Why I love philosophy*

Philosophy has come under attack a bit on this blog. Martin is worried about the unnecessary termino-logical contortions philosophers seem to love putting themselves through in making simple points, and Frank Weyns has argued that philosophy constitutes a wild-goose chase for absolute truth. (THIS MAY BE A LITTLE UNFAIR. FRANK WEYNS’ POSITION ON THIS WAS MORE NUANCED THAN I GOT ON FIRST READING…PERHAPS CLOSER TO THE ONE I OUTLINE HERE THAN I NOTICED. (edit)) He has also claimed, in a response to a post of Katy’s, that feminist philosophy is impossible.

In this post I shan’t argue against either of these claims about the nature of philosophy (directly). Rather I’ll put forward a different view, my own, which is contrary to those mentioned above. The reader can decide for themselves.

Is philosophy the search for absolute truth? Maybe. Is there any such thing? Maybe. Either answer to the latter question (yes or no) is to my mind hubristic – rather as any definite answer to the question of whether or not there is a God. The only respectable position on such matters is either agnosticism or a self-professed confession of faith.

While I think philosophy might be a search for absolute truth, and that that search may or may not be futile, it is not the reason I love philosophy.* Nor is it the reason I think philosophy should (and I think it should!) be pursued.

I think of philosophy as a discipline whose principal aim is the challenging of any and all preconceptions simply in order to open up new avenues of thought and enquiry. Forget about absolute truth: Descartes argued that there were two completely inseparable realms, the mental and the physical, of which the mental is in some sense prior; Kant that the mind has an essential role in the constitution of the physical world; Berkely that there may be no physical world whatever. These assertions may (for all we know) be true or false – scientists have yet to disprove esse ist percipi. What is interesting (for me) is not whether they are really true or false, but the ideas themselves – seeing how these ideas fit into a world view, how attractive or inattractive that world view might be, how they challenge basic preconceptions that people (now and/or then) have taken to be obvious. Such enquiry first reveals limits to what we can know about the world, and then fills in the gaps exposed by those limits with arguments that should, I think, be judged not by whether or not they take us closer to absolute truth (whatever that may or may not be), but rather by a) their deductive rigor (they must, pace Martin, be at least logically consistent)and b) aesthetic constraints like elegance, simplicity, conformity to common sense, and so on.

This sort of radical challenging of basic preconceptions** is in fact common to the very best human achievements in science, philosophy, art, music, literature, and mathematics (to name a few). Whether or not we call certain people working these fields “philosophers” comes down to a terminological quibble; and of course not all mathematicians, scientists or what have you are philosophers even in this sense. But some (by my definition here) certainly are. I think there is a plain difference between those mathematicians who, for instance, use antecendently established algorithms to code up secrets and those mathematicians who behave more like philosophers, who challenge basic mathematical preconceptions (does -1 have a root? Are there infinite numbers?). Like stories could be told for other disciplines (think of the humdrum scientist working on hair-care products as opposed the theoretical physicist who suggests there may be things neither wave nor particle), and in each case folks of the latter “philosophical” kind tend to be the truly great ones (e.g Kurt Goedel in maths, Wittgenstein in philosophy, Albert Einstein/Werner Heisenberg*** in physics, James Joyce in literature, Arnold Schoenberg in music, Malevich in art to name some contemporaries).

To my mind this view of philosophy makes it plain that feminist philosophy is possible and distinct from political feminism. Political feminism is concerned with actively furthering progress in terms of women’s rights and so forth; but a feminist philosophy involves challenging preconceptions people might have in various areas of thought – either in terms of ideas about the feminine, or ideas that do not include the feminine explicitly but perhaps should do. As an example of this sort of preconception, Frank Weyns wrote in a comment in support of his views about the impossibility of philosophical feminism:

Philosophy admirably concerns itself with human nature in general, i.e. it tries (or should try) to understand what is common across that broad spectrum we call the human race, i.e. it should continue to try hard to abstract from human specifics that relate to how individual political segments of society aspire to politically differentiate themselves from the human race in general..

Why this preconception of human nature as ungendered? One might think that part of what it is to be human is to be gendered, and thus that an exploration of human nature will involve understanding the essence of each gender and their relations; or one might think that the homogenized ungendered view of human nature is correct, but that (since most “great thinkers” of history have been white european males) the current ungendered view is in fact unnecessarily biased towards men. I think these avenues of overtly feminist philosophy can and should be explored****; for philosophy just is (on this view) precisely the exploration of such avenues, for no reason other than that they are there. Doing so is (to my mind) of great intrinsic value, and the reason I ❤ philosophy.*

*For etymologists: note the meta-love here 🙂

** of course the same constraints do not apply; but certainly great musicians, artists and so on challenge ones preconceptions in those areas.

***http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Heisenberg,Werner/Heisenberg,%20Werner%20-%20Physics%20and%20philosophy.pdf

**** checkout SEP on feminist philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology & so on.

Not yet converted – An Unbalanced View

Where might you be at the end of your part-time Philosophy MA conversion course? What will you have discovered?

While I wait for the results of my exam to see if I will be allowed to take my full vows for the real thing, I thought it might be interesting to see what I think about it all.

What strikes early on is the shear intricate detail of the arguments made in pursuit of a case and a sort of cloud that hides a presumably obvious message as to what is being said. Even articles of supposedly model explication confound me. Kant, while difficult at the best of times, infuriates by throwing in a second proposition before you realised there was a first one *, and ‘formers’ and ‘latters’ send me scurrying back to work out if the point I am looking at is ‘for’ or ‘against’.

No wonder logic is an attraction with its supposedly clear air of precision. But I have to date found it surprisingly irrelevant and more a case of converting arguments into fine-sounding modus ponens for the sake of appearance – at least as far as I can tell.

I realise that I am signing my own death-warrant with these confessions. But while we are at it let’s get to some meat. It is obviously all Descartes’ fault. He started it off – or rather set it off again after many centuries of innocent ponderings. We must sit by a fire and split reality into a subjective ‘I’ and an objective ‘real’ world. We must then spend the next three centuries or so trying to argue against our initial assumption without changing it – the very assumption that we have made in the first place.

No wonder the arguments are intricate; nearly, but not quite reaching their target. Knowledge, scepticism, free-will, the mind-body problem, time, the reality of morality et al, confound and confuse in knicker-twisted knots of ‘formers’ and ‘latters’ and compatibilist compromises.

But if only we had listened to Descartes we might have noticed that only God is allowed to change goals without changing them – if you see what I mean. In our analytic world the goal we have set is firmly bricked across. It is impenetrable to mere mortals.

So why do we persist? And why do we not listen to alternatives as hinted loudly by Thomas Nagel+, and why do we not notice the full blown torpedo in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’? Why do we not actually look at the hands of G.E. Moore’s before they get entangled in a fancy modus tollens?

I obviously have a lot to learn. But despite my apparent cynicism I still hope I am given the chance to achieve conversion. My interim conclusion is that philosophy is oddly compelling. The question (to the latter point) is “Why?”

Martin Earl

* See page P13 of Kant, I. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Gregor, M. (transl./ed) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). We are informed of the second proposition and then take a devil of time working out where the first one is within the previous six pages. (This is obviously Kant’s fault, not mine!)

+For example, “It is the aim of eventual unification [of the subjective and objective] that I think is misplaced.” Nagel, T. ‘Subjective and Objective’, in Mortal Questions, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979) p 213

 

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