A Reply to “Reflections on Philosophy” by Manarch
What does it mean to “make a difference” philosophically?
Dear manarch,
I very much enjoyed reading every aspect of your piece, Reflections on Philosophy, in The Taoist Online, and hope many people read it. You are “il miglior fabbro.” It goes deep into important ground, and is very well written and coherent. Highly recommended!
I also enjoyed reading your piece because of our similar backgrounds and temperaments. You mentioned the “surf-hippy-biker sub-culture.” I’m definitely a product of the coastal California culture and environment of those times. I also read Pirsig and Huxley, and was most deeply into Castaneda. I’ve spent the last 20 years reading philosophy seriously. You’ve mentioned Rorty, who I’ve read. My “guiding light” has been Wittgenstein.
You and I agree on many things, yet we came to slightly different end-conclusions. You said in your piece:
“I went in supposing philosophy was all about being philosophical about life, and came out thinking it is only about generalized propositions that abstracted the world.”
I don’t see these as separate, opposing “about’s” or as one being better than the other. I see them as a Ying and Yang, moving back and forth between them. (I’m big on the high-level Taoist perspective.)
In this piece, I offer my end-conclusions. While I think they might have value, I recognize they are subjective, and present them as subjective. Please forgive my possibly aggressive, arrogant writing style — it’s just ingrained style — my intentions is absolutely friendly collegial discourse.
We part paths almost immediately looking back at Locke:
“Locke’s thesis, taken literally… Locke’s memory theory was false.”
I’d say instead Locke’s thesis was brilliant in 1689. To be sure, he got some things wrong. Over the past four centuries, philosophers have pointed out his errors, beginning in the decades after he published his thesis. Not to mention how pathetic his thesis look in the light of 21st-century neuroscience. That said, the essence of his thesis remains brilliant. Memory is a key part of the self. Who would deny that today? It’s not less brilliant now because people today see the essence of his thesis as axiomatic.
Consider a decrepit Victorian house in San Francisco in its original state. No one wants to live in it, but should it be bulldozed for a new house? Instead, thoughtful remodeling — picking and choosing what to keep and what to change — brings back the delight we find in its original inspiration.
Along a similar line, but more broadly, we part paths on academic (“proper”?) philosophy:
“A philosophical proposition is a generalized, abstracted, claim about the world made within a systematically reasoned thesis. And it has a quite particular, if dense, obscure, sense of grammar and style.”
I agree very much with your definition of philosophy in your first sentence. I see your second sentence as ad hominem. As a former advertising copywriter, I hate the style you describe as much as you do. However, Kant had brilliant thoughts, regardless of how odiously he expressed them. (The Victorian house metaphor applies here too).
One thing I realized about academic philosophy, after reading part of a translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, is that, effectively, they could only write first drafts. They didn’t really have word processors or typing pools or editors. Although contemporary academic philosophers have these tools, they are sometimes under time constraints and/or deadlines to publish.
(By his own semi-tacit admission, Tolkien could have produced a better Lord of the Rings with more time and resources. Having read LOTR dozens of times as a lit major, I can see how profusely he failed his own ambitions — especially in light of how profoundly he achieved them.)
Another “ad hominem” point in your Nietzsche quote (‘re-edited’ for clarity?):
“Philosophers all pose as if they had discovered their real opinions through a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic. At bottom their opinion is an assumption they defend with reasons they sought after the fact. They are for the most part wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize as ‘truths’.”
So? Philosophers are human like the rest of us — defensive, prejudiced, etc. (For example, I’m very sensitive to criticism that I’m in “attack mode” writing this reply.) It seems ironic to criticize philosophers’ subjectivity and then say “all ideas are subjective.” I couldn’t agree more profoundly with you that humans are inescapably subjective. We should forgive philosophers for being “human, all too human” and let it go at that, as you go on to perfectly articulate:
“This is not to say philosophical propositions can be easily dismissed, not at all. It is no stretch to say human societies are grounded by some seriously good philosophy both east and west, as are explanations for things that defy the narrow lens of science.”
My above points are largely superficial. We hit much deeper substance with your thoughts on the purpose of philosophy:
An ideal ‘philosophy’ [is] about attaining some kind of wisdom about ‘life’ that [leads] to peace-of-mind, ‘being philosophical’ about life… Western philosophy rinses the world and life clean of intuition and imagination, holding it at arm’s length under a theoretical microscope, and in doing so offers little access to either as commonly lived experience… We find the one thing a person can do [is] improving our self as a person.”
First, you examine and contrast several times the difference between theory and practice in philosophy. I totally agree with the end goal about “being philosophical about life” as a way to live a better life. However, I disagree that philosophical theory is in any way a distraction from practical philosophy.
One can and should be philosophical about life in a noble and productive way. It’s possible one can achieve that without learning philosophical theory. But it’s harder, and proportionately less common, because learning to be philosophical about life without theory is “learning on the job” — it’s more trial and error.
(My experience in formal education is it never teaches you practical applications. It’s necessarily abstract. I took classes to learn CAD. Although the classes didn’t prepare me for the real world, they gave me a foundation. At least I produced halfway-competent work, even though it was often missed the mark from a practical perspective.)
(Also, I think education by its nature relies on its students to figure out practice on their own (as I struggled to do). If you can’t do that, don’t bash education, bash yourself for not seeing how to bridge the gap. It’s not impossible.)
Second, you talk about living a better life, improving oneself, etc. How do you define “a better life”? “Improving yourself”? “Making life worthwhile”? You seem to suggest those definitions are already established. I don’t think they are. I’d argue studying theory can help people define those things. So many people just go with whatever they hear from society, which seems to me to be “make money, acquire material possessions, and have lots of fun on the side.”
Reading and learning philosophy exposes you to many different answers to those questions and takes you through a range of answers and their pluses and minuses. Then you can better decide what the answers are for you.
Turning to a more positive critique…
I heartily agree philosophy is not wisdom or knowledge when you say:
“Philosophy is clearly far less a ‘love of wisdom’ and than a ‘love of knowledge’, arguably at best a ‘love of explaining the world’.”
That’s a perfect definition of philosophy — “a love of explaining the world.” That is exactly what philosophy is about imho. Moreover, that’s what people are about. We’re biologically and genetically programmed to explain everything we encounter, whether we actually attempt to, or not. I think of philosophy as explaining the 1% of things nobody else has successfully explained.
Of course, ultimately, it’s a hopeless task. (We can’t even be sure other people exist, or be sure we have any kind of agency.) We can’t and never will understand Being, as Heidegger called it. If my understanding is correct and I’m not bungling the wording, I think Taoists would agree with Heidegger on that — all we can do is accept life as it is and “go with the flow” — there is no enlightenment.
But that doesn’t mean explaining is useless:
“To think that no one can be ‘wise’ because no one can know all there is to know in an infinite universe is patently absurd.”
One the most indelibly etched things I learned in lit class was roughly “just because we can’t point to one novel as the greatest of all novels, we can still point to War and Peace and say it’s a better novel than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
You say — brilliantly! — although you regard it as a problem:
“Being philosophical has an intrinsic problem — subjective relativism. Ideas can ‘make sense’ as long as they ‘feel right’ in the liminal mental space of our imaginations. They ‘light up’ in a way that has a sense of the transcendent, a sense of luminosity or ‘rightness’ to them, maybe even a faint tinge of the numinous. Is this just the rhetorical power of ideas working on a desire for some kind of deeper ground for day-to-day life that inflates ‘meaning’ and ‘realness’? In what does the ‘real’ and ‘meaningful’ consist? The thing being perceived or the perception itself?
“We are faced with metaphysical questions about the nature of reality that, no matter the answers, will always be followed by the most obvious response — ‘great, so, um, now what?’ ”
I don’t see a problem at all. We both passionately agree there is no perfect explanation (philosophical or otherwise) of the world, so why worry about it? Nothing will ever answer the question “so now what?” (The cool thing about existentialism is it tells us there is no answer.)
“Put more simply, the rhetorical power of our imaginations so far exceeds the limits of language and reason as to warrant caution.”
Totally agreed again. Poets are free to exceed the limits. Philosophers apply caution. They search for the boundaries. Each philosopher picks a portion of the presumed boundary and examines it from a certain perspective. That survey yields data points, which will ultimately never be turned into a boundary, but that’s ok. Any truly thoughtful person (like you) can examine a map of the data points and come to see a boundary that is ultimately as legitimate as anyone’s.
We don’t need an exact boundary because we don’t have the ability to discern one in the first place. But we always benefit when we can discern the boundary more precisely. We can answer the question “so now what?” better than we could before.
The fundamental way through all the issues you bring up about life and philosophy life in your piece I believe to be the way of Socrates, the “original” (OG) philosopher — we come up with our ideas and examine them. We scrub our ideas with questions from all sides. What comes out of the wash is cleaner. As a wise public elementary school principal once told me, “progress is always good” even if we have to revise our ideas of progress as we go along.
I see a Socratic bent in these passages from your piece:
“It is hard not to wonder if there really is anything new under the sun. Just different ways of seeing — subjectively perceiving — a shared objective reality. Logically, it cannot be any other way… While differences between people are obviously real, they are nonetheless still constructs that can be changed if there is a will to…
“We soak up ideas and thoughts that become a part of our sense of ‘self’, our identity. Then, with monotonous regularity, we mount the inner battlements to defend these ideas at all costs against those who threaten them as if our lives depend on it. Ironically, we didn’t not exist as a person with a conscious awareness of being in the world before we appropriated them either consciously or sub-consciously…
“We all stand in relation to each other in an objective world, each from our subjective ‘view from somewhere’. Being able to do so with a little less turbulence seems to be something that should be accessible to more than just philosophers. In this light, being philosophical in a much simpler, popular, sense is something everyone has access to.”
I agree we cannot not have differences, that we soak up, become entrenched in, and defend ideas, yet we should be able to coexist with less turbulence. The “truth units” project is specifically intended to accept our subjectivity, and to some degree transcend it to reduce turbulence.
Socrates admitted “all I know is that I know nothing” yet insisted “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I think of his attitude as “epistemic responsibility.” We can only wear the clothes we have. Still, we need to keep them laundered, if we are to accomplish anything good in close company with others, which it seems we must.
Thank you for reading!
