First thought: Why do philosophy?
This is my first post, in what will hopefully be a regular blog. I am a graduate (ish) student in philosophy, though I may not be able to take up the offered position as soon as I had hoped, and I am aiming to use this blog to do a few things: (1) build up confidence in writing semi-publicly, (2) build up the skills required to write regularly and analytically, and (3) try to think through some ideas. I figure that the best way to do this will be to post regular, short, and only very lightly edited posts about the problems I’m thinking about and the stuff I’m reading. I will make mistakes here (in all sorts of ways), but my fear of making mistakes has often been my biggest weakness and I need to overcome it.
Recently I tried to write a short essay on why I think we should read philosophy. I still hope to write this essay (hopefully my thoughts will develop over future blog posts), but as I began to write I realised that the question I was really trying to ask myself was: Why do philosophy? This is a question that I have considered in the past, but I have often been frightened away from trying to seriously answer it. I’m frightened because I think it is difficult to ethically justify doing philosophy and because I find it central to my life. This creates a dilemma for me: How can I organise my life around a practice that I consider unethical? This post won’t seek to answer this question, I will instead sketch out some general ideas about my conception of philosophy and why I find it difficult to justify.
Firstly, I think of philosophy as essentially analytical. It is concerned, first and foremost, with looking at the concepts we use (in specialised or everyday contexts) and pulling them apart. This exercise aims to give us an idea of when and how we use our concepts, and what we commit ourselves to when we do so. I think that this is connected to language, though I am not so sure that words and concepts have a one-to-one correspondence and I certainly think that different cultures can share concepts, even when translating between cultures is difficult. This is a pretty standard view of contemporary Anglophone philosophy (I think!), so there shouldn’t be any surprises here.
Secondly, I think that philosophy is concerned with ‘truth’. I’m not attached to any substantive notion of truth, but I do think that we can get things right in some sense. From this, I get the feeling that my conception of philosophy is one that has room for a notion of philosophical progress. Philosophy’s popular image is that of a field concerned with ‘perennial questions’, and there are good reasons to hold this belief, but I think that we can define and solve problems within the field that are context-sensitive and open to change. This does, on the other hand, mean that our answers may need to change as the context changes, and we need to be sensitive to recognising when we need to modify our position.
So far, it should be difficult to see why philosophy might be ethically fraught. Thinking seriously about the concepts we use and trying to identify problems with those concepts is an important task. But if we limit philosophy to this, it’s difficult to see what makes it a distinct practice. We all engage in this sort of analytical practice at some point, so if we want to get a better idea of philosophy then we probably need to look at the distinct features of the practice as it develops as a specialised practice. These days, that typically means thinking about philosophy as an academic (or para-academic) discipline.
It’s the features of this specialised practice that I think raise ethical problems. First, and foremost, there’s the division of intellectual and manual labour that’s implied by the development of philosophy as its own academic discipline. This isn’t a problem unique to philosophy, but I think that in some ways it can be harder to justify for philosophers. This is because there are simpler utilitarian explanations for why we have a social need for fields like engineering, physics, chemistry, etc. The humanities do struggle to answer these questions! And I think that we need ways to answer them that don’t simply call for a total upheaval of the social order (as much as that may be needed!). When we make these calls we may be right, but we sometimes use them to avoid the work of identifying and expressing our values.
Part of why I think the problem of justifying ourselves can be difficult, is because of the way we go about doing philosophy. Philosophy is often carried out through reading other philosophers (in addition to fiction and research in other fields, though I don’t do this as much as I should) and we still often read a set of ‘canonical’ philosophers. I was trained in a Eurocentric, analytical tradition, so I read Hume and Kant, alongside scores of 20th century philosophers who mostly work(ed) at Oxford and Cambridge. I enjoyed reading a lot of these philosophers, and have found a lot of value in their work, but it is sometimes unclear to me whether finding value in their work is a good justification for reading them in the context of defending the value of philosophy as a social practice.
I worry that I’m not making myself clear, but I’m putting this out there with the caveat of this being a blog of hardly edited, developing thoughts. I need to start working out these ideas more fully, and working through them alone isn’t cutting it any more. I’m hoping that what I’m trying to say comes across: It seems to me as though my reasons for reading (and thus doing) philosophy are personal and are presenting themselves as utilitarian. I’m not sure whether this raises ethical problems, I would like to work that out and make some headway on answering those problems if it does.