Topics Philosophy

Question I'm just getting into philosophy, thanks in no small part to this site! I was discussing it with a friend recently - a friend I admire as hard-working, intelligent and someone who challenges himself - and found out that he was actually a philosophy major in college (now he's a businessman). Naturally I was excited, but I was quickly discouraged as he explained that he had given up doing philosophy long ago and had no interest in it. When I asked him why, I received the following explanation, which confused me and I'm hoping to gain some clarity on it from this site. I hope it's not offensive to any of the professional philosophers who read this site, though it is of course anti-philosophy, since it was his reason for abandoning it. In any case, he said that he gave up reading/doing/thinking about philosophy - and he specified "analytic philosophy" as the culprit - saying that, although he found that the material he read was highly intelligent, he was nagged by a persistent feeling (one he ultimately couldn't shake off, try as he might) that somehow the central issues being explored in the readings - issues such as the nature of friendship, or love, or reality - were somehow deeply alien to the writings themselves. He said he never got the sense from their writings that any of the writers he read actually understood the lived human experiences of those central issues or that the highly intelligent discussions from the writings had anything meaningful to do with those issues in real life. He warned me against bringing this up to philosophers, saying that, although he frequently could not put into words anything "wrong" or "illogical" about their writings, he simply had this persistent feeling that the writers didn't understand these issues, though they may have written an entire book on the subject, any better (and possibly worse than) than anyone else. He told me that if I raised this issue with a philosopher, they'd just call him a quitter. Is that how you see him? I've known him many years and he works very hard - I can't see him as a quitter. He also mentioned to me that there were many others like him, and that he finds intellectual sustenance elsewhere. Sorry for the long question - as a neophyte to this field, I'm trying to make sense of this and having trouble. Thanks in advance!

Accepted:
December 9, 2011

Comments

I'd have to say that I'm sympathetic to your friend's view. Kierkegaard was too. I would distinguish between philosophy professors and philosophers. Philosophers have a love of wisdom and some success in accruing it. One can indulge in the puzzles that are the fare of academic philosophy and be devoid of that love of wisdom which is to say an urgent need for a knowledge about how to live. There are people who make their living doing philosophy who are really into it because they enjoy unlocking intellectual puzzles and building models. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that but your friend (and maybe you) are right about some people in the field living more or less entirely in their heads, who don't really worry too much about how their lives connect to their theories about life. But abuse is not argument against use- don't let the abuse or misuse of philosophy put you off from the real thing.

As hard as it was for your friend to explain his dissatisfaction with philosophy, it's even harder for me to be confident that I really understand just what his complaint is. But I do think that a philosophical work fails to a significant degree if an intelligent reader comes away feeling that the author missed the boat or can't speak to anyone but specialists. Indeed, I support this website because I think philosophy is far too important not to be better understood by the general public. I'd encourage your friend to try harder to articulate the reasons he came away dissatisfied by this or that particular work of philosophy: to translate his feelings as carefully as he can into reasons and examine them. That exercise by itself very much counts as philosophizing.

From time to time (although not as often as the public probably supposes), contemporary academic philosophers take up an age-old human concern like the meaning of life. An outstanding example, if by no means always easy reading, is Professor Thomas Nagel's article "The Absurd," originally in the Journal of Philosophy (1971) and widely anthologized since then. If your friend has read that article, does he think Nagel is just missing the point? If I may, I've linked below to a couple of my own humble attempts to explore such issues in a widely accessible way. I hope they're written so that any readers who find them dissatisfying can pinpoint pretty clearly why they do.

Maitzen, "On God and Our Ultimate Purpose," Free Inquiry 31:2 (2011)
Maitzen, "Does God Destroy Our Duty of Compassion?" Free Inquiry 30:6 (2010)