What is depth?
Are there deep philosophical problems? (Are all philosophical problems deep? Are some deeper than others?)
If so, what makes them deep?
If a work of philosophy, or art or literature, strikes you as deep, is that the same sort of thing?
Is it a good metaphor, or is there one you find more useful?
If so, what makes them deep?
If a work of philosophy, or art or literature, strikes you as deep, is that the same sort of thing?
Is it a good metaphor, or is there one you find more useful?
Comments (23)
In my experience, philosophical questions considered "deep" are usually those where people fail to recognize that the issues are metaphysical rather than part of our everyday existence and experience.
It's a good metaphor. There are always alternative metaphors I suppose.
I like the (different but related) expression "it cuts deep". Meaning "what you say hurts, emotionally" but also: it is a critique that goes to something vital, central, structurally important, as opposed to attacking a mere superficial feature (ie it's not a mere scratch).
So depth, biologically, means something like "structural, fundamental, vital".
Let's see where that leads me...
Why is the depth of an organ, in complex animals like us, correlated to the vital character of the organ? Perhaps because we live in a dangerous world where predators or foes can always aggress you and therefore it stands to Darwinian reason that the most essential organs should be well protected by layers of less essential ones.
That'd be why your heart is located inside your rib cage. If you tried to literally "wear your heart on your sleeve", you'd be too easy to kill.
So in our biological metaphor, "deep at the heart of things" must be where the most essential components, the structurally vital organs are.
And the surface is where slightly less essential things are eg the skin, which is in fact essential too but more easily repairable, and the hair/fur/feathers, also very important to survival but less so than the heart.
Ok, so what? Are some problems deeper than others, ie more vital, more central, more essential than others?
From experience, the real world appears infinitely 'deep'. Its richness in details is inexhaustible, its complexity apparently infinite, its possibilities exceeding all human imagination.
From that perspective, all problems are deep, but some answers cut deeper than other.
The concept of depth is a no-no to the postmodern ethos. Why is this? Because depth tends to be associated with exactly the kinds of metaphysical meta narratives that this thread is accumulating.
I would suggest intimacy as a preferable metaphor to depth. Philosophy needn’t concern itself with ultimate truths that we are chained to like some giant leaden anchor. Instead, thinking should be about nothing more substantial than being in time and the intimate way that experience changes moment to moment.
[quote=Wikipedia]
The two truths doctrine states that there is:
1. Provisional or conventional truth (Sanskrit sa?v?ti-satya, P?li sammuti sacca, Tibetan kun-rdzob bden-pa), which describes our daily experience of a concrete world, and
2.,Ultimate truth (Sanskrit, param?rtha-satya, P?li paramattha sacca, Tibetan: don-dam bden-pa), which describes the ultimate reality as sunyata, empty of concrete and inherent characteristics.[/quote]
Any statement/problem/isssue/question/whathaveyou that gives you a glimpse of, takes you closer to, param?rtha-satya/ultimate truth could be thought of as deep or said of as possessing depth.
The experience of depth (of anything) is very common in neophytes. They're, in a sense, both blessed and cursed - blessed for the reason that their very basic understanding of things provides them with many opportunities to experience the ecstasy that accompanies encounters with profundity and cursed because these orgiastic aha moments don't correlate all that well with true depth. A beginner in piano might feel elated at being able to play happy birthday with only a few mistakes but a professional pianist's exacting standards means fae feels the same only with a flawless performance of a Beethoven/Bach piece; though the two compositions are radically different in what we may view as depth, the emotional intensity is the same, beginner or virtuoso.
A "deep" question is usually a difficult decision. It's deep because we can "sink" into it. We can put a lot of thought to it, perhaps we may never even arrive at an answer at all. A deep bottomless ocean - that's how I see the metaphor.
Then I must reside in the very deep... I found the ultimate truth!
To be deep implies the issue raised is foundational. You are getting down to the bottom of things in some very general way.
So as a metaphor, it seems quite reasonable. But it does make a commitment to the notion of there being a foundation - a general unifying basis - to all that could matter.
Philosophy then divides itself on that point. Inevitably you get the antithesis of the anti-foundationalist response.
But that response is not deep. It has to ignore all the success of foundationalism as the project that got philosophy going. It also has to ignore the very fact that it employs dialectics to argue against the dialectics which has proved the most generally successful variety of foundationalism.
Quoting Joshs
Precisely.
Quoting Joshs
Well if the object is to avoid being merely shallow, then good dialectics would indeed say that we ought to be able to label the other pole as something that is fruitfully complementary.
Intimate is a pretty good stab at that.
But that still leaves a position being created by appeal to a foundational level of reasoning - a deep view, the dialectical view, which encompasses even its own attempts at contradiction.
Whaaaat? You mean how deep you can stick it in?
It’s possible that’s what Foucault meant.
@Banno and @Hermeticus both note that questions we never quite answer are the deep ones. @T Clark and @TheMadFool make related points, that there can be problems or tasks where we feel we are out of our depth, or in over our heads, either unable to answer or at least finding that our usual ways of solving a problem don't work.
@Joshs is the only one to suggest that depth may not be a very helpful way of classifying problems, and suggests "intimacy" instead.
I am genuinely surprised no Wittgensteinians showed up to say that there are no deep problems.
@Joshs answer I don't quite have a handle on, but I have a bad interpretation of it that might be useful: if we set out to define what we mean by "fundamental" we might naturally arrive at something like a dependency tree. [hide="*"](The way computer science handles trees, the root is depth 0, and the nodes are of varying depths, with leaves representing maximal depth of a subtree. Ordinary usage reverses that, just as it puts the root at the bottom, not the top.)[/hide] But what are the nodes in this tree? Concepts? Issues? Beliefs? Problems?
It can't be problems (or questions) because that would suggest a dependency like "to answer b, you need first to answer a"; if answering simple questions is dependent on answering deep, hard questions, the simpler questions are at least slightly more unanswerable than the deeper ones. Maybe that's wrong though. Maybe it's only that if you had an answer for a then b would take care of itself. Unclear.
Concepts might be a better candidate, but then we're not saying a question is deep if answering it requires the most fundamental concepts, because everything does, everything is dependent on them; instead we might say depth is not dealing with a lot of dependent concepts, but passing right by those nodes on the tree and heading for questions the answer to which only uses nodes close to the root.
Which brings me to my bad interpretation of @Joshs. The tree image suggests there are a lot of steps between where we start, out here at the leaves, perhaps, and the answers we seek, near the root; @Joshs's idea of intimacy actually does look like a claim that we can instead do valuable work right here within a step or two of where we are. He could even say, maybe there is hierarchical tree structure here, but we needn't peg value to depth, to distance from where we are.
I also want to come back to this:
Quoting Hermeticus
Sometimes mathematicians will speak of "deep" results, theorems that show connections that are surprising and illuminating. I remember being entranced as a youngster when I first saw [math]e^{{\pi}i} = -1[/math]. How could [math]e[/math] and [math]{\pi}[/math] be related like that? It was mind-boggling. The proof of Fermat's last theorem pulled together several branches of mathematics that as an undergrad you might not expect to be related. That's a deep result. It might change the way you think about mathematics.
I also want to make one more nod to the experience of depth. We all know the joke about looking where the light is best. As you move farther from the available light, you might begin to experience depth, the depth of shadow and obscurity. As you go deeper into a cave, the light coming in from the cave's mouth is less and less helpful in finding your way around. It's always Wittgenstein: the general form of a philosophical problem is, "I don't know my way around here." What's more, my usual way of finding my way around here -- sight -- isn't working; I not only need to find my way, I need first to find a way to find my way. Is that depth? (And to pull these two paragraphs together: deep in the cave, you might discover that this cave actually connects to another cave you know, the mouth of which is miles away.)
(Bring a torch! My limited experience with real math matches that. To prove a theorem in topology, say, you build some really specialized sort of set or space or transformation -- your torch -- and then you send it down into the cave and it lights up your surroundings for you, shows you exactly how things stand. That suggests that philosophical problems might be solvable with a sort of Deleuzean, or at least pragmatic, concept craftsmanship.)
You look to be setting yourself up for a false dichotomy - an either/or demand.
Modelling theory says optimality is always going to be a pragmatic trade-off between accuracy and complexity. The structure of knowledge you create to represent your world has to balance the desire for fundamental simplicity with the need for creative expressivity. It must be just as good for talking about the particular as it is about the general.
So you can't have the leaves without the trunk, and you can't have the trunk without the leaves. The fundamental and the superficial go hand in hand as two limits on the one whole.
And it is a pragmatic balancing act as you don't want more leaves than the trunk can bear, nor more trunk than is needed to sustain its weight of leaves.
So you ask a rather emotive question - what is "deep"? We all know the opposite of deep is shallow. And who wants to be labelled shallow?
And you get a reply, maybe what we should value most is intimacy. That kind of sounds like a good counter to deep. Who wouldn't want to celebrate a capacity for intimacy? Who wouldn't now see that as good reason to reject the claim that it all comes down to the pursuit of depth - the pursuit of grandiose unifying generality?
But if we move beyond the usual cultural wars to a mathematics of modelling, then we can see that the right answer is one that expresses a fruitful balance.
Depth is drilling down towards maximum generality and simplicity. But the trade-off is that the broadest explanations must encompass the greatest amount of particularity as well. Foundations need to match what is to be built upon them. And they don't actually need to be stronger, deeper or wiser than that.
Prefect and that for me summarizes the tensions inherent in my relationship with philosophy, such as it is. I never seem to know when I should fester or walk away...
What's deep is usually dependent on the type of person you are. You may be into ethical problems or epistemology or aesthetics.
There are, however, a series of questions pertaining to each field of philosophy which have been with us in some form or another since our early history. We've answered a few of them.
Most of the one's talked about these days are the really hard problems. So it's almost by definition that if you're interested in what philosophers talk about, you are interested in deep questions. Deep, meaning, difficult to make sense of.
...a true Wittgensteinian would have said there are deep problems, but nothing can be said about them...
To say of philosophy or poetry that it is deep might suggest work that is difficult to fathom or even fathomless.
Other associations could be 'profound', 'subtle', 'nuanced', 'complex'. 'dense', but these carry no necessary allusion to mystery than cannot be solved, plumbed or penetrated.
So, in this context, does depth suggest to you mystery, impenetrability or ineffability?
So. I've rambled a bit, but basically I'm wondering whether you are thinking of what is hidden or what is complex and/ or nuanced.
Along what axis or dimension?
Quoting Joshs
Exactly.
[quote=The Buddha]Freed from the classification of consciousness, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea.[/quote]
Indeed Mr Buddha... I suspect that deep is a metaphor that has almost gotten the better of us.
"To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
- William Wordsworth
Otherwise, terms like "complex", "fundamental", "crucial" etc. can be used, and they say more than "deep".