What is the point of philosophy?
What is the point of philosophy? I don't mean this to sound argumentative. To me, exploring philosophical ideas and trying to get to grips with the really big issues (especially philosophy of mind) seems like THE most important intellectual pursuit. But is it? What practical advantage does it give us as a species?
It feels like an intellectual itch that needs scratching but aside from my own gratification what benefit does it have?
Very few people seem to really try to understand the big philosophical issues beyond a superficial level and those that do seem to get drawn to different viewpoints depending on how they approach the problems.
I wonder whether we will ever make real progress, actually solving some of the big issues so that certain schools of though can be laid to rest permanently.
If so, what implications would this have individually and culturally?
Of course, philosophical enquiry can help people deal with their lives and provide valuable insight to help with personal development etc but other distractions can do this too - playing an instrument, a sport, massage, crafts, just socialising.......so many different things! As people who are intrigued by philosophical thought that's great for us, but is that as far as it will go? If every philosophical thinker died tomorrow would the course of world history be drastically altered?
It feels like an intellectual itch that needs scratching but aside from my own gratification what benefit does it have?
Very few people seem to really try to understand the big philosophical issues beyond a superficial level and those that do seem to get drawn to different viewpoints depending on how they approach the problems.
I wonder whether we will ever make real progress, actually solving some of the big issues so that certain schools of though can be laid to rest permanently.
If so, what implications would this have individually and culturally?
Of course, philosophical enquiry can help people deal with their lives and provide valuable insight to help with personal development etc but other distractions can do this too - playing an instrument, a sport, massage, crafts, just socialising.......so many different things! As people who are intrigued by philosophical thought that's great for us, but is that as far as it will go? If every philosophical thinker died tomorrow would the course of world history be drastically altered?
Comments (68)
What is the point of being human? Some philosophy looks like (and maybe is) word games. On the other hands we are thinking, loving, fearing, aging beings who know that we and all we love must die. That everything is fragile and passing. Our first order of business is perhaps to make peace with this or to justify an early exit. These are the questions forced on us by love, fear, and pain.
Quoting Oliver Purvis
What 'spiritual' advantage does it give you as an individual? Why not this question? Let's consider the shape of your question. What do you already assume? Seemingly a science-inspired yet ultimately metaphysical and value-driven vision of how this or that practice should be justified.
I love philosophy for getting behind the question. In our asking we already know too much. We have already constrained the answer in the categories and norms we drag along with our questioning.
Quoting Oliver Purvis
Is this so clear? Why not call those issues big that everyone is drawn to? Religion and politics are philosophical. Philosophy as a list of 'official philosophers' is a sometimes bad sometimes good mere piece of the philosophical conversation that we largely are with our bodies as well as our minds.
If the soldier charges a machine gun nest, he answers certain questions with an action. To marry. To kill in anger. To steal. To sacrifice. To lie. This is lived philosophy, the living of the answers to the big issues. No doubt some are more articulate and more invested in being articulate than others, but this too is an implicit decision about the relative value of having the impressive words on hand.
If you are questioning the vanity of philosophy as a sort of would-be science, then I can sympathize. For me the great philosophers are fascinating personalities. They were born. They suffered, worked, thought, etc. They scribbled their better thoughts and died. I can find a 'use' for them that itself is not easily put into words. I try to put this use into words at times and thereby add to the genre, join the conversation. The danger is that the conversation becomes too precious and distant, and outsiders rightly suspect that (often enough) nothing important/living is being said. The boys are just being as clever as possible for one another. (And this too may partake in that.)
Quoting Oliver Purvis
But what if this is like certain great poems or symphonies being laid to rest permanently? Why must philosophy be understood as a kind of ultimate science? Why not rather just a sequence of individuals sharing their wrestling with the fact of having been born into a particular place and time and language?
Do you want a quasi-mathematical theorem about the meaning of life? Does such a thing make sense? Or is the whole approach flawed? Do we ever conquer life with words? Words help, sure. But life is bigger than our words for it.
Maybe there are none. Perhaps it's the way philosophy is often phrased as a question - it suggests that maybe there are definite answers to be had. Without these answers, or the genuine possibility of one day finding them, we are left with the word games you mentioned.
Most of the time I find philosophy helpful and spiritually uplifting as you suggested. I guess I'm asking where you turn on the occasions when even philosophy feels empty!
I think what you're getting at, from my perspective at least, is that philosophy can help provide a working body, but you, we, must still figure out why we are as we are. Traditionally, when philosophy hits its wall, religious thinking arrives to offer a way around. I think a problem with such a way around is someone forgetting the philosophy that might have gotten them there. I think both philosophy and theology can coexist, but it's tricky.
Additionally, perhaps you can still find meaning in your life if you live by an ethic. For example, I attempt to live a life guided by honesty and love. At present, I'm not religious, yet I am able to think and feel my way through the day-to-day because of my grounded morality. For me that is what helps create meaning and helps answer the "Why?" that philosophy can't always answer.
Just my couple cents, take them as you will, cheers (Y)
I'm skeptical of the modern "institutionalizing" of philosophy. Philosophy is not "just another discipline" to be put aside biology, psychology and statistics. Nor do I think philosophy should be aiming for its own dissolution (re: Russellian analytic philosophy) or reduced to a "handmaiden" to the sciences (re: "naturalism").
At its core, philosophy is the rational manifestation of humanity's religious nature. We want to know why we're here and where we're going, how we know what we know and the limits of this knowledge, whether there is a God and what happens after we die. Most crucially, we want and need to know how to live, because life is an eternal ambiguity with no simple algorithm. It is this latter observation that leads me to believe that philosophy is born from a certain helplessness, an anxiety in the face of moral ambiguity and spiritual discouragement. Hence why when we approach deep philosophical questions we usually do so in silence or with trepidation. And this is exactly what you see inside temples and churches, cathedrals and mosques, a deafening, breath-taking silence.
Not all science has a practical effect on our lives. It really doesn't matter if there is massive black hole at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy. But it's interesting.
That's why I cringe whenever the argument comes up that science exists for technology's sake. No, science, like philosophy, exists first and foremost because we're a curious species. We like to ask questions. We want to understand. We're puzzled by the world and ourselves.
I agree with Marchesk's response - whether or not philosophy has a practical impact on our lives, the same can be said for many fields of interest. It seems that at the core of any philosophical problem is a 'need-to-know-solution', highlighting the curiosity of the human mind.
Philosophy, etymologically, is derived from the Greek words 'philos' meaning love and 'sophia' meaning wisdom, so (unless you didn't know already) philosophy = the love of wisdom.
In response to your question: 'what is the point in loving wisdom?' I'd respond 'why would you not?'.
Besides, philosophy is all about asking questions. It is a philosophical question to ask whether philosophy has a purpose, and that I think clearly illustrates the purpose of philosophy.
This is what philosophy is all about. Too provide meaning. But one must be creative and leave the box.
Very well put, my friend. I very much relate. The 'real' problem seems to be that nothing lasts. Everything passes. Time conquers all. We can't get out of this machine that destroys its products, this devouring mother. Some do believe in a realm apart from all this. I could never really believe it. And maybe there is something seductive in our mortality. Maybe it's all more beautiful this way. We can't wrap our fingers around it. We can't drag it away from the chaos and hide it safely in some lair outside of time. This forces us to give ourselves to the dying moment. It forces some of us to give ourselves to the void.
In my view, we are future-oriented beings. We save money. We repress various urges. We set alarms. In short, we make long term plans and keep promises. And this is close to what makes us a human. Yet the abstract mind can see the ultimate futility of all plans. There is no future, or (apparently) no stable and ultimate future. So our best laid plans are haunted by absurdity. At least for those of us who can't believe in some hidden world where the usual rules do not apply. 'The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.' As an atheist, I read 'God' as reality here. One might say that philosophy begins with the perception of our eerie situation, of our absurdity, fragility, etc. But then 'philosophy' is maybe too dry a word, especially when it's so often steered toward a kind of meta-science, which is to say away from the felt individual situation. For some it is a kind of chess we play to forget the terrible questions. It can be a fleeing into cleverness or into a sort of earnest objective work that forgets that earnest objective work is haunted by an ultimate futility.
Well said. To me this describes the real stuff. I almost hate the word 'philosophy' for being too preciously or artificially understood. As you say, it is a 'rational' manifestation of the religious urge. The urge takes a shape that demands a kind of conceptual clarity. What is it to be rational? We have some sense of what it means. We forbid ourselves a kind of foolishness. We want our words to have a certain weight or objectivity or universality. We become sensitive to the way our narrative sticks or does not stick together.
[quote=Ecclesiastes]Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?[/quote]
I was on vacation, and I realized it would quickly pass and I would never get to do the vacation over again. That was a bit depressing.
I feel you. What we take in our hand we cannot hold for long. We are always dying and being reborn. One love object fails. Another appears. Slowly, though, the ability to love and adapt recedes. This old vessel betrays us. I'm between youth and old age, in possession of a virility that believes finally in its coming death. That's a good place from which to write love poems --poems to the Her behind all hers.
I suppose one could use the word 'God' for what is bigger than us in our situation. But from this perspective the comforting theories about God are a kind of war against God, a denial of God, an escape from our dark origin and endpoint.
I feel that some haven't taken on board my original point fully (Perhaps I didn't express it very well). I totally get what you guys/girls are saying, but I must stress that the 'point' to philosophy that some of you have argued in favour of is something I generally agree with. So many spheres of life are fortified by an appreciation of philosophical ideas, so many situations dealt with more pragmatically and wholeheartedly. For so many years I have been fascinated by philosophical approaches to all manner of questions and on the whole this has enriched my intellectual life, provoked long and meaningful conversation with friends and helped me to tackle the trials and tribulations of everyday existence.
My question, I suppose, was more to do with where we find ourselves when the philosophy runs out. When our philosophy takes us around the houses, examining (maybe even acepting) everything from all sides, adopting contrasting or contradictory points of view, all the while appreciating how our outlook has been enriched by the journey...but...eventually...when we return to 'normality' and discover that nothing has really changed - then what?
I imagine I will always think philosophically and I am very grateful that there are others out there who have similar attitudes. But there are times when it all seems like intellectual posturing. Or distraction. Or very clever ways of explaining why we don't know or can't agree on certain things. Or finding comfort in ideas that turn us on despite knowing that other equally/more intelligent people hold opposing views.
When the biggest questions are asked (Ok, 'big' is a relative term but I'm sure you all know what I mean) and no definitive answer is forthcoming...where next? Faith? Despair? Seems a shame to throw away a life time of philosophical thought for either of those.
I must stress I don't get to this state often, yet it does happen periodically and I must accept my feelings during these times. Can it be written of as merely a hormonal imbalance or something similar? At the time, as bleak as it may sound, there is a striking sense of intlectual and philosophical clarity.
Of course, eventually it passes and the wheel keeps spinning.
Thanks. I like your OP. I've seen others resent the question, but to me it's a very [s]philosophical[/s] question. I scratch out the word because lots of wisdom writing is found in literature, etc. It's found in rock lyrics, rap lyrics, comical TV shows. It's found in interviews with artists. I have, actually, read lots of the great philosophers. And some of them are heroes for me. But the dark side of foolosophy is the usual intellectual vanity that I myself have been guilty of, especially in my younger days --though the war is never finally won. In short, we can be seduced by nice little formulae and close our eyes and hearts to what doesn't fit these formulae. We can make too much of some trendy jargon. As I see it, we want to become good and beautiful people. We want to know and appreciate good and beautiful people. I suppose most of what I'm getting at is 'there' in a person who is good and beautiful without having read and parroted this or that famous thinker. Direct access! Life, experience, moral-aesthetic progress. Books are great but secondary. I suspect you already get and feel all of this in your own words --else you wouldn't have been so kind.
Quoting Oliver Purvis
A good and deep question. For me the stoics among others come to mind. I don't want to die whining or biting my nails. I want to stand up straight and calmly see the void envelop me. There's a ridiculous movie, The Scorpion King, that nevertheless had some charming dialogue. Too tough guy heroes who are friends meet. "Live free," one says as they grasp one another's forearms. "Die well," says the other.
Live free. Die well.
It's not a bad four words. Why live free? Why die well? Because it feels right. Because it sounds right. For me that's the truth behind the epistemological 'posturing. ' Even this posturing feels right at the time for those invested in a certain notion of responsible, thorough 'rationality.' Indeed, my own position evolved from within a more stiff and earnest in-retrospect-posturing. To be sure, it sucks to suffer. It sucks to die except when the sucky suffering makes this the best alternative available. To suffer well and to die well is just a slight desuckification of the situation. And yet maybe the highest thing, too.
This place where philosophy runs out is also at the center of my interest. It strikes me also as the place where the 'real' philosophy begins. Where our little formulae become dust. There's a strange community in this place of death. Petty differences fall away. We love. We care. We fear. We know that we are terribly and wonderfully in something (the world) that envelops and overpowers us. A person might call it God, but slapping a friendly human face on it neutralizes the terror of it. It's that terror and mystery that we can stand against. Gallow's humor comes to mind. I can't say that I envy those who deny death and the limits of language, because there's a terrible beauty to be had where the philosophy runs out. On the other hand, there is sometimes the most profound agony there, as every possible comforting phrase becomes a lie in one's mouth. I understand suicide. It's not on my agenda, but I understand why sensitive and thoughtful individuals sometimes reach for a decisive act. They flee the indignity of being cast into this haunted house.
Quoting Oliver Purvis
This is great stuff, man. I don't think it's any kind of sickliness. The daily business of the world just doesn't know what to do with the eerie thinking that contemplates its nullity. The best it can do is create yet another business (therapy, etc.) But individually the therapist himself goes home and surely, at times, feels an alienation from his work day pose. He gets a check for playing a certain role, wearing a certain face. If he his doubts, he has to tuck them away like we all do to keep the rent paid or the wife happy. If we don't know what the hell it is all about, we usually do know that we don't want it all to fall apart in the next month. So we play along. We do what one does. We react. Occasionally someone snaps and ties a noose or becomes violent toward others. Then it's someone's paycheck to clean up the mess. Generations come and go. Wise and unwise things are said and recorded. But the coming and going continues, largely ineffable, swamping our wise words. I connect this 'vision' with the striking clarity you mention. It's a clarity about our situation and the way that exceeds tidy sayings. 'Always the procreant urge of the world.' This vision makes me feel large and small at the same time. I can participate and assent to this vast machine I've been thrown into. I can be willing to look at it in its glory and filth. It opens up a deep connection to every other heroically awake person out there, no matter their preferred lingo.
*I bought an old typewriter lately, on which I write something like poetry. But it tries to tell the truth in a few well-chosen words.
Hearing the question as, “How does philosophy benefit human societies?”...Does anyone have some interesting historical info about philosophers and philosophy in general?
Always a good question, brought up afresh many times.
I think there are many issues for questing minds to work on in the real world that are more pressing than what seems like idle speculation. For example: population control, global warming, environmental degradation, food production, preserving endangered species, disease prevention, eliminating severe endemic poverty, the meaning of work, etc. etc. etc.
Indeed. I've definitely tried to stir up some feely foolosophy. For me that's foolosophy at its best: life and death, love and loss, a brave and/or wise response to having been born here.
Anyone who has slogged their way through the contents of social science journals can certainly relate to that sentiment.
"Why must philosophy be understood as a kind of ultimate science?"
I dunno. I think it can do a damn good job of it in the hands of a self-proclaimed scientist like Nietzsche, or via the emprico-scientific syntheses of Merleau-Ponty. Science itself, shorn of scientism and recognizing itself to be ideology alongside other cultural products, can return to its original task as a branch of philosophy as it was for the Greeks.
The concerns you mention above owe their existence to formulations of concepts like environment, population dynamics, etc, that stem from sciences whose central metaphors derive from prior philosophical speculation and the mathematical formulations they contributed.
Today's most pragmatic and practical concerns are the product of frameworks of understanding which were born as philosophcal speculation. By getting involved in the solution of these practical problems, you are not getting in on the ground floor, you're at the tail end of a long historical process of thought.
Alarm bells ring...
I'll grant that philosophy begat science, but I will not grant that science is an ideology.
I view much of the content of philosophy (probably the most useful part) as a branch of intellectual history. Modern philosophy has continued on with part of the tradition after science branched off and became a field unto itself.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I don't know MP, but I know Nietzsche well and have a fondness for early Heidegger (pre B&T) who comes to mind as I read that passage.
I do have some bias toward the individual quasi-religious function of philosophy. We look for words that allow us to live and die with a kind of nobility. The social question is part of this. But life is short, and an individual may come around to seeing that he probably won't put much of a dent in the world's thinking. The situation becomes especially personal. 'I' can't, ultimately, change that many hearts and minds. I can of course adopt as a spiritual goal a certain world-improving role. But even here one might decide that the effort is best or more authentically spent 'locally.'
Perhaps 'actual' science is not an ideology. But the word 'science' is IMV massively entangled in ideology. See the quote below.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't think 'science' even tries to answer the most profound questions. Moreover, I don't see how science can provide its own foundation. Engineering and medicine earn our trust more or less by giving us what we want. But the idea of eternal, universal truth sounds pretty theological to me. In short, its foundation looks to be largely pragmatic or 'irrational.' We keep doing what scratches the itch. By putting philosopher in quotes, you are (as I see it) linking the heroic 'payload' of the words science and philosophy in an ideological way --as if the 'deepest' kind of talk humans are capable of is the defense/worship of science.
Would it make a difference if philosophy were simply renamed "critical thinking"? Folk may make the mistake of wanting answers when what it mostly teaches is a structure of good thought habits. By applying thinking to really extreme problems, dealing with everyday problems ought to be made easier.
More generally, if philosophy is functioning well, it ought to be the engine room of culture. So we might study it to learn its skills. And then as a social institution doing a job, it should be generating the wider view that defines the space of possibilities for society. It should articulate the alternatives rather than aim to solve the problems as such.
You seem to suggest that philosophy ought to be more like science - an evolving story of ever better theories. While philosophy ought to keep "improving", it is a more consciously historic exercise for good reason. Bad ideas and wrong turns are worth keeping alive in the institutional memory if the focus is on learning critical thinking skills and enlarging the space of the possible for cultural-level thought.
Then on the question of how philosophy relates to everyday living, I don't think it is that great as either some general life pursuit or self-help manual.
If you have some kind of deep curiosity about existence, then you are going to wind up wanting to scratch that itch. But also, there is a consequence. The cost of a critical thinking mindset is that living a life can become quite an abstract exercise. It can divert you away from actually living that life in a usefully balanced fashion. It can become an excuse not to properly engage. So if "living a good life" is the primary goal, then positive psychology or something more applied - even religion - is a better thing to invest your effort in.
Philosophy can take you out of yourself, propel you into the absolutely abstract. But I wouldn't rely on it to bring you back to yourself. We are social creatures, formed by our cultural actions. So we only find ourselves through the negotiations of actually living a life, not by chancing upon the right recipe in some philosophy text.
So short answer is that philosophy is absolutely central to cultural development. It was the institutionalised habit of critical thought that created the space of possibilities which then underwrote 2500 years of rapid social evolution.
And if you have a curiosity about existence bordering on the obsessive, then philosophy is the base camp for that expedition into the abstract.
But if you are troubled by life, then doing philosophy is not itself an answer. It could end up more isolating than helpful, unless it is balanced by some social and cultural actions as a result. The question is does it return you to the world in some useful fashion? If it is being used as a refuge from the world, then it is not in fact functioning very usefully.
Well said. What may be usefully found in a philosophy text, though, is this kind of reminder about the limitations of any mere text.
Hah. Philosophy in a nutshell - the art of productive disagreement. Everything said becomes the departure point of its own possible contradictions. :)
Whereas living a life as a social creature is mostly about productive agreements....
We're digging the hole deeper but not getting anywhere closer to the truth, whatever that is. Actual, as opposed to imitation science? What is ideological about causation? About the laws of thermodynamics? What is ideological about "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." or Darwin's finches? or the first through fifth extinctions, now heading into the sixth? or the San Andreas or Madrid fault? or is this squirrel a hybrid or a separate species? Or climate change? What are the genes that contribute to invincible stupidity?
One would think that after 2500 years, philosophy would have had more success in answering the most profound questions. Maybe, you think?
Who said it's about answering questions? Again, this assumes that philosophy is a kind of science. We can also think of philosophy as a questioning that reveals our ignorance to us, a questioning that guards us against our tendency to be smug and complacent.
I don't know. Seems like total agreement has no need for creative compromise.
Total agreement rules out any scope for differences of opinion, hence freedom and creativity. So that is why I would stress productive agreement - the kind of agreement that pragmatist philosophy would have in mind.
The foundation of productive agreement would be agreeing about what kind of differences don't in fact matter. And that approach to discovering truth is the opposite of seeking agreement based on starting definitionally with the essence of things - the differences that make a difference.
So I am advocating an emergent or apophatic approach to arriving at agreement. As we agree about what doesn't change things, then what does change things will emerge into view with any luck.
What could be more ideological than claiming that the facts of the world are not subject to ideology?
Such absoluteness is the very hallmark of the ideal.
I think we basically agree here. I might phrase 'productive agreement' as a the friendly disagreement that wants to get something done together. But even outright war can inspire innovation. So there's that.
I like pragmatism. I think it describes pretty well the way we actually reason. We have projects. We want things. Sometimes it's a matter of getting these things, and sometimes it's a matter of clarifying these objects (well, situations) of desire. And let's throw in whatever I'm leaving out.
Quoting apokrisis
That seems like a foundation. It also seems foundational to clarify the goal.
Exactly. We lust for the right angle, for the fixed simplified situation. But this leads us to ignore what doesn't fit that tempting picture.
That's why one can speak of medieval, enlightenment, modernist and postmodern science. These movements express the way in which philosophy of science as well as the methods scientists see as defining what they do, and the very content of science evolves in tandem with the rest of cultural achievement rather than leading it.
That is a very strange "think" given that science can take us back to before the big-bang and answers the question "why"?
Science does not provide its own foundation, because it has no need of a foundation. Scientific theories survive on their own merit.
On what merit? That they get things done? I agree. But that's a pragmatic foundation, a vague foundation, an 'irrational' or inexplicit foundation. I trust my dentist. I don't believe in ghosts or afterlife. But I also don't pretend that various prediction and control technologies are 'highest' things.
It's a little ungenerous, but I'm tempted to parody scientism as the worship of dentistry. Can you sincerely tell me that your life as you experience it fits into the scientific paradigm? That what it is to love and be mortal and be thrown into a particular face and body are neatly arranged by the physicists and the biologist? This seems to me like a wild and questionable hope, the hope to reduce what it is to be to the publicly quantifiable, etc. Only the peer reviewed and intellectually respectable is real. Sure. Educated common sense is the true god.
To be clear, this is not some politically hopeful cultural criticism. I don't in the least pretend to be changing the world here. I don't have the time to waste on preaching this or that gospel in that kind of grand sense. Life and the world are bigger than me, not just bigger than science. I'm just trying to make some exciting conversation.
You are here. Philosophy is a way of understanding your condition.
Good point. It may be that a certain discourse functions well because it ignores its own foundations. What we might call scientism is something like a vague distrust of any kind of thorough conceptualization or investigation of these foundations. On philosophy forums, there's usually a fear of religion at play. Any lack of reverence for science 'must' lead to some kind of religious position --because surely there's no 'rational' or intellectual reason to place science in the total context of life. For scientism, something like a scientist as priest metaphor seems to function in the background.
Of course. And the general goal of philosophy or critical thinking would be something along the lines of "arriving at the truth of reality". But even that could be disputed by those who claim it to be akin to an exercise in poetry or whatever.
Yet also, I was talking about productive agreement as being the general social goal. And society seems an exercise in creativity.
A society's goals are founded in nature - the demands of evolutionary fitness and thermodynamical imperative. Or at least those are nature's constraints on our being. They set the general limits, and within that scope, we are free to play. We can set our own goals from there on. Nature is in agreement with whatever we choose to do from the point where it thinks that any differences don't make a difference.
And so the goal of the human project is reasonably open-ended and emergent within those physical limits. Our job is make sense of the freedoms we find. Or at least that is one possible philosophical view of the foundational goals of a social creature.
Quoting ff0
Yep. It is standard social science to point out that a flourishing social system depends on both competition and co-operation. So striving leads to creative advance.
But also, it is a balance. The implicit question here is whether a good war creates more than it destructs in terms of long-run social and intellectual capital?
So it is not a paradox that conflict is productive. It is the balance of strife to harmony that gets judged in the long-run as both are forms of productivity. Stability must be tempered by plasticity, etc. It's all part of nature's dialectic.
That's a pretty good description. But we might also speak of attaining a kind of emotional equilibrium, of making peace with death or 'evil,' etc. Of living and dying well. The phrase 'adaptive doing' comes to mind, where doing includes thinking. As far as poetry goes, I think it's fair to include the pleasure we take getting some truth down. It's not just the ring of truth but the quality of that ring. The King James translation is great English, for instance. The same ideas in a lamer English don't ring the same way. As I see it, we are more Kirk than Spock.
I generally agree with the rest of your post. But perhaps you neglect the position of the mortal individual with a particular history. You mention the individual pole in passing, but don't have much to say about it, which is fine. But what of the individual who comes to term with his smallness on the world stage? With the impotence of his notion of the way the world ought to be? Born into a kind of chaos, he will die in it. Also it seems fair to expect the species itself to go extinct.
In short, we operate within a sort of finitude and absurdity, granting these assumptions. We are future-oriented beings with long-term projects and social hopes. Yet projecting far enough ahead reveals a kind of futility. Of course we can 'forget' or 'justify' our deaths in terms of social hopes, artistic accomplishments, offspring, religion. But we reason about these things. We wrestle within ourselves. I'd include this kind of talk within 'philosophy.'
I like Feyerabend. It's been awhile, but his Conquest of Abundance is pretty great. I hope I remember the title correctly. But I could also drag in Whitman here. Or lots of other poets. They are phenomenologists, one might say. They try to speak the truth about experience, to let the fish see the water. The science-religion debate is (at worst) like an argument between those who lost their left eye and those who lost their right eye. For 'spiritual' or 'aesthetic' reasons some of us strive for a kind of wholeness and richness of experience. An opposite drive exists toward some citadel of invulnerable correctness. 'Here, finally, is the systematic truth, the one true method, the machine-like set of words that puts to death the hassle of inquiry forever.' I can't curse that urge. It too seems deeply human.
I'm thinking of those as applied philosophy. So the answers are not so much to be found as invented. And a science - like positive psychology - is the place to be watching the technology coming through.
So the practical issue is that religious teachings and philosophical wisdom did try to create good life advice. But it was advice for a different world, a different time. A lot of it may have been particular to life as most people might have lived it 2000 years ago. Some deep principles may still apply. But also, a scientific, evidence-backed and conjectural approach, might be the better way to philosophise about "living well" today.
So the modern way of thinking recognises that the human project is subject to nature's constraints. We are evolved and that shapes our ideas about any personal or collective purpose. It is foolish now to believe that we are either radically free of this biological conditioning, or that alternatively, we are conditioned by some divine telos.
Of course, both those comments will be immediately disputed. But that's my position here. Philosophy is wasting its time - in terms of deliverables - if it is still seeking answers on the moral, the aesthetic, the human, in terms that either deny a biological history or claim a divine basis. So what philosophy would focus on productively is how to make sense of the freedoms we discover, given a history of natural constraints.
We've still got lots of choices. And we are so busy doing stuff, changing things, that we need to get scientific about the ultimate goals we might be wanting to achieve. We need to investigate our psychology well enough to have a credible story about what actually makes us happy, allows us to flourish, leads us towards the nirvana of self-actualisation - if that is indeed all the things we would freely choose for ourselves in the long run.
In short, between the moral absolutism and the moral relativism that is the polar dichotomy characterising most people's understanding of the philosophical choices, I am arguing for the moral pragmatism which takes the middle course of recognising reality to be historically conditioned, yet also semiotically open-ended. There is a practical balance of opposing tensions waiting to be struck. And the scientific method is what you apply once you start to zero in on a fully account of anything.
Quoting ff0
Is mortality more something you worry about when you are old or when you are young? Life seems to provide its own perspective on these things.
On their deathbed, most people regret not spending more quality time with family, friends and passions. A life devoted to striving and achievement seems unbalanced in retrospect. The cultivation of the individuated self - the idea of making one big difference to society rather than a lot of small differences for those closest at hand - seems overblown at the far end of life. For quite natural reasons. Just as it seems the most important thing of all back at the start of adult life.
So should the futility of life, the inevitability of death, be the final philosophy of "a good life"? The evidence of living suggests that what looms large at the beginning becomes naturally more inconsequential towards the end.
Quoting ff0
I've got to agree as I've felt it too. And I think finding it "fascinating" speaks to a suitably balanced assessment.
Life is both futile and worthwhile, both absurd and meaningful. And this isn't paradoxical, just an expression of the range of possible philosophical reactions we have learnt to manifest. We feel the full space of the possible - in a way that a lack of philosophy would render inarticulate.
And that in itself is both fascinating and unsettling.
So the only problem with philosophy is that once you have habituated its dialectical tendencies, they infect everything you could think about. Once you create range, you always then have the dilemma of locating yourself at some definite point on the spectrum you've just made.
The alternative to that is to float above your own spectrum of possibilities in some detached and free-floating manner. Which is where "you" start becoming a highly abstract kind of creature even to "yourself".
Do I care? Do I not care? At every moment I could just as easily make a different choice on that.
Thank goodness life provides its social scripts that "one" can always grab hold of, so as to decide the matter for the passing moment, eh? Ah, the existentialism of being an existentialist. ;)
Quoting Oliver Purvis
I agree. My understanding of it includes getting behind all of this encrusted theoretical language. To the things (factic life, existence, being there) itself. But this is a goal. On the way to that goal we have to cut through the pre-interpretations. We have go back behind the first wrong move as much as possible. Fail again. Fail better. Become a little more wakeful.
word games
— Bitter Crank
I get a little nervous when people start talking about Truth (big T). I certainly do not think that "there is no truth", nor do I think Truth is relative to each and everyone's personal POV. I like to find truth--I have found bits of the truth here and there--and usually it is (small t) truth, a piece of larger truths that we suppose exist.
BIG T TRUTH are the windmills at which Mr. Quixote charges. An impossible dream. What makes BIG T TRUTH a windmill is that our reach exceeds our grasp. We can ask the question, "what is truth?" but we can not provide a very satisfying answer (so far). We like to think that we will know the truth, and the truth will make us free. Determining THE TRUTH will be a transformative event, worth a Nobel Prize, at the very least.
The trouble with THE TRUTH making us free is that it is an import from the Gospel of John. Jesus makes it clear enough that "THE TRUTH" is a Person. Finding the truth, and knowing the truth, is the result of a relationship with God, he says,
Now, I am not speaking here on behalf of John, Jesus, or Jason. I'm only pointing out that THE TRUTH in the famous quote isn't something that will ever result from the study of philosophy--or anything else, for that matter. I suspect that The Truth, or the ordinary secular truths we can actually grasp, are the consequence of our relationships with one another, and science, in that order.
Assuming that what you say is correct, it would make sense--philosophy begat psychology rather recently (19th century).
In my experience, the young are more terrified of death. As we age, we start to understand its attractions. We go from terror to mixed feelings.
I didn't stress it, but I include the failure of the body in the problem of death. We don't usually just drop dead. Things fall apart first. The vitality we took for granted seeps away. For context, I'm between youth and old age. My remaining vitality beings to appear in its true finitude. This first-person switch from the future stretching endlessly to a certain number of Christmases and Thanksgivings is food for thought. Life takes on a new vividness. It's a loud dream. To some degree we choose to continue dreaming it.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes. This sounds right to me. Youthful ambition is world-historical. Youth refuses to believe that the world will likely no more notice its departure than it did its arrival. I think seeing the 'hugeness' of the world and life is a sort of 'philosophical' realization. My voice is one among many. Those who locally love me give a damn, and that's usually it. Even intellectual fame would involve (I presume) something like a caricature or alienation. It has no obvious 'deep' meaning.
Quoting apokrisis
Thanks. I'm definitely looking for the right tone. Some of life's beauty lies in the death of all things. All things are temporary and elusive. We like to chase things. The receding seduces. The ungraspable beckons. What is more sickly sweet than an unplucked opportunity as it dies? Neither victory nor disaster endures. Neither the heroic deed nor the most terrible crime. It comes and goes like music.
Quoting apokrisis
We are 100% on the same page here.
The full space of the possible.
Quoting apokrisis
Good points. Sometimes hand-wringing theory-mongering is absurd and inappropriate.
Yes, in that order. If I give scientism hell, it's only because I think people in fact experience one another in a non-theoretical sense that transcends not only the lingo of science but also of metaphysics and theology. To me it is somewhat 'obvious' that we don't have a verbal handle on the fullness of what it is to be human. I assume that the lives of others are roughly like mine. This gut-level half-conceptual assumption is the kind of thing I'm talking about, though. Preconceptual or half-conceptual know-how.
For whom is their lover atoms and voids or a system of facts or a ghost in the machine? All these cute little concepts are pasted over something that's far harder to describe. I'm not anti-science, etc. There's just a tendency to pretend that life is reducible to physical or biological science that amuses and dismays me. Have such people ever been in love or buried someone? You know what I mean? Or heard great music? Or been moved by a novel? Life is big.
I agree. Getting old, it is decrepitude and its many indignities that are the live issue. Death becomes a solution more than a threat.
But then unnecessary longevity is such a recent thing too. A relatively new topic for the philosophisers. At least I've not yet noticed any modern Heidegger making a thing of humans being the only animals conscious of their own imminent gerontocracy.
Decay lacks the profundity, the finality, which we are so quick to grant death.
Quoting ff0
The biological perspective is my thing. So I really like the idea that life is like riding a bicycle, or the tilt of the sprinter.
We hang together on the edge of falling apart by flinging ourselves constantly forward. The beauty of living lies in this constant mastery over a sustaining instability. We stay in motion to keep upright. Then eventually we slow and it all falls apart.
So there is a self-making pattern. Individuals come and go, but the pattern always renews. And it is the possibility of the material instability that is the basis for the possibility of the formal control. Life is falling apart given a sustaining direction for a while.
Sure they have.
I know. It was a rhetorical question. The point is that scientism (as distinct from science) ignores all of this. It's all 'really' quarks, etc. This 'really' is metaphysical for scientism in a way that it doesn't admit. They can have a ball with that. But I can have a ball picking my own horse and arguing with you about it. (This is my idea of fun.)
Another example: Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's a pretty lovable guy. But even a brilliant man like that doesn't get 'why is there something rather than nothing?' I sort of get it. Lots of religious types themselves think that this is quasi-scientific question, for which they have a quasi-scientific answer --God as hidden object. Both sides are obsessed with 'junk' they can be correct and certain about.
Scientific theories require no justification nor foundation, as if any such thing were possible. They are the last idea standing after they have withstood all the criticism we are capable of subjecting them to.
Their merit lies in that they have survived as our best explanations as to what constitutes reality, how reality behaves, and why it does so.
Quoting ff0
Not sure what that means, but I have a vague inkling that no one really does that.
Right. I think that's where certain authors are right about 'existential' time. It is directed and finite. Gold won't buy it back. And even the usual lifespan is not guaranteed.
Quoting apokrisis
Very well put.
What I have in mind as an unacknowledged-by-some foundation is the know-how of everyday life. We understand an ordinary language (a meta-language for science). We know how to exist socially, to form relationships. We don't doubt our senses. We know how read the instruments. We have a basic understanding of the counting numbers, which can lead us to the rational numbers, etc. We don't question and test everything. We don't doubt that others are really there, even if we can't experience their emotion-sensation-consciousness in the same way they do. We don't bite our tongue when we chew our food. We stand a certain distance in conversations so as not to freak people out. And so on.
In short, there is a dim foundation of shared, trusted half- or non-conscious assumptions that set the stage for science. The base of the pyramid is sunk in the sand. So scientific theories have been left standing after all the criticism that seemed relevant in terms of human purposes. Even that is perhaps an approximation. Among other things, it assumes that the institutions of science function perfectly --that valid criticisms weren't repressed or ignored. That individual scientists in power aren't emotionally attached to this or that experiment.
To be clear, I like science. But I find the tendency to think of science as a replacement for philosophy more or less absurd.
Quoting tom
It happens all the time, though maybe I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. Look around. The sceintific vision of objective reality is taken wholesale out of its context as a disavowed (unquestioned) metaphysics. Space is the space of physics. Time is the time of physics. Humans are the animals of biology. If none of this is objectionable to you, then you may be missing out on some good philosophy.
I can't speak for you. But I think of science largely as a tool. It gives us comfort and free time to do things that are better or higher than science. For some (and even for me when it comes to particular slivers of science), research itself is one of the deepest pleasures. I get that. But humans (and philosophy) have more things to do than (only) obsess over epistemology and sing the glory of science.
The 'problem' is a focus on the public and objective that leaves our personal, mortal situation more or less unthought. Human time is finite. The future and the past mingle in some non-mathematical present. The now isn't a real number. It's a non-repeatable moment and a baby-step toward the grave. Space is the space of a two-footed body and of human eyesight, of obstacles and the object to be reached. Then of course there's the fact of being a distinct person --exactly the distinct person obliterated in the abstract interchangeable observer of science. This forum is a zoo of distinct and stubborn personalities. Where are all the unbiased people hiding? It's a role we play in a lab coat, which is not to say that no one plays it well. The point is that science is a particular ideal, a purification in one direction of this mess we're in.
I tend to think of philosophy in the original sense, as the pursuit of wisdom, so for example to me science really is natural philosophy, which is part of the general philosophical project of seeing how things hang together, which has the practical purpose of helping us orient ourselves in the world.
To me, academic philosophy as we know it (conceptual analysis, say) is just a specialist subset of philosophy - but scientists, natural philosophers, also have to be philosophers even in this narrow sense, at times.
The pursuit of wisdom also involves guarding against rhetoric/hypnotism (hence the "therapeutic" aspect). And it also involves a certain amount of creativity in the realm of those biggest, most abstract ideas (hence the more "continental" approach).
I think that is true to a large extent, though I think some are merely bitter or defiant. Also, it must surely be true that many people who have strived and achieved, especially highly, will not regret their striving,
Anyway, regarding the "regretters" - is their actual internal focus on lost time or the feeling that they have not been adequate to the task of having lived a more fulfilled, engaging/loving life I wonder? It is easy to blame lost time, but in life it seems quite hard to thrive - to "self-actualise"; to come out of our shells.
I have particularly enjoyed your writing on this thread BTW.
Another way of saying this is that science doesn't try to answer questions that don't make sense, or aren't falsifiable. What makes any answer to any question that isn't falsifiable better than any other answer that isn't falsifiable?
Quoting ff0
What is an eternal, universal truth as opposed to just the truth? What is the 'deepest' kind of talk, as opposed to just talking about the way things are?
Good point. For me the word 'shrewd' comes to mind. I feel shrewd for not being seduced by this or that formulation of formulaic wisdom. But I do sometimes envy the formulaic. They enjoy the sense of knowing it all. I only get what might be called the narcissistic pleasure of understanding myself as less seduced. I don't get to be the prophet. I am boring common sense, slightly purified.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm a student of science (engineering path), and I must say that I don't see how science can tell me who I should be. On the other hand, the philosophers don't necessarily convince me either. I chose science because I've never been able to shake the sense that philosophy was basically opinion-mongering.
Nevertheless, the way good friends talk about 'life' around a campfire as they share a bottle bourbon seems 'deeper' than science to me. They talk about the total situation of life. Love, career, death, religion, art, etc. And they do it in a shared language that as far as I know has never been formulated or processed by philosophy or science. I think the wise-man fantasy involves getting behind life and language with a formula that sums the total situation up once and for all. In my experience the most believable philosophers are those who point at the gap between systems and what they'd like to conquer --being alive as a particular human in all of its complexity. (Unfortunately, even some of these 'existential' philosophers tend to impose some lingo and get themselves talked about formulaically. )
Quoting ff0
Right. Religion at least tackles the stuff we care about most, but it doesn't necessarily convince. So for me, I suppose, 'philosophy' is a kind of bourbon-around-the-fire conversation about life for those without religion --including the religion of being scientific with a kind of ideological purity. There's a spirit of not-knowing, I'd say. But I must confess that this skeptical position (the thought that religion and science aren't enough) is also a form of belief. It too has its stubbornness and commitment --to the 'obvious' perhaps.
I relate to this. I have my dreams, etc. But I find that I largely have to react to life. I try to lean on wise abstract words. I reason that death itself won't hurt. That a certain amount of risk in unavoidable if one wants to live a life worth living. Life bumps us into an anxious abstract mode at times. It forces us to reason about trauma. We make certain adjustments (if we can manage it), and then we settle back down. We get re-absorbed in the relatively smooth patterns of our lives.
But as you say, we largely avoid the disaster that threatens us next month. The closer the disaster is to us in the future, the more we prioritize it, as a general rule. The vague, unavoidable disaster of aging and death waits for the most part behind all the smaller disasters that threaten to fuck us up without ending us. It's a quiet evil laughter that accompanies our otherwise successful disaster-dodging. But it's also the one true cure for the hustle and hassle of this jumping and sliding.
Quoting ff0
I also relate to this large and small, which I hinted at in your Hegel thread. I am small because I see that I am 'naked' (theoryless, godless) in this world that eats me. But I am 'large' in my disbelief that anyone else is in on some secret. I know what it feels like to have the secret. But it passes as the pain sets in. I don't mean despair (though sometimes something like that.) I mean bodily pain. Maybe just annoying boils on the face. It only takes so much bodily malfunction to shut down the mood that knows the secret. In short, I can see that someone really believes in their secret and remain unseduced. For the most part, they seem wisest who just do the usual things with grace. Even talking about this stuff is a little stiff and earnest. I guess it scratches a certain itch. I thought I'd give online philosophy a try, having read not much but having talked quite a bit about life. ('Philosophy' has an academic smell.)
Quoting ff0
Yeah. That's what my sciency peers don't get. Go truth. Go atheism. Go agnosticism. But it's pretty obvious that the guts are set one way or another. There's a limit to what we can sincerely question or doubt. There's something fixed about personality. Some arguments will never go anywhere. Things just 'sound right' and 'feel right' differently to different people. All the objectivity talk in the world doesn't cancel the objective fact (ding ding) of endless disagreement. This idea that we are tossed into a role doesn't gel well with the idea of us being perfectly free, perfectly rational beings. It seems to be that we have some decisions open to us and others closed. 'I can't turn off what turns me on.'
You're the second person to talk about philosophical conversations being "deeper" than scientific ones.
Talk of Love, career, death Etc is really talking about the cultural influences in our lives. Really we are just talking about the icing on the cake. Science gets that the cake itself and its ingredients including the ingredients of the icing.
It seems to be that those conversations aren't deep at all but are rather shallow compared to talking about how those things even exist in the first place and why we even experience them and talk about them.