I'm getting used to the blank stares. Occasionally I'll get a timorous "Well . . . that's nice, isn't it?" Either of these I can deal with, but the disapproving chuckles are just the worst.
These are examples of how people generally react when they're told that I'm going to school to become a philosopher. If Democritus was the "laughing philosopher," I sometimes feel like the "laughed-at philosopher." But I take it in stride. :-)
It's not hard to understand disbelief and disapproval in this age of communally enforced materialism. I challenge you, for example, to find among the job listings for Fortune 500 firms any entry-level openings for fresh-faced philosophers. (Did you notice that snazzy alliteration? It was intentional.) If you propose to graduate with a degree in philosophy, it is commonly assumed that your ultimate design is to (a) follow up with law school, or (b) become a professor. While I do plan to pursue a career in academia (Shakespeare got to get paid, son), it is actually for neither of these reasons that I spend a great deal of my free time poring over tracts and treatises which too frequently enter the mind with the same difficulty that two scoops of concrete in a waffle cone might enter the stomach.
I dig philosophy simply because I am pathologically interested in the mind, the Universe, and the relationship between the two, as well as the relationship between one mind and another. I don't necessarily philosophize toward a given end; I do it because I simply love doing it. Philosophy teaches me to live with--no, to revel in--uncertainty. As Voltaire famously noted: "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." If I were looking for a personal motto, I'd start there.
Could my curiosity be satisfied by empirical means, I suppose I would have chosen to become a physicist or a psychologist. But, as I said, it is the very practice of philosophy--which, put generally, is merely critical thinking--that is my fix. The fun and interest aren't in finding the answers, they're in finding new ways to undermine the things I thought I'd already figured out.
It seems only appropriate to begin a philosophy blog with at least a minimal discussion of what I would describe philosophy to be. Now, philosophy is a bit different, a bit more slippery, than other academic disciplines. We can characterize biology as the study of life, psychology as the study of the mind and mental processes, sociology as the study of social interaction and populations. I do not think we could so neatly and generally describe philosophy, along these lines, as the "study of _________."
Philosophy is often represented as consisting of three major subfields:
- Epistemology. This is the study of knowledge. How do we know what we know? How is this different from belief? What is truth? Can we ever know anything for certain? The study of logic is crucial to epistemology.
- Metaphysics. This is the study of existence. What is reality? Why are things the way they are? What is our relationship to the world? What exactly is the Universe?
- Axiology. This is the study of values and aesthetics. What are our values? What do we mean by good and evil, right and wrong? What is art?
Epistemology, in my view, is the undergirding issue throughout philosophical inquiry. Questions about the nature and limits of human knowledge would seem prerequisite to problems of existence or moral and aesthetic value. Actually, all of these issues are inextricably linked in an interesting variety of ways. It is often difficult (where it is not altogether impossible) to focus on one aspect with disregard for the others.
As usual, etymology can be helpful in the development of a working definition. The word philosophy is built from two Greek roots: φιλοσ (philos, "love"), and σοφία (sophía, "wisdom"); its etymological meaning, then, is simply "love of wisdom."
In our time, we recognize that empirical methods provide us with knowledge of a scientific nature which is useful to us. It seems to me that this has increasingly led to the notion that philosophy is somehow going out of date, outliving its usefulness. It also seems to me that one must be careful to recognize the distinction between "knowledge of a scientific nature" and "wisdom." I could not suppose that, because of predictive power or other utility alone, a quantitative increase in scientific knowledge necessarily implies a qualitative increase in self-awareness or the awareness of one's environment, which is roughly what is meant by "wisdom."
In his First Meditation (from Meditations on First Philosophy), René Descartes famously resolves to withhold his assent from all propositions of whose truth he cannot be absolutely certain, so that he may begin anew the construction of a system of beliefs, all of which would therefore ostensibly be true. Whether or not he actually succeeds at doing this remains highly debatable, but his enthusiasm and ingenious methodology are roundly appreciated even today. He outlines three reasons which give him progressively greater cause to doubt all he thinks he knows. Descartes begins by admitting that his senses have sometimes deceived him into believing things which were not true, especially in the case of perceiving "small and distant things" (a dramatic example might be the apparent size of the Sun viewed from Earth, versus its real size). But he is not willing, given this reason alone, to doubt certain things about himself and his environment within proximity: that he is sitting next to the fire holding a sheet of paper, for example. About this, Descartes writes:
But on what grounds could one deny that these hands and this entire body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to the insane, whose brains are impaired by such an unrelenting vapor of black bile that they steadfastly insist that they are kings when they are utter paupers . . . or that they have heads made of clay, or that they are gourds . . . [translation by Donald Cress]
However elegant many of the arguments in the Meditations may be, it is perhaps taxing for 21st Century readers to take seriously Descartes' invocation of "an unrelenting vapor of black bile" as the cause of insanity. Pauvre René was merely working with the tools available to him at the time, and, in this case, they happened to be the old Aristotelian doctrine of the four bodily humors.
My point is that an apparent poverty of knowledge does not necessarily diminish his philosophical wisdom. The point of studying the Meditations is the ingenuity of the arguments, and the historical context given by Descartes to those who came afterward. While scientific experimentation can impart to us a very great deal of knowledge and technological prowess, the cultivation of wisdom is not among its expected products. I maintain that an increase in depth and amount of knowledge will tend to lead to changes in philosophical thought and discourse, but it does not follow from this that wisdom is composed of nuggets of knowledge alone.
One way to figuratively describe philosophy, then--and precisely as suggested by etymology--is as the transformation of knowledge into wisdom, so that we might term it, as it were, the "mother" science. Philosophers certainly take interest in what empirical science has to say about the major subjects of philosophical inquiry enumerated above: cognitive science and linguistics in the case of epistemology, the physical sciences as they apply to metaphysical issues, and social science as it speaks to concerns in axiology, for example. The philosopher will not typically deny the evidence, but he may most vigorously argue about what the evidence means.
That philosophy is so subjective--and that it can be treated as a means without necessarily implying any particular ends (rather like, say, artistic endeavor)--is the bulk of its value as I see it. Philosophy can be personal and literary in a way that science is not, just as science is rigorously structured in a way that is alien to the philosophical tradition as a whole. There are professional philosophers and there are professional artists, but art and philosophy are activities that every individual can benefit from practicing.
Science gives us many of the tools we need to help create a better world for ourselves, our cohabiting species, and our descendants to come. But to use those tools wisely and in the service of that which is of maximum propriety and beneficence remains the province of philosophy. As Socrates is supposed to have said to the court of Athens in refusing to cease his own philosophizing even on pain of death, "The unexamined life is not worth living." This is the essence of philosophy.
This is why I am here, and I hope it is why you are reading. Let's engage in discussion together; and, having done this, let us then go our respective ways in the world and see who can gather the greatest number of blank stares. :-)
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