Philosophers Anonymous
Jun. 22nd, 2006 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkagesI knew before I went to college that I did not want to become a philosopher. All my peers who wanted to be philosophers, and all my older friends who were philosophers, shared two characteristics. First, they loved to argue; second, they had a solid and unwavering belief in their own correctness. If they were, like Socrates, questioners and gadflies, I was inevitably their counterpart, the Socratic interlocutor, or dupe, whose job it was to agree with their dogmatic assertions and to provide erroneous assertions of my own which they could set to rights. In short, where philosophy was concerned, I was, as Socrates might well have recognized, a "bottom," and I could only put up with being one for so long.
Unfortunately, my temperament was such that I could not simply revolt and become an alpha-male dogmatic asserter and questioner. So, once in college, I put philosophy in abeyance, and went into literature instead. But while in college, I ran into another way of studying philosophy: intellectual history. Under this new scheme, I didn't have to worry about the underlying empirical truth or falsity of the philosopher I was reading; I just had to understand how that philosopher's system worked, and how it generated or influenced other systems. So, when I studied Aristotle, I didn't have to defend myself against people who asked how I could read him when his theories of biology were so obviously wrong that even Galen was an improvement. I could instead talk about the way in which his theories of potentiality and actuality may have come about from his observation of the development of frogs. Even the second of my two great Aristotle teachers, Timothy Smiley, who was a respected logician, period, asserted that Aristotle's deductive system could not be simply superseded by modern formal logic, but had to be considered as an alternate, if slightly less totalizing model.
While the ability to read and understand philosophy was one of the great pleasures of my life, it was essentially a solitary pleasure. I was still a non-philosopher. When I tried to talk about philosophy with other non-philosophers, they didn't know what I was tallking about. The same was the case when I tried to talk to philosophers. I did not know the secret handshake. My formulation of problems was at right-angles with their way of handling them. Inevitably, they would argue at me and tell me that I was wrong. (I can appreciate, from the reverse side, how Robert Pirsig came up with his misguided ideas about Aristotle -- they were wrong, although who knows what would have happened had he bumped into Jacques Derrida -- and got nailed as an outsider at the Committee for Social Thought.) (In an irony, my first great Aristotle professor, Jonathan Lear, is now on the Committee for Social Thought.)
I still have the same problem. I read philosophy, and I want to talk to other people about it, but I don't want to be lectured to or made to feel that I am at the bottom of some dialectical trap. I've got a project right now on one of Kant's minor pre-Critical treatises, and I need help. Where is it to be found? Must I become a philosopher, or is there such a thing as Philosophers Anonymous, where all the philosophy can be leached out of my head and replaced with something more lucrative, like the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula? You tell me.
Unfortunately, my temperament was such that I could not simply revolt and become an alpha-male dogmatic asserter and questioner. So, once in college, I put philosophy in abeyance, and went into literature instead. But while in college, I ran into another way of studying philosophy: intellectual history. Under this new scheme, I didn't have to worry about the underlying empirical truth or falsity of the philosopher I was reading; I just had to understand how that philosopher's system worked, and how it generated or influenced other systems. So, when I studied Aristotle, I didn't have to defend myself against people who asked how I could read him when his theories of biology were so obviously wrong that even Galen was an improvement. I could instead talk about the way in which his theories of potentiality and actuality may have come about from his observation of the development of frogs. Even the second of my two great Aristotle teachers, Timothy Smiley, who was a respected logician, period, asserted that Aristotle's deductive system could not be simply superseded by modern formal logic, but had to be considered as an alternate, if slightly less totalizing model.
While the ability to read and understand philosophy was one of the great pleasures of my life, it was essentially a solitary pleasure. I was still a non-philosopher. When I tried to talk about philosophy with other non-philosophers, they didn't know what I was tallking about. The same was the case when I tried to talk to philosophers. I did not know the secret handshake. My formulation of problems was at right-angles with their way of handling them. Inevitably, they would argue at me and tell me that I was wrong. (I can appreciate, from the reverse side, how Robert Pirsig came up with his misguided ideas about Aristotle -- they were wrong, although who knows what would have happened had he bumped into Jacques Derrida -- and got nailed as an outsider at the Committee for Social Thought.) (In an irony, my first great Aristotle professor, Jonathan Lear, is now on the Committee for Social Thought.)
I still have the same problem. I read philosophy, and I want to talk to other people about it, but I don't want to be lectured to or made to feel that I am at the bottom of some dialectical trap. I've got a project right now on one of Kant's minor pre-Critical treatises, and I need help. Where is it to be found? Must I become a philosopher, or is there such a thing as Philosophers Anonymous, where all the philosophy can be leached out of my head and replaced with something more lucrative, like the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula? You tell me.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 12:14 am (UTC)I think I managed to get away with not reading any Kant other than the "Prolegomena to the Metaphysic of Morals." Wait, can that be right? I must have had to read *something* else.
I was fascinated by ethics. I think I ultimately came to the conclusion that the ethical theorists were just looking for systems to prop up what they already believed because it was what they'd been indoctrinated with. Maybe not the Utilitarians. But Utilitarianism is icky, so meh.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 12:15 am (UTC)Bunk
Date: 2006-06-23 12:54 am (UTC)There are a few issues which your comment that "philosophy is bunk" raises, perhaps issues which might be better discussed viva voce. How coextensive is philosophy with the "life of the mind?" Is it possible to live in the world without making philosophical judgments? (This is what I was getting at with my talk of "Philosophers Anonymous.")Is it more expedient to do so?
Do you think that jurisprudence is not philosophical? Do you think that the evolving social-contract theories underlying law are "bunk?"
I'm starting to get overexcited and carried away with all these questions, and you don't have to answer them.
I will say one thing, though. I have nothing of pragmatic value to offer the world. If the world is pure, flowing Machtpolitik, and I survive for the time being in a small, inefficient eddy, I am surprised that it has not disappeared by now and blotted me out. I am not a philosopher, as I have said, but thinking about things is what keeps me going. If philosophy, considered broadly, is indeed bunk, so much mental masturbation (here disapproved of, Biblically, as fruitless), then there is nothing to me. I refuse to admit this.
Re: Bunk
Date: 2006-06-23 03:11 am (UTC)I dunno. Maybe my brain has deteriorated (I suspect mad cow disease), but I find that the older I get, the less patience I have for systems and theories. I had professors in college who encouraged me to go on in philosophy. I didn't do it in large part because I wanted to do something "useful," whatever that means. I wanted to help alleviate the suffering in the world, and I didn't think philosophy was the way to do it. To me, philosophy was fun, and I felt like there were more important things I needed to do. Now? I don't know.
I was drawn to philosophy initially because I wanted to be *good.* I thought studying philosophy would help me figure out how to be good. I worried about how to be good a lot. Now I worry less about how to be good and more about doing it. And I feel like the amount of suffering in the world is so vast, whatever I'm doing to alleviate it is OK. I don't have to worry about how it fits into a system.
I'm rambling. I think I should stop before I embarrass myself further.
Re: Bunk
Date: 2006-06-23 03:35 am (UTC)I think that you are good, and that you never needed to go to a philosophy department to find that out. I find your goal of alleviating human suffering compelling. It's too much for me to handle; my anger and indignation get the better of me, I get delusions of grandeur, and I crash. My best shot at saving lives is repeated apheresis. (I even screwed that up, once.) In the meantime, the study of philosophy gives me the illusion of a life of the mind.
Re: Bunk
Date: 2006-06-23 04:33 am (UTC)I don't know what "apheresis" means and we misplaced our dictionary in the move. I'm realizing that my comments sound incredibly dismissive of your concerns, and that's not what I want. Maybe philosophy is incredibly important. It's enough that it's important to you. I just know that for me, it stopped working.
I think philosophy graduate students are what really turned me off to philosophy. I was taking a Nietzsche seminar where I think I was the only undergraduate. I looked around at the philosophy graduate students, I listened to them talk and I did not want to be one. I really, really, did not want to be one.
Maybe I need to exercise my brain. I haven't read much Martha Nussbaum, and none since college, it seems to me. Maybe I should check out that book you emailed me about.
Re: Bunk
Date: 2006-06-23 09:48 am (UTC)Re: Bunk
Date: 2006-06-23 01:29 pm (UTC)Re: Bunk
Date: 2006-06-23 07:57 am (UTC)On reading this post, I had the same feeling. Someone who could actually get charged up about the Grundlegung, as I did at age 19 or so -- that person is viewed dimly, like one of those little keychain single-photo viewers you used to get in the '80s when you went to Magic Mountain with your friend and the lady at the gate with a camera snapped a picture of you, and you happen across it two decades later, faded to dross but still vaguely recognizable as a souvenir of someone you're sure you must once have been.
I'm sure that 19-year-old would view this as a loss, but from here it feels like progress; if only a lighting of the way to dusty death.
No editorializing; just a datum.
The problem is not just philosophers...
Date: 2006-06-23 06:10 am (UTC)Re: The problem is not just philosophers...
Date: 2006-06-23 09:50 am (UTC)Re: The comment
Date: 2006-06-23 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 01:40 pm (UTC)Philosophers are constantly asking questions that cannot have definitive answers. If Monty Python is right about philosophers being huge drunks, I can see why.
And as a real official Business School Graduate (tm), I can tell you there are better things to fill your head with than Black-Scholes. Finance, like economics, is just a highly-quantifiable branch of psychology, anyway, and in spite of being highly quantifiable, it possesses about the rigor of Freudian psychoanalysis. You're probably better off reading William James, or something.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 06:41 pm (UTC)