Montana Freethinkers

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Why Philosophy

Justin Whitaker
September 28, 2005

Note: After my presentation of this to the UM Philosophy Society, one of the comments was that I failed to define philosophy. Fair enough. Philosophy is the quest for unchanging truths, those which were true three thousand years ago and those which will be true so far into the future. Philosophy is not limited to university philosophy departments, and in many cases the teachers and students in such departments are not doing philosophy. Philosophy is also found in fine arts, literature, music, theology, the sciences, and mathematics and in fact many of the worlds great philosophers were initially trained and worked in one of these fields.

I had thought about going through history and picking out philosophers' statements about philosophy, about what it meant to them in life, and so on, but I think instead I'll present some of that around themes that are more pertinent to my own reasons for pursuing philosophy.

These themes are death, society, and human nature. And I think they need to be confronted in that order, both for the individual, and for mankind writ large. I also want to talk about eastern philosophy as an alternative history of human maturation from what we have around us in the west.

So, Death: I came across an interesting paper on Socrates today with a rather pithy but solid argument concerning philosophy and death.

Can anyone remember what Socrates is famous for saying about philosophy and death? He says, "…philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death." He says this in the Phaedo, Socrates' last conversation with friends, a conversation which was mostly concerned with comforting these friends.

So how does the argument work? How is philosophy the practice of death, and what good is this? It goes like this:

Philosophy is the quest for the unchanging: all philosophers strive to make statements about the world which are always true; non-philosophers settle for the manipulation of the particulars around them.
The unchanging is immortal: it is not just that it survives beyond its first utterance, but it survives political upheaval, death, carnage, all sorts of change in which non-philosophers presume 'everything has changed, nothing will be the way it was before, say, 9-11'. Hogwash - as much as every generation (including many of its philosophers) feels itself unique, different from all past generations, they are wrong, and I'll talk more about that in a minute.
Thus philosophy is the quest for the immortal: and as such, it is through philosophy that we survive political upheaval, carnage, change, and all of the uncertainty which comes with being a human being, two thousand years ago or today.

The way this comes into life is as follows:

Once a philosopher conquers his fear of death he no longer desires to live. It is to be remembered that Socrates does not see this as a death wish. We can only desire what we do not have. A true philosopher does not desire to live because he or she already possesses life.

And thus it is the same with Buddhist traditions, in which meditation on death plays a key role in the early education of monks and nuns. For the central teaching of Buddhism is that nothing in life is ultimately stable, lasting, or unchanging. This is a simple thing that most of us can grasp intellectually, but then when our car breaks down or someone we love dies, we still get angry, depressed, withdrawn, and so on. This exemplifies an important understanding of most eastern philosophy: that we can know something in two very distinct ways, merely intellectually, or both intellectually and affectively/emotionally. Meditation on death is a very emotional process, but it moves that intellectual understanding of change into the affective realm, thus bringing the intellect and emotions into harmony, overcoming the dissonance of knowing things change and still having the emotions of grasping and clinging to so much in life. Once we have accomplished this, change and the loss which comes with it no longer through us into selfish emotional turmoil, but rather we are capable of being creative in that flux, helping others, and finding solutions.

Society:

When you study history alongside philosophy, you come to realize, as many have, that in many ways philosophers are just a manifestation of whatever society they happen to live in.

Socrates is a product of an emerging democracy and the opposition of such a city state with its neighbor Sparta, a military oligarchy, as well as the civilizations of Ionia and Egypt amongst others.
Descartes is a product of Catholic scholasticism failing to confront the growing skepticism of European society in the 1500s and the insanity of the 30 years war raging across Europe.
Kant is a product of Newtonian physics, which seemed to give perfect mechanistic explanations to the world around us, as well as his pious Christian upbringing where from his mother he gained a sense of awe, both from "the starry skies above us, and the moral law within us."
Nietzsche is a product of growing material wealth in 19th century Europe and the consequent lack of spiritual or religious depth amongst many Europeans.
Simone de Beauvoir is a product of twentieth century French bourgeois liberalism, born of the confusion and madness of World War II, along with the Existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre.

But in a very important way, each philosopher transcends his or her own time in a way that the non-philosopher simply cannot. Think for a moment of society without philosophy, or at least without philosophical concepts… What we get is a blooming buzzing confusion of immediacy. That may be going too far, for the non-philosopher generally has some grasp of the world, some framework through which things seem to make sense, even if it is the infantile: 'there are good guys, and there are bad guys….'

But such a grasp is failing in that it can only hold so much of the world, the present year, decade, or generation can make sense, while beyond that things get fuzzy. The job of the philosopher, as any reader of Plato will know, is to meticulously question those concepts we use to explain the world around us such that these concepts of ours make sense of more and more of the world. So in fact all philosophy is a fleeing from society, fleeing from the immediate and confusing world, toward a richer understanding of it, such that when he or she returns, as any philosopher must, the confusion of the world is overcome. No philosopher ever really escapes his or her society, but each gains a perspective which the toiling non-philosopher never can. In general the non-philosopher is either an uncritical skeptic or cynic, who believes that there is no perspective to be had: 'history is bunk' as Henry Ford is famous for saying, and surely philosophy as well. Or the non-philosopher is somehow satisfied with whatever narrow 'good and evil', 'black and white', 'blue state / red state' image of the world they have inherited from their society. Thus to be philosophical requires two things: a sense of awe in the world and the belief that history (or philosophy) is NOT bunk, and dissatisfaction. The doorway into philosophy is awe, that which pushes you through it is dissatisfaction.

So it is in Buddhist practice (along with many other traditions) that one physically leaves society for a while to contemplate the larger and yet simple truths of life. The Buddhist learns to accept certain changes in society over time and place, but through practice he or she (hopefully) does not get swept up in these changes, and is able to live and work creatively within society. And thus it is the philosopher, or those who grasp and understand philosophy who are capable of effecting the greatest change in society, while the non-philosopher is in a sense, swept along. And I quote from Gandhi, one of those who uses philosophy so beautifully: "All our philosophy is as dry as dust if it is not immediately translated into some act of living service."

Human Nature:

I am one to believe that both Truth, with a capital T, and human nature are, in a sense, eternal and unchanging. Despite all the change around us, some things just don't change. I think this is why we can read Plato's dialogues, or the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, let alone Nietzsche or Sartre and see the profundity of their questions and insights, and their concrete application in our lives. The unique thing about philosophy is that we don't read it as social anthropology, to see how people way back when thought about the world.

That's not to say that things don't change, but only that, in my opinion the deeper within we look the more things stay the same. The surface is ALWAYS changing. But even if you say that humanity is 'socially constructed all the way down' you still might have to suppose that there has been something about mankind that has persisted over time unchanged that allows for his being 'socially constructed all the way down' in the first place.

And, it is just this sense that there is an underlying sameness which connects us with the ancients just as much as we are connected with people around the world in our own times, that brings out our most characteristically 'human' traits. For me human nature is simply that, the capability to realize interconnectedness and interdependence with others in the world, and to act from that realization.

But, like the realization of death (through which we learn to truly live), the realization of interconnectedness, or fundamental intersubjectivity, through which we learn to truly live with one another, takes a lot of energy and thought to move from the merely intellectual to the deeper affective level of understanding. It is not an easy task, and it never has been. But, it would seem that the rewards are well worth the effort. And that, for me, is Why Philosophy.

Sources:

Philosophy: The Morbid Science by Douglas Vaughn

http://home.att.net/~leefrank/newnotes/mar29_04.html (random stuff, I looked up "Blooming buzzing confusion" and found out a bit about it here)

Simone De Beauvoir: more on her.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius online.