Philosophy and Life
Philosophy is the pursuit of Knowledge. There are a number of ways to define philosophy, but this one — at least to my mind — comes as close to capturing its essence as any. Of course, it’s a rather loaded definition, for What is ‘Knowledge’? However, if we shelve that pickle for the moment and let our common sense understanding of Knowledge stand — as a synonym for the Truth and Wisdom (also loaded terms, but not to worry) — we have ourselves a perfectly fine definition of the philosophical enterprise.
We have been doing philosophy ever since we developed the capacity for thought. We are a truly philosophical species indeed, distinguished from the rest of known life — to the best of our Knowledge — by our propensity for reflection, inquiry, examination. The first instances of philosophical inquiry, we can well imagine, were inspired by the natural wonder of things. The starry heavens above, or the birth of a newborn, for example, might have served as the original source material for philosophical speculation, causing us to contemplate our place in the world, the Truth of our peculiar situation. For a long while — the great majority of its history in fact — philosophy was a fundamentally narrative tradition. That is, it took the form of stories intended to explain whatever gripped our imagination, whatever stimulated our philosophical appetite. The stars in the sky were the eyes of the Gods, red soil the blood of distant ancestors. Gradually, however, the scope of philosophy evolved beyond the most speculative form of metaphysics (storytelling) to include questions of every conceivable kind. Similarly, its method, the process by which we sought to understand the world — that is, attain Knowledge — evolved.
The birth of modern philosophy, it’s generally regarded, was with the ancient Greeks some few thousand years ago. Names such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus hailed as the founding fathers. Not to give the impression that nothing of significance happened until then, it surely did, but the Greeks are unique in that they did substantially more than anyone to define what philosophy is and how it should be done. Above all, it was the Greeks who brought a much-needed self-consciousness to the enterprise, an awareness of the pitfalls of its method and the ambiguity of its end. Beyond this kind of self-consciousness, the Greeks also made fundamental contributions to the method of philosophy itself, introducing a previously absent analytical rigour, with their emphasis on logic, rationality, mathematics and empirical observation. In effect, the Greeks sowed the seeds of both modern philosophy and science (the latter technically falling under the umbrella of the former), articulating and demonstrating how both ought to be done, thereby moving the needle of human understanding in major ways. It’s an incredible testament to the genius of the Greeks that there are very few significant philosophical questions — before or since — that they didn’t themselves pose. To this day, the works of such giants as Plato and Aristotle continue to be mined for insight and clarity on the big issues — such as the issue of Knowledge, as in ‘What is it?’ and ‘How is it possible?’ — that still confound us. What were the Greeks smoking? one might ask. As it happens, the question is rather, What were they drinking? Whatever it was, it was clearly good stuff.
While the Greeks did much to widen the gaze of philosophy beyond the parochial or merely human, the central question of philosophy, then and until relatively recently, was the question of ‘How to live?’. To our modern minds, it’s an odd-sounding question, and any attempt at answering it, certainly on behalf of others, would seem to imply a degree of hubris that would inevitably undermine the answer, life being as ambiguous and open-ended as it is. But of course, it’s a question that we all wrestle with, as individuals, even if we don’t formulate the question so explicitly. Irrespective of how reflective we are with respect to our own lives, our actions in the world contain an implicit response to the question. Where we live, what we do for work, how we interact with others, when and whether we have kids, what we do in our spare time etc. The facts of our lives reflect, in addition to the vagaries of circumstance, our answers to this most perennial philosophical question. In other words, the question of how to live is, by virtue of our living, utterly inescapable. Like life itself, it is simply forced upon us.
Around the birth of modern philosophy, when the foundation was being laid, as it were, philosophy was considered a highly practical affair, akin to something like the martial arts, with different schools teaching different philosophies, each principally concerned with question of how to live. The first, and certainly most famous, philosophical school was Plato’s Academy. Located just outside the city walls of Athens, and infamously centred around a sacred grove of olive trees, the Academy is regarded as the first Western institution of higher education and is therefore attributed with greatly influencing our ‘modern’ system. Far from the stale and stuffy universities stitched together by ideology that we’ve come to know, however, the Academy was an eclectic community of intellectuals, united by a common passion for understanding and wisdom. Topics of study at the Academy ranged the full gamut, from poetry to politics — and of course philosophy proper. Quite famously, a sign above the entrance of the Academy bore the inscription, “Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter here.” Suffice to say, mathematics was also part of the curriculum.
A ‘philosophy of life’
Antiquity was littered with such schools. At the heart of each of them was the concept of a ‘philosophy of life,’ that is, a view of what constitutes the ‘Good Life’, and how it’s to be attained. While there is no bumper sticker version of Plato’s philosophy of life, his allegory of the cave serves as some approximation of what it might’ve been: that the end of human life is to escape the cave of ignorance in which we are all born, and emerge, through diligent study, into the light of wisdom. Enlightenment, in a word. Others were more explicit. Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, for instance, founded the Cynic school of philosophy, which advocated an ascetic lifestyle. Discipline. Conversely, Aristippus, another student of Socrates, promoted a hedonistic lifestyle. Pleasure. In between these two extremes, were the Epicurean, Skeptic and Stoic schools, each which advocated different philosophical recipes for the Good Life. Where the Academy was at once highly theoretical and grounded in the practical affairs of human life, many of the subsequent schools were skewed more towards the practical, with the Cynics eschewing theory almost entirely.
There are no longer such philosophical schools. Today, philosophy is almost solely the province of the Ivory Tower, academia, and has become almost entirely divorced, with little exception, from the practical reality of human life, the concept of a ‘philosophy of life’ having long gone out of fashion. While the shift towards the purely theoretical dimension of the philosophical game was perhaps an inevitable consequence of the institutionalisation of philosophy and the growth of knowledge generally, it remains a great shame that the practical piece — that is, the piece that most concerns most people — has fallen by the wayside.
“Among most of the philosophers of antiquity there was a close connection between a view of the universe and a doctrine as to the best way of life… If philosophy is to play a serious part in the lives of men who are not specialists, it must not cease to advocate some way of life. In doing this it is seeking to do something of what religion has done, but with certain differences. The greatest difference is that there is no appeal to authority, whether that of tradition or that of a sacred book.”
Bertrand Russell
The institutionalisation or ‘academification’ of philosophy has had a number effects on the enterprise, beyond the gradual erosion of its practical foundation. Not the least of which is the trend towards obscurantism and obfuscation, a trend perhaps most flagrantly embodied by the philosophical movement known as “post-modernism.” Born out of the existentialist tradition — another philosophical movement infamous for its amorphousness and resonance with adolescent angst — post-modernism sought to undermine all claims at truth, claims to truth being ultimately claims to power. The idea, in a nutshell, was that all truth is relative, dependent upon cultural context for its validity, that nothing is therefore inherently real or true in any ultimate sense. Sex, gender, politics, morality, reality writ small and large, it’s all constructed, all made up. That’s post-modernism, in a sentence. Of course, it’s not without irony that post-modernists were making truth claims of their own (with the passionate zeal of subjective relativity) in order to undermine all other truth claims, but that’s another thing. The point here is that post-modernism is reflective, as well as a proximate cause, of a certain decay within the philosophical enterprise at large. A decay that sees inaccessibility pegged as virtue, the impenetrability of a work hailed as proof of its genius. In other words, the insidious rot of pretentiousness has brought the promise of philosophy to its knees.
Whatever value there is to post-modernist thought, whatever its genuine contribution, and I’m convinced there must be some, it’s most visible function is as a disguise for intellectual sloppiness, a seemingly catch-all justification for every flavour of ill-conceived idea. ‘It’s not stupid, it’s post-modern. As in, after modern. It’s like philosophy, but like, from the future. You wouldn’t get it.’ Even if the movement has served as a much-needed corrective against overconfidence, convention and cherished dogma, a potentially valid argument one might make, the memes that arose from it have perversely affected the health of society’s intellectual dialogue, in more ways than one. In glorifying concepts such as ambiguity, uncertainty, relativity, and subjectivity, and in doing so in such overtly non-sensical fashion, post-modernism promotes a malaise of ambivalence, by sowing an almost malicious distrust in the very integrity of the philosophical project, the project of Knowledge.
While post-modernism is a microcosm of the worst of modern philosophy and therefore an easy target for criticism, it is by and large but a reflection of the structural — that is, institutional — conditions that gave rise to it. As a product of academia, modern philosophy has been imbued with its myriad biases and prejudices, not only structural and intellectual, but aesthetic, too. The social, cultural and psychological dynamics of modern academia, both good and bad, have inevitably been projected upon the enterprise of thought. In addition to a spirit of critical thinking and scholarly rigour, philosophy has been suffused with group-think, a propensity for jargon, an affinity for the highfalutin, the pretence of profundity, as well as a bias towards pure theory. None of this should be revelatory, for thought and the conditions of thought are of course inextricable. If something is awry with the former, so too must there be with the latter.
All of this simply to say that a wedge of artifice has been placed between the practice of philosophy and everyday human life. And since the value of philosophy is ultimately in its bearing upon everyday human life, this represents somewhat of a tragedy.
Philosophy‘s dead, so what?
One might ask, So what if philosophy has lost its relevancy? So what if it’s dead? Of course, that one might plausibly ask such a question in the first place is itself testament to the disconnect between modern life and philosophy. For philosophy is at the absolute heart of the human project. Indeed, they are one and the same. Humanity is, at its very core, a fundamentally philosophical undertaking. Contrary to its present reputation, philosophy is not some thing at the periphery of what we do, in a very real sense, it is all we do.
All that’s required in order to appreciate the centrality of philosophy is to consider what an individual human life is, and what it is in the aggregate, that is civilisation. The individual experience and civilisation alike are expressions of human consciousness, human thought. Manifest mental material. You will remember that we defined philosophy earlier as the pursuit of Knowledge. And while Knowledge is an elusive, highly mysterious phenomenon, whatever it is, we know it consists of this very same material — ideas, values, beliefs etc. What distinguishes Knowledge from other forms of mental material is that the mental material that constitutes Knowledge bears some correspondence or symmetry with Reality. Much to the postmodernists chagrin, it contains Truth.
If we appreciate that philosophy is made of the same fundamental material as our lives and thus civilisation (and not only that it’s made of the same material, but that it’s concerned with the mining, analysis and architecture of it) an appreciation of its importance should naturally follow. At some level of abstraction, the central goal of the human project, individually and collectively, is to imbue our minds and the very structure of our world, with as much Knowledge, as much Truth, as possible. This is the positive function of philosophy. In addition to the embodiment of Knowledge, however, the role of philosophy is to expel, from our lives and the structure of our world, its opposite: ignorance, illusion, misunderstanding. This is the negative function of philosophy. Having ascribed philosophy this dual function, the state of our lives, and the state of our world, at any given time, can therefore be seen as a reflection of the state of philosophy.
Placing philosophy at the centre of the human project is, on one hand, to gratify the field by duly acknowledging its vital importance, and on the other, to place an enormous burden upon the enterprise’s shoulders. For if the state of things fundamentally reflects the state of philosophy, if the former isn’t up to scratch, it’s the latter that’s ultimately to blame. If things are any less than they could be, in other words, it’s the fault of philosophy. A rather heavy responsibility, if ever there was one.
Philosophy, as I’ve defined it, is a sprawling enterprise. The Knowledge Project. My criticism, however, is aimed squarely at the formal discipline, academia, the ivory tower, philosophy as an institution. Due to the various dynamics, biases, prejudices and so forth at play within academia, philosophy has been perverted in various ways. That’s the claim, distilled. Why, though, if philosophy is this giant thing — the pursuit of knowledge — that spans the entire human project, should we care so much (if at all) whether the formal practice of philosophy is a little banged up? After all, philosophy is everything. Philosophy is science, philosophy is art, philosophy is knowledge as embodied in Culture across the board. What we refer to as “philosophy” is merely one branch of the knowledge project, a small group of individuals that are particularly intentional about the pursuit of knowledge and focused in terms of the kind of knowledge — the types of questions — they’re interested in pursuing. As a portion of philosophy as a whole, the formal practice of philosophy is an almost insignificant sliver. Why, then, should a claim re the state of philosophy rest on a claim simply about the state of the formal discipline? “Philosophers” may have lost touch with the realities of Reality, one might argue, but so what, that’s what People are for. We no longer seek instruction as to how to live, or what this is all is, from Philosophers but instead counsel celebrities, podcasters, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, scientists. Living embodiments (we hope) of practical wisdom. The most influential philosophers on the planet are no longer formally trained wisdom seekers, but rather the Tim Ferris’s and Joe Rogans of the world. Philosophy isn’t dead, it’s simply no longer where or what it used to be. Kanye’s the new Nietzsche. What’s wrong, if anything, with that?
On one hand, there’s nothing wrong. For there is nothing intrinsically special or superior about knowledge produced within a formal, academic, institutional context. Knowledge is Knowledge, whether the universe instantiates it in the form of a leather bound book or a 16 bar verse. It also makes sense that practical philosophy should be done not by theoreticians, those who live primarily in the polished realm of the abstract, but rather those grounded in the messy world of experience. That is, we should seek guidance as to how to live, not only from those who have theorised, from first principles, how best to, but from those who have demonstrated their ability to embody the knowledge necessary to live well. Those that have walked the path successfully are of more use, in many instances, than those who have simply studied the path extensively. On the other hand, however, the decay of formal, “serious” philosophy is in fact problematic on a number of levels. For one, even though there is very little engagement between the average citizen and formal philosophy, philosophers both past and present — as society’s intellectual elite — nevertheless continue to wield disproportionate influence over the collective consciousness. Not through direct engagement, but through its place in the hierarchy of our cultural infrastructure. Those who are serious about thinking, serious about Knowledge, naturally and invariably read the “serious” philosophers. Since the kind of cats that gravitate towards serious anything are those most likely to occupy positions of intellectual authority, by virtue of their authority, they wield disproportionate influence themselves. In other words, there is a kind of ‘trickle down’ effect at play. Very few people mess with philosophy, but those who do spread it wide and far. Thus whatever problems are at play within philosophy as an institution are not confined to the institution itself, but affect the entire scaffold of human thought, and therefore, human culture.
That philosophy has lost its connection with the majority is not only attributable to the trends towards obfuscation and obscurantism, but broader cultural trends that influence how we relate to information more generally. With so much media vying for our attention, our attention has been spread thin, fragmented. As we can all attest by this point, what captures our attention is, for the most part, that which most appeals to the deeper structures of our brain — that which has the most immediate reward value — rather than our higher ideals or best interests. Short, highly graphic material (Instagram posts, cat videos, porn etc.) in this environment wins the day, our time. Philosophy, unfortunately, requires both immense attention (relative to most activities) and is (as a rule) far less pleasurable than the content that is concentrated across the various digital rabbit holes we often find ourselves lost within. Thus the odds are stacked against the consumption of philosophy from the outset. Combine these realities with the realities of a world drowning in the informational equivalent of junk food and the stuffy, pompous, pretentious, aesthetic of philosophy and it’s not hard to see why we’re not eating our greens as we should.
In order to revive philosophy, to re-establish the contemplative connection with the human mind, philosophy must therefore elevate the quality of its presentation. Amidst a hyper-competitive landscape of content, philosophers and artists alike must work to wrap their ideas in such a fashion that commands attention. Pretentiousness, obscurantism, and language games are all impediments to the consumption of substantive philosophy, barriers to a more enlightened populous, manifestations of pathology to be purged at all cost. While Wittgenstein was, in my opinion, unduly cynical about the reach of philosophy, he was onto something when he wrote, “What can be said can be said with clarity.” Anyone in the business of saying things should keep this front of mind.
