Sunday, May 16, 2010

Studying philosophy


The New York Times' Opinionator blog/column has started a new section on philosophy.

Here's my two cents' worth:

One cynical commentor said: "Philosophers are little men in little offices who write unreadable papers about symbolic logic or metaethics. That's all."


In the academic world that tends to be the case.


But with or without professorial help, philosophy happens every time someone tries to decide what's the right thing to do, or what something means--especially when the answers don't seem clear-cut.


Every normal human being has a philosophy, even if they can't articulate it, and even if they are often uncertain about the right way to go, or suffer from second thoughts frequently.


So if I were going to teach a course in philosophy I'd start there. I'd have students try to tell me what their philosophy actually is. And if that stumped them, we could winkle it out with moral questions.


This is inductive reasoning--you derive ideas from facts. Tell me what you'd do in a bunch of situations and, if you've been honest, your philosophy will emerge from the answers.


After determining that we could then look at what philosophers/philosophies the students (usually unwittingly) follow already.


In other words, philosophy should be grounded in everyday life. It's not some academic exercise. We're constantly wrestling with difficult questions, from political positions to personal decisions.


They're difficult fundamentally because we're designed from the ground up to live in small hunting and gathering bands, and modern society comes as a nonstop shock to our fundamental nature. Our minds are flexible; we can certainly sort it out--but it helps to do that sorting.


Especially since for that life we needed to be both ruthlessly deadly and sweetly loving--the former to enemy tribes and dangerous animals; the latter to our own tribe members. Civilization greatly reduces the need for that ruthless part of our nature, but it's still there--and treating it as evil is both scientifically and philosophically wrong.


So as I hope you can see, philosophy connects to real life best when it's based on what science has taught us about our biological reality.


The problem with most academic philosophizing is that many professors treat philosophy as existing sui generis--independently of our reality, and of what science has taught us about human nature and its origins.


It's true that science can't hand us purpose on a platter. But by revealing how we're hardwired it reveals what the purpose we choose must reflect.


Thus, for example, any philosophy that either denies or exaggerates the differences between human males & females will wind up at war with human nature. Any philosophy that denies or denounces the animal underpinnings of human nature is equally doomed. Any philosophy that wanders into the weeds, playing endless head games, isn't going to work in the long run either.

Workable philosophies must also be grounded in social reality--in the way society works.


Too often right wingers long for a society that never was, while left wingers reach for one that never will be.


In political article comment threads in this newspaper, you constantly see this playing out--Tea Party types declaring a kind of rugged individualism they couldn't achieve without living completely off the grid, while leftists weave rainbow dreams that are equally impossible.


And without a sound grasp of science and society, a philosophy can't put down roots and grow.


On the other hand, if you do have a grasp of these things, it can be wonderfully illuminating to read the philosophers, and the philosophy embedded in other things, from Google's company motto ("Don't be evil") to the ideas about life implicit in, say, the Adagietto of Mahler's 5th Symphony (the implacable shadow of mortality cast across the greatest joys, while at the same time making them the greatest joys), to the existential cheeriness of Keith Haring's sophisticated stick figures.


There's philosophy everywhere if you know how to look for it.


I've had my best such moments while scuba diving over remote Indonesian coral reefs.


The novelist Joyce Cary said "freedom is the inside of the outside." Meaning that one form of freedom is a stoat in rut, running through the woods, while another is Spinoza ("Freedom comprises arranging your chains as comfortably as possible") contemplating the infinite in utter sillness, like a fly looking at a light bulb--and freedom truly comprising keeping both Spinoza's stillness and the utterly subjective action of the stoat in your heart, simultaneously.


I hope Dr. Critchley [author of the NYT series] can meet the challenge.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I recommend Richard Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." He elabourates on some points with which you would agree. He comes from a pragmatist tradition and is considered the father of neopragmatism. Cornel West (for better or worse) was one of his students. The latter is also a wonderful thinker.

You seem to be advocating a brand of highly pragmatist philosophy with a blend of ethical responsibility, or at least normativity that I haven't yet been able to determine. That's interesting.

I think it undercuts a great number of questions to say, "each has his own philosophy." That would mean that philosophy is relatively static. Philosophy is the challenging of norms. The question is not is this good or evil, but why good or evil. Who judges good or evil? Is there a guarantee that I will make the right decision? Who but men will hold me accountable? I agree with you that these kind of questions manifest themselves in all facets of everyday life, just as Socrates wondered into the markets to "philosophize."

Just be careful that you don't turn philosophy, even the personal ones (whatever that means) into a doctrine or dogma.

Ehkzu said...

Right you are, mate. I've been a philosophical pragmatist since my sophomore year in college.

And I'm sure that you can derive a core universal human morality from hardwired elements in the human character. That leaves room for lots of cultural diversity, of course. But not for "anything goes." It doesn't.

Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal" gets into this--how human morality co-evolved with our physical evolution.

And while each person has a philosophy, it's not necessarily his own. Many people just adopt the philosophy of their culture and let it go at that. Likewise some people's philosophies are static, others dynamic.

In other words, each has his own, but his own may suck--especially if they're philosophical stick in the muds.

The nice thing about pragmatism is that the principles never change (simply scientific method and knowledge applied to human needs), but the applications morph constantly as our knowledge (personal and collective) progresses.

Good and evil aren't ultimately determined by human decisions, but rather by human nature as it has evolved over that past five million years or so--basically, ever since our ancestors abandoned the trees, which engendered profound changes in human behavior.

Doctrine/dogma is inevitably reductionist--not up to the granularity of existence.

Thus in any given situation there is always a most right thing to do--but no list of rules can fully tell you what that thing is.

There are circumstances in which the most right thing to do might be to kill someone you love with all your heart, to give an extreme example. Or to sacrifice your life for someone you don't like personally, but who will save your family shortly thereafter, but only if you do something that kills you and saves him.

There are circumstances in which you must lie, cheat, kill, steal, betray, etc. Not many and not often--with luck, not ever. But they're out there.

Kohlberg's morality scale is helpful here (not sure I've got his name spelled right):

1. Baby morality: me, now.

2. Loyalty: My brother and I against my neighbor; my neighbor and us against the stranger.

3. Cop morality: the rules are the rules. Here's the Book: obey it. Inspector Javert from Les Miz.

4. Spirit of the Law: why we have judges and not just cops. This is where we take circumstances into account, and intent, etc.

5. The Greater Good/Triage: why you might oppose curing AIDS, because AIDS aids holding back overpopulation and consequent ecocide. This is extraordinarily hard to achieve, and under the most trying circumstances can cause PTSD.

Camus said your first question, philosophically, is whether to kill yourself--since an affirmative answer pretty well eliminates the need to answer anything else.

He said the second question, if you get to it, is deciding whether you can kill someone else. If not you've decided not to be an adult.

A little food for thought there.

Anonymous said...

But under every one of those propositions, the code, even evolutionary psychology is the question "why?". Pragmatism gives a use value to things. The question "why" does not add any value, just as "truth" does not necessarily add any value. Therefore both are irrelevant to hard line pragmatists.

My question is why? Why that code of behaviour, why have evolutionary morality, why did it happen, why are we faced with these situations? Beneath pragmatism and psychology (especially) is a normativity, a value judgment being made without posing it. The why questions that value judgment.

As to the scale of morality--there are thousands of counter examples. If morality were solely determined by our evolutionary history, could we really ever make a "moral" decision? What is an ethics? What even would be a decision? Is it that we are acting without agency in the evolutionary drama of existence and never really make a "decision" as an autonomous being? If that is true, then would not any decision be rational, or in the very least justifiable? We have to have bad decisions in order for evolution to occur. We all don't make the right decisions? Right?

In any regard, I don't think anything goes. We are bounded in every regard to a situation. The human situation. My life is finite, I am faced with finite decisions, finite resources (from power, to goods, to income, etc), so there is not an anything goes in any regard. Perhaps all we can acknowledge is that morality is baseless. There is no metaphysical Truth that holds the universe together.

Camus is a fun one.