The Way of Philosophy

An Introduction

Engelland

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498220972
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy is the quest for a life that is fully alive. Drawing on the insights of philosophers through the ages, The Way of Philosophy clarifies what it means to live life intensely. It exposes the shallowness of conventional wisdom by asking such questions as-Can science know everything?-Should we do it if it feels good?-Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?-Is life about creating ourselves?-Is love supposed to be selfless?-Can we ignore death?-If God exists, why is he hiding?Philosophers invite us to go down deep and live a life in light of truth, goodness, and beauty. If we tread this path, we can discover for ourselves the hidden source of the philosophical life in the unending wellspring of wonder.

1

Why Bother?

[Quest]

The first philosopher we know much of anything about, a fellow by the name of Socrates, proclaimed, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”1

His statement hurt the feelings of his peers, who promptly put him to death. But Socrates didn’t care about how people felt; he cared about how people were. And he thought most people were living life without really living. He loved them too much to stay silent: “Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?”2

Our culture trains us to be superficial and shallow, to chase shadows and content ourselves with trifles. A look in the mirror tells us where that gets us: nowhere. We are empty inside. We are bored. We crave something, anything, we know not what.

What can we do? Socrates shows the way: go down deep with philosophy.

The Wonder of Life

Philosophy won’t solve any of our problems. It won’t, for instance, tell us how to land our dream job, attain our ideal weight, make lots of money, improve our self-esteem, or anything else that would be genuinely useful.

Perhaps philosophy is entertaining, then? I’m afraid not, which is why this book is not titled, How Many Philosophers Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb? While such a book would make for easy bathroom reading, it could not avoid giving the erroneous impression that philosophy itself is a joke, except one that isn’t particularly funny.

If it is neither useful nor entertaining, what is the aim of philosophy? It wants to do nothing other than provoke wonder.

Wonder is neither useful nor useless, neither entertaining nor dull; it is something else altogether. Wonder fills us with unease, stinging us, numbing us, gripping us in the gut. But it also tingles and cajoles, hinting at something fantastic and exotic. It is this wonder that philosophers celebrate as the continual wellspring of philosophy itself, because it causes us to shed our conventional opinions and readies us to accept the truth. Wonder is awful and awesome at the same time. It rips us open to allow reality to fill us up.

Conventional wisdom lulls us into repose, but philosophical wonder is shock therapy. Wittgenstein writes, “Man has to awaken to wonder—and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”3 Philosophy awakens us to what is at stake in being human. Philosophy literally means love (philia) of wisdom (sophia), and it is the task of this little book to convey something of that love, something of that wonder of being confronted with the truth of things.

Most professional philosophers initially get interested in philosophy because they want to clarify properly human questions of meaning and purpose, but after a few years of studying philosophy they encounter all sorts of technical questions and puzzles, and they leave behind their original quest for meaning. (The older I get, the more I appreciate these puzzles. For example in the Liar’s Paradox, a member of a set asserts that all members of the set are liars; so, a politician might call all politicians liars, but if they all are liars, and he is a politician, then he too must be a liar, suggesting he was lying about all politicians being liars. In philosophy, such logical puzzles abound.) Introductions to philosophy by professional philosophers typically present a host of technical puzzles that are interesting but somewhat removed from the wonder lying dormant in each of our hearts.

Boiled down to its essentials, this book introduces the non-technical insights of the love of wisdom insofar as it clarifies what it means to live a meaningful and engaged life. That’s it. No logical tricks, no mind-boggling inquiries into ultimate reality, no frightening suggestions that you might be a brain in a vat. These other questions are worth pursuing, but they have a power of distracting people from the question that naturally plagues us humans: what is this all about? This book outlines a path blazed by some of philosophy’s greatest thinkers. Each section serves to make shine some key idea that illumines us on that way. The brighter they shine, the harder it is for us to persist in our repose, and the more likely it is that we will open our eyes and wake up. To this end, the book does mention a lot of philosophers that guide us into philosophy. A glossary lists a bit of information about each, including when they lived, and what sort of things they lived for.

Three Reasons to Philosophize

Why should we philosophize? I’ll go with the weakest argument first because it is the easiest to follow. Some of the brightest of our species have devoted themselves to the pursuit, sacrificing lesser goods such as wealth and influence to the pursuit of wisdom. So, because Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, among others, have sought wisdom through philosophy, so should we. I said it is the weakest argument, because it appeals to authority. We are sensibly told to “question authority,” but in truth we can’t get by in life without it. Why should you get chemotherapy if you have cancer? Because the best doctors say so, not because you understand how it works yourself. You rely on their expertise and authority. Of course, if you happen to be a cancer doctor, you do not have to rely on authority; you know it for yourself. Similarly, if you are outside philosophy looking in, wondering, why bother, you should bother because those on the inside, who are the only ones in a position to know, say that you should come on in. Once you’re in, you can judge the pursuit for yourself. The weakness is that just as the doctors could all be hacks, so the philosophers could all be fools. How can you judge someone’s expertise when that’s precisely what you yourself lack? Still, the aim of the argument is to motivate inquiry, not to give an irrefutable proof. There should be something contagious about the philosopher that makes you want to catch whatever he or she has.

The second argument is more complicated, but it is an ancient one. It goes like this: philosophy is unavoidable, because in order not to philosophize you have to philosophize. Say I didn’t want to philosophize. I could argue that it was a pointless activity, because it was removed from life, led to endless questioning, or was incapable of arriving at the truth. But these reasons, given in behalf of avoiding philosophy, are themselves philosophical. To justify them, you would have to do a lot of philosophy; for starters, you’d have to clarify what life is about and what philosophy is, and only then would you be in position to justify the claim that they are divorced from one another. But all of this is honest philosophical work. Put simply: either you philosophize or to avoid philosophizing you still have to philosophize. The best approach, then, is to accept your fate rather than vainly seeking to avoid it. Philosophize, then. (Of course, you could just shrug your shoulders and turn over and go back to sleep; you’ve avoided philosophy through indifference, but you’ve also avoided using reason, which is proper to our species.)

The third argument is my favorite, because it is most personal and doesn’t seem tricky. Why philosophize? Because we’ve got questions that we need to ask and nothing else can answer. So, I want to know what is the point of human existence, I want to know what I should do in a given situation, I want to know what the allure of beauty is, I want to know what happiness is. Physics, the queen of the sciences, naturally cannot answer such properly human questions, and it falls to the philosopher to tackle the really important questions we come hardwired with. Of all the animals, we are the unhappy, restless ones, who require so many things in order to grow and thrive. We are the most highly questionable animal, and when we question philosophically we awaken to what we are. Each of us, however attached we may be to passing delights, nonetheless hungers for something more, although we generally know not what. Philosophy lives this hunger intensely, ever on the scent of truth.

Incidentally, for those of you keeping track of such things, the first argument, from authority, can be found in Plato, who had been struck and wounded by the stunning figure of Socrates; the second argument, about the unavoidability of philosophy, is featured in an early work by Aristotle (and it came to ensnare Wittgenstein, who wanted to retire from philosophy but kept getting sucked back in); and the third argument, about human desire, can be found in any philosopher worth her salt. Descartes, for instance, rightly says, “The brute beasts, who have only their bodies to preserve, are continually occupied in looking for food to nourish them; but human beings, whose most important part is the mind, should devote their main efforts to the search for wisdom, which is the true food of the mind.”4

Setting Aside One Reason Not to Philosophize

When my older sister came back from college on breaks, she brought philosophy books. At first I turned to them with unbridled enthusiasm, but I quickly grew discouraged when I discovered that philosophers generally disagree among themselves. Aristotle studied with Plato for twenty years but nonetheless disagreed with him in fundamental respects, and much later Descartes relegated Aristotle’s followers to the cellar, and today it is extremely fashionable to think Descartes got just about everything wrong. Philosophers disagree, so philosophy appears impossibly difficult or quite doubtful.

To this objection let me make three remarks. First, philosophy is the passionate pursuit of wisdom—not its possession. Only Hegel claims to have achieved “Absolute Knowledge”; philosophers in the main claim a more humble, specifically human wisdom. In its beginning, philosophers insisted that gods do not philosophize, only human beings do. The founder of modern philosophy, Descartes, likewise remarks, “In truth it i...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Why Bother?
• Chapter 2: Can Science Know Everything There Is to Know?
• Chapter 3: Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?
• Chapter 4: If It Feels Good, Why not Do It?
• Chapter 5: Is Life about Creating Yourself?
• Chapter 6: Are We Supposed to Be Selfless?
• Chapter 7: Is Death Important (or Can We Ignore It)?
• Chapter 8: If God Exists, Why Is He Hidden?
• Chapter 9: Is Ignorance Bliss?
• Appendix 1: How to Read a Bit of Philosophy
• Appendix 2: Do I Have to Be a Skeptic?
• Glossary: Philosophers and Their Guiding Stars
• Bibliography