Where have all the philosophers gone? What are they doing with themselves? Why isn't there a small army of sages out in the media and on the shelves of our bookstores helping with the worries and confusions that beset us as we tiptoe tentatively up to the doorstep of what's likely to be a challenging new year?
I could probably name three or four contemporary philosophers who are publicly addressing the serious issues of our time, and of our lives, in a clear, wise, and accessible way. But, given that there are thousands of professional philosophers teaching in our colleges and universities, it seems more than a little surprising that so few can be found outside the classroom, working to bring insight to a world so obviously in need of it.
Philosophy is etymologically "the love of wisdom." And wisdom is understood in most world cultures as simply insight for life. The history of philosophy has encompassed two broad endeavors - a theoretical investigation of ultimate issues, and a practical quest for life guidance. The theoretical work has sought to raise and understand fundamental questions about knowing and being. The practical undertaking has involved an extended attempt to grasp the most important truths about living. What should we value? How should we act? What is the shape of a good life?
On theoretical issues, philosophers have notoriously disagreed. It's even been said that a philosopher can be defined as a person who contradicts other philosophers. From our lofty vantage point in the early twenty-first century, it's hard to imagine how these hoary battles could ever be settled, once and for all. Yet, just as remarkable as the endless theoretical disputes, and much less reported, is the remarkable degree of convergence to be seen throughout the centuries and across the cultures on many issues of the most practical relevance: How should we handle anger? What leads to success? Why is courage so important for a good life? Where can happiness most reliably be found? It's not as if there is unanimity on such issues, either, but the closer philosophers have stayed to the lived realities of daily existence, the more their analysis and advice seems both deeply harmonious and powerfully helpful to our own adventures in the world.
For most of the past century, philosophers have been keen on imitating the natural sciences, due in some measure to an envy of their results. But this emulation has been seriously incomplete, with a fixation on purely theoretical matters, and surprising little interest in practical implications. Science pays off in technology and medicine. Where does contemporary philosophy pay off?
In my own education and fifteen-year tenure as a professor of philosophy, I discovered a widespread prejudice in the academic world correlating abstractness with importance. I was trained in matters and methods of thought so esoteric that some of my academic essays and early books could be read with profit and understood thoroughly by no more than a few hundred people around the globe. And they were almost utterly devoid of practical implications. It can of course be argued that knowledge is valuable for its own sake and needs no pragmatic justification. But there's no good reason for thinking that knowledge put into the service of our fellow human beings isn't even more valuable.
An old friend just sent me the first results from a survey of 3,226 intellectuals throughout the world described as "professional philosophers" - largely, denizens of philosophy departments. The survey sought to determine their views on a wide variety of issues considered important in the profession. The first questions alone made me smile.
A priori knowledge: yes or no?
Accept or lean toward: yes 662 / 931 (71.1%)
Accept or lean toward: no 171 / 931 (18.3%)
Other 98 / 931 (10.5%)
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?
Accept or lean toward: Platonism 366 / 931 (39.3%)
Accept or lean toward: nominalism 351 / 931 (37.7%)
Other 214 / 931 (22.9%)
I'd be completely remiss not to display the final question of the survey as well, which, though ordered throughout in an alphabetical arrangement of Big-Issues-To-Philosophers-These-Days, seems to culminate in a spectacular nadir of non-practicality, and yet with a splash of undeniable pizazz:
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
Accept or lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible 331 / 931 (35.5%)
Other 234 / 931 (25.1%)
Accept or lean toward: metaphysically possible 217 / 931 (23.3%)
Accept or lean toward: inconceivable 149 / 931 (16%)
I think it's safe to say that these aren't exactly burning issues in the lives of most people. There's not likely to be an Oprah show devoted to any of them. Out of the total of thirty questions asked of all these philosophers, not a single one had to do with the everyday problems of emotion, attitude, or choice that we face and struggle with in an often-difficult world. None provided insight into the most pressing world affairs, or a needed perspective on our most difficult domestic problems. And only one - "God: Theism or Atheism?" - raised a concern that, while in one sense being an issue of "theory," is also traditionally viewed as ultimately important for determining the overall shape of a life.
So, where indeed have all the philosophers gone? I suspect most of them are in their studies, or offices, working away on such issues as those highlighted in the survey. I wish more were using their considerable training and acumen to be of help in a time of need.
Go into any bookstore with a philosophy section. You'll likely find lots of books by theoreticians, with only an occasional practical thinker like Marcus Aurelius or Seneca thrown into the mix. To read more on the life issues that intrigued and moved them, you'll have to go to the Self-Improvement section, where, unfortunately, the watchword these days is "Caveat" - since there is no particular education, background, perspicacity, or overall tenor of mind required for authoring a book of general life advice, and far too often a vapid new mysticism of wishful thinking passing itself off as wisdom crowds the shelves with clever titles and brash claims. We need more of the real philosophers in our time to turn their attention to the shape of the life they join the rest of us in living.
Socrates was unjustly executed on a charge of corrupting the youth of his day. It's hard to imagine any of our current philosophers being convicted of having any sort of broad influence on the youth - or the rest of us - at all. It's their absence from the fray that's nearly criminal. And yet, as a result in this case, the rest of the culture ends up drinking the deadly hemlock of poisonous pseudo-wisdom.
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I think it's worthy of note that people have been doing philosophy, either in the context of religion or not, since there has been conceptual thought and language. That's a long time. One might think of doing philosophy as blind men examining an elephant, but since it's been going on for 10,000 years or more, that elephant has been pretty thoroughly examined and anything that can be said about it has been said.
If one has already read European phenomenology, ontology, epistemology, logic, and so forth, and, say, their Indo-Tibetan counterparts, what's left to be done in those fields? And if one has studied or “done” European existentialism as far as, say, Paul Tillich, and again, studied or done the Eastern counterparts such as non-religious buddhism or Taoism, what's left to do in philosophy? It just seems like the elephant has been pretty thoroughly examined. Anything called “philosophy” at this point just seems like restatement. I'm open to suggestions, though.
Michel Foucault's historical analysis for discursive formations.
Jacques Lacan structuralist reappropriation of psychoanalysis.
Zizek's Trancedental Materialism
Althusser structuralist reading of Marx.
You analogy is inadequate to describe philosophy because philosophy does not have a static object. Philosophy is not transhistorical, every age imposes its own problematic. The philosopher task is to find an opening in that problematic.
http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb
I'd like to know what you - as a philosopher - feel about the WIZ BIZ, and how it either helps or harms the larger society.
Can we create a wise society by habitually paying money to people like Tony Robbins or James Arthur Ray or "life coaches" who charge $200, 300, 400/hour and more?
Can we create a wise society by mass merchandizing religion and spirituality?
Will these WIZ BIZ practices and their practitioners take us from where we are, to where we want to go - or do they, in the end, actually dumb down society while they line their own pockets with cash?
Youth wants to know.
I really like what you have to say here. I just received my undergraduate in philosophy a few months back and, though I'm not pursuing graduate studies, had something like your thought occur to me senior year.
Coming to toward the end of my schooling I sat back for a second and it occurred to me that all of my professors and all the reading were debating very small topics in philosophy. Then I thought about the texts I had read in my ancient philosophy classes, the classics like Plato and Aristotle and saw a developed system of philosophy that would span metaphysics, ethics, epistemology and others to create a cohesive, and often practical, world-view, no matter how baldy informed their premises might have been at times.
I was sad that no one seemed to be thinking along these lines in the modern day, just hashing out small, difficult to grasp problems with no sense of a greater philosophical system and, as you pointed out, no sense of applicability to current affairs. The whole subject is just so high on itself at this point, and I hope you and others can bring it back down and have it mean something again for the rest of us.
Hard to disagree. I'd like to hear more from the philosophers. Just read Sandel's book called Justice, which does a fine job wrestling with contemporary issues as viewed from political philosophy. It's based on his teaching at Harvard, which reminds me of your teaching at Notre Dame.
A question: Should Tiger Woods read your book True Success?
I hate to break it to you all, but philosophers were important when the rest of the population was illiterate. Philosophy is education in thinking and stating an opinion. Who doesn't have an opinion, on everything, anymore?
Yes, if philosophers spoke out more on the real issues: global warming, what we owe each other as human beings, etc., they would have a place in the public discourse. But only a place, not the entire stage.
Just because I think only nincompoops refuse to admit global warming exists does not invalidate the opinions of others. They may be unscientific, but they have a right to exist, and to be expressed.
Philosophy has died as a profession because, frankly, the rest of us don't consider you the only experts available. Your opinion is probably correct, and certainly has more educated thought behind it than 75% of the rest of us. But the rest of us do think, if imperfectly, and we like deciding things as a group, rather than relying on a small number of "experts."
The only people who still read philosophy are the occasional college student and the anarchists.
I see my world through the lens of Love and devote myself to a quest of higher understanding. Climbing (physically) I seek answers in the quiet mountain air. What seem to be answers one day, lead to more questions the next. Perhaps a new generation of philosophers will emerge from the mountains (metaphysically) to debate and challenge the old guard. Both will be the wiser for the exchange.
As always, thank you Tom for sharing your wisdom.
PS: Zombie question; myth often proves later to be reality. For me the jury is still out in regards to the existence of the undead.
:-)
I'll claim there is no metaphysical realm, no Platonic forms, and apparently we are not born blank slates; and, I am completely with you on the "vapid new mysticism of wishful thinking" and "poisonous pseudo-wisdom".
Intellectual depth just doesn't sell. For philosophers to have any real impact on our culture now, they're going to have to work through the media with some dumbed-down best selling novels and screen plays. Professional philosophers have to become mass market writers, and screenwriters have to start mining that product.....lol..
There have always been those who urged (with a vengeance) that thought must ultimately be practical. And they were right, of course.
Nothing more useless than professional philosophers sitting in their study on one end and on the other end mass market users buying cheap fodder for their primitive urges to deny away the reality of the intellectual world of argument and reasoned discourse.
Part of it is the result (specifically in the US) of the dominance of the republican stultification paradigm a la Rove. Republicans are profoundly guilty of making fools of their fellow citizens.
But that doesn't explain everything, because the phenomenon exists outside the US as well. It's a mode of complacency. A laziness in the guise of efficiency and bottom lines.