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.