophy
you’re talking about has no bearing on the real
world. It’s mostly an academic pursuit full of puzzles, word games, and
the kind of thing that’s done in universities. It’s up in the clouds,
not down-to-earth, and nowhere else useful, either.”
“You’re right, contemporary professional philosophy has, in general,
become unhinged from the concerns common to all of us,” I might reply.
“And, yes, the worst of it has degenerated into logical puzzles and the
search for ingenious counterexamples and knock-down arguments to
theories no-one else is interested in. But, beyond these worries, I can
hear in your voice the most potent criticism – that philosophy is
worthless on the grounds that acting is more important than thinking.
‘Getting things done,’ you imply, should be ranked much higher than
‘pie-in-the-sky reasoning’.”
Suppose for a moment that my interlocutor is right. But then, aren’t there times when we don’t know
how
to act – as well as times when we’re completely at a loss concerning
how to go on, or how we got to where we are – a place where we’d prefer
not to be? Times when we’re in a crisis over which we seem to have no
control? Times when our lives no longer seem to make any sense? At such
times, wouldn’t it be wise for us to try to
think our way through
the situation, in order to come to some more complete understanding of
ourselves and of our place in the order of things? It’s at such tragic
moments that the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s questions
concerning what we care
most about and what (and who) is
worthy
of our care might ring in our ears. At its best, philosophy asks us to
be meticulously honest with ourselves. It impels us to look closely at
the hand we’ve been dealt, to determine the extent to which we’ve helped
or harmed others, to figure out what ultimately matters to us, and to
assess how we’ve lived, in the most fundamental terms we can understand.
Were my questioner then to ask, “Why philosophy
now?” my
reply would be that we’re living through a historical period marked by
great change. The institutions that make up the modern world – education
and medicine, family and religion, home and work, among others – as
well as the spheres of influence that define our existence – the
economy, civil society, the state – are changing dramatically, resulting
in new experiments in living being tried out. Some will get replicated
and others will be ruled out. Insofar as our time has raised fundamental
questions about the nature of our existence (what, for instance, is
work? What is
meaningful work? What is family? What is
justice?), philosophy has returned in the form of a life-need – an
activity that, although not fully understood, nor resounding with
authority in the public imagination, is more than ever of vital
importance. And yet philosophy is vital only if its conclusions are
embodied, lived out in practice – that is to say, only so long as
they’re taken in, sat with, mulled over, and integrated into our being.
In this light, what people should find attractive about the
philosophical life is a vision of an integrated soul – a person whose
fundamental cares and concerns are integrated into a meaningful whole.
And if, at this late stage, she were to scoff at this seeming
self-importance, I might offer the thought that one of the things I’ve
learned is not to take myself too seriously. Jane Austen taught me that,
along with my myriad failures. Other things I’m still learning include
the art of speaking truthfully without bullying or boring; that of being
honest without baring all to all; of being accurate without being
self-righteous: also, how to be grateful when corrected, open-minded
while committed, and, above all, how to love the small things, the grace
of them all, and, not least, the sheer fact of my existence.
Reason, it turns out, is neither omnipotent nor impotent in matters
of the head and heart. Philosophical wisdom is neither so rare as to be
entirely extinct from the world we inhabit, nor so common as to be
easily purchasable in the marketplace. Yet thanks to a mature
recognition that things
aren’t as they
ought to be,
philosophical self-examination will continue to have a reason for being,
because it promises to ultimately bring us peace of mind about the
things that matter most.
© Andrew Taggart 2014
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