Topics Philosophy

Question If a philosophy is widely considered difficult to understand and even more difficult to put into practice, then what good is it? Is not overthinking philosophy creating problems where none exist? For example, I sometimes read that Marxism, despite all its failures these past 150 years, has never been correctly implemented and must be given more chances to succeed. Since so many varieties of Marxism have already been tried at the cost of tens of millions of lives and an immeasurable amount of personal and economic freedom lost, why can't we say that history has "disproven" Marxist philosophy?

Accepted:
September 12, 2013

Comments

I'd like to pause over the first half of your first sentence (the 'if' bit): the idea that philosophy is difficult to understand and difficult to put into practice. I'd suggest that this isn't the best way to put things.

Philosophy may or may not be difficult to understand, but no more so than any number of other subjects. Philosophy can be difficult to follow because when done well, it depends on careful arguments and subtle distinctions. That means there's a lot to keep track of, even if the writing is crystal clear. Compare: each step in a math proof might be clear by itself; seeing the argument entire might not be easy.

The next bit is supposed to be that philosophy is difficult to "put into practice." What's striking here is that very few of the philosophers I know think of philosophy as something you "put into practice" in the way that, for example, I might put the Golden Rule into practice. By and large, philosophy isn't in the business of giving practical advice.

For example: some philosophers think about how best to understand the relationship of cause and effect. Some of them have detailed views on what it means for one thing to be the cause of another. But none of them (or none that I know of) would find it very natural to talk about putting this view into practice. They might apply their view to the discussion of more specific problems (such as how best to understand questions about so-called "quantum entanglement") but my hunch is that this isn't what you mean by putting philosophy into practice.

I picked this example for a reason: it's an abstract issue, and it's mainly concerned with understanding something rather than applying it or putting something into practice. That's the kind of discipline philosophy is: one that tries to understand things at a very general level rather than offer practical advice. Whether that's any "good" depends on what sort of good you're looking for, though clear distinctions and careful arguments (the tools of philosophy) have their practical side too.

Still, philosophy is not easy. One reason is that careful thinking in general is not easy. Loads of research bears out what we instinctively recognize: human beings have a strong tendency to be sloppy thinkers. (On this topic, I recommend Thinking Fast and Slow by the social psychologist Daniel Kahneman.) Another reason is that the questions philosophers grapple with (What is cause and effect? Is there a God? Is there such a thing as free will?...) are hard questions. But surely we don't doubt that something is worthwhile just because it's difficult.

That's the general answer to your question, but I'd like to add a couple of comments about your Marxism example. There certainly are philosophical aspects to Marxism, but it's misleading to describe Marxism as a "philosophy." Marxists make a lot of claims about how economies and societies actually work and about how they would work if they were organized in certain ways. Those are claims about empirical matters of fact, even if very abstruse ones. As such, they don't count as philosophical claims. Your instinct that we need to look at the world itself to find out if they're true is right on target. But for exactly that reason, we're no longer simply in the realm of philosophical debate.