Philosophize--it's good for you

This article in the New York Times so struck me, that I have copied and pasted it here for all of my thousands of readers to peruse. Embroiled in the reading of Tom Campbell's My Big TOE trilogy, I am dabbling in philosophy, science, and metaphysics on a daily basis. I cannot say how it has affected my life as yet, but there is a sense of withdrawal from the everyday--if only to free up some desperately needed mindbandwidth for processing. And a looming ever-present sense of the largeness of it all. And an internal nagging to be better/do better.

What drives some of us to batter our heads against the impenetrable mysteries? What makes a philosopher, and what kind of helmet does she wear?

I have highlighted bits that jumped out at me--my comments in green type.

 

The Difficulty of Philosophy

By Alexander George
One often hears the lament: Why has philosophy become so remote, why has it lost contact with people?
The complaint must be as old as philosophy itself.  In Aristophanes’ “Clouds,” we meet Socrates as he is being lowered to the stage in a basket.  His first words are impatient and distant: “Why do you summon me, o creature of a day?”  He goes on to explain pompously what he was doing before he was interrupted: “I tread the air and scrutinize the sun.”  Already in Ancient Greece, philosophy had a reputation for being troublesomely distant from the concerns that launch it.

Is the complaint justified, however?  On the face of it, it would seem not to be.  I run AskPhilosophers.org, (send them a question) a Web site that features questions from the general public and responses by a panel of professional philosophers.  The questions are sent by people at all stages of life: from the elderly wondering when to forgo medical intervention to successful professionals asking why they should care about life at all, from teenagers inquiring whether it is irrational to fear aging to 10-year-olds wanting to know what the opposite of a lion is. The responses from philosophers have been humorous, kind, clear, and at the same time sophisticated, penetrating, and informed by the riches of the philosophical traditions in which they were trained.  The site has evidently struck a chord as we have by now posted thousands of entries, and the questions continue to arrive daily from around the world.  Clearly, philosophers can — and do — respond to philosophical questions in intelligible and helpful ways.

Erin Schell

But admittedly, this is casual stuff.  And at the source of the lament is the perception that philosophers, when left to their own devices, produce writings and teach classes that are either unhappily narrow or impenetrably abstruse.  Full-throttle philosophical thought often appears far removed from, and so much more difficult than, the questions that provoke it.

It certainly doesn’t help that philosophy is rarely taught or read in schools.  Despite the fact that children have an intense interest in philosophical issues, and that a training in philosophy sharpens one’s analytical abilities, with few exceptions our schools are de-philosophized zones.  (The modern educational focus has been on job training for the purpose of making a good living--be a lawyer/accountant/investment broker, etc. We have become very profit/money oriented. We live in a Can it be measured? society. What is the ROI?) This has as a knock-on effect that students entering college shy away from philosophy courses.  Bookstores — those that remain — boast philosophy sections cluttered with self-help guides.  It is no wonder that the educated public shows no interest in, or perhaps even finds alien, the fully ripened fruits of philosophy.
While all this surely contributes to the felt remoteness of philosophy, it is also a product of it: for one reason why philosophy is not taught in schools is that it is judged irrelevant.  And so we return to the questions of why philosophy appears so removed and whether this is something to lament.
This situation seems particular to philosophy.  We do not find physicists reproached in the same fashion.  People are not typically frustrated when their questions about the trajectory of soccer balls get answered by appeal to Newton’s Laws and differential calculus.

If one seeks illumination, then one must uncover abstract, general principles through the development of a theoretical framework. (My Big TOE is this in a nutshell--no pun intended.)

The difference persists in part because to wonder about philosophical issues is an occupational hazard of being human in a way in which wondering about falling balls is not.  Philosophical questions can present themselves to us with an immediacy, even an urgency, that can seem to demand a correspondingly accessible answer.  High philosophy usually fails to deliver such accessibility — and so the dismay that borders on a sense of betrayal.

Must it be so?  To some degree, yes.  Philosophy may begin in wonder, as Plato suggested in the “Theaetetus,” but it doesn’t end there.  Philosophers will never be content merely to catalog wonders, but will want to illuminate them — and whatever kind of work that involves will surely strike some as air treading.

But how high into the air must one travel?  How theoretical, or difficult, need philosophy be?  Philosophers disagree about this and the history of philosophy has thrown up many competing conceptions of what philosophy should be.  The dominant conception today, at least in the United States, looks to the sciences for a model of rigor and explanation.  Many philosophers now conceive of themselves as more like discovery-seeking scientists than anything else, and they view the great figures in the history of philosophy as likewise “scientists in search of an organized conception of reality,” as W.V. Quine, the leading American philosopher of the 20^th Century, once put it.  For many, science not only provides us with information that might be pertinent to answering philosophical questions, but also with exemplars of what successful answers look like.
Because philosophers today are often trained to think of philosophy as continuous with science, they are inclined to be impatient with expectations of greater accessibility.  Yes, philosophy does begin in wonder, such philosophers will agree.  But if one is not content to be a wonder-monger, if one seeks illumination, then one must uncover abstract, general principles through the development of a theoretical framework.
This search for underlying, unifying principles may lead into unfamiliar, even alien, landscapes.  But such philosophers will be undaunted, convinced that the correct philosophical account will often depend on an unobvious discovery visible only from a certain level of abstraction.  (Campbell insists, correctly I think, that we cannot view the bigger picture of our reality from within it. We must get ourselves outside of it -meditation, lucid dreaming, out of body experiences, etc. to get a sense of what we are engulfed in..... unfamiliar alien landscapes?) This view is actually akin to the conception advanced by Aristophanes’ Socrates when he defends his airborne inquiries: “If I had been on the ground and from down there contemplated what’s up here, I would have made no discoveries at all.”  The resounding success of modern science has strengthened the attraction of an approach to explanation that has always had a deep hold on philosophers.

But the history of philosophy offers other conceptions of illumination.  Some philosophers will not accept that insight demands the discovery of unsuspected general principles.  They are instead sympathetic to David Hume’s dismissal, over 250 years ago, of remote speculations in ethics: “New discoveries are not to be expected in these matters,” he said.  Ludwig Wittgenstein took this approach across the board when he urged that “The problems [in philosophy] are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.”  He was interested in philosophy as an inquiry into “what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions,” and insisted that “If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.”  Insight is to be achieved not by digging below the surface, but rather by organizing what is before us in an illuminatingly perspicuous manner. (It can be said that "the answers", or at least most of them, have been before us all along. It just takes a new perspective (and a suspension of many intrinsic beliefs) to organize them in a way closer to the actual truth.)
The approach that involves the search for “new discoveries” of a theoretical nature is now ascendant.  Since the fruits of this kind of work, even when conveyed in the clearest of terms, can well be remote and difficult, we have here another ingredient of the sense that philosophy spends too much time scrutinizing the sun.
Which is the correct conception of philosophical inquiry?  Philosophy is the only activity such that to pursue questions about the nature of that activity is to engage in it.  We can certainly ask what we are about when doing mathematics or biology or history — but to ask those questions is no longer to do mathematics or biology or history.  One cannot, however, reflect on the nature of philosophy without doing philosophy.  (An indication that philosophy is important stuff in the lives of human beings? After all, we are here to grow, mature, learn, progress. Can it hurt to philosophize--ponder--dream on a daily basis?) Indeed, the question of what we ought to be doing when engaged in this strange activity is one that has been wrestled with by many great philosophers throughout philosophy’s long history.
Questions, therefore, about philosophy’s remove cannot really be addressed without doing philosophy.  In particular, the question of how difficult philosophy ought to be, or the kind of difficulty it ought to have, is itself a philosophical question.  In order to answer it, we need to philosophize — even though the nature of that activity is precisely what puzzles us.
And that, of course, is another way in which philosophy can be difficult.

---

Alexander George is professor of philosophy at Amherst College. A new book drawn from AskPhilosophers.org, “What Should I Do?: Philosophers on the Good, the Bad, and the Puzzling,” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

On Time

Much time has passed since I last posted here. Time, that elusive ever-present non-existent entity, is something that has fascinated we humans for thousands of years. All of my life can certainly be measured in our version of time--the linear days/months/years from one's birth to the present. Yet as I have been pursuing the greater ideas of reality, the concept of time has shifted, skewed, and twisted and has left me grasping at some way to understand--really understand time's place in the universe.

Back in the post "There is no going back" I did write a bit about time--how the present is ground zero and the past and future emanate from it. I felt moments of clarity when contemplating all of this--bright spots of clear sky--and yet I still strive to understand more--to keep the clouds away. SO I thought I would share some recent reading about time from an old-ish source--Carla Rueckert's channeling from 1973. (Check out the link--it is only two pages long.)

L/L Research Transcript August 1973

The entities find our narrow windows of perception amusing, (I am sure there is much more about our behavior that sends them reeling) but only because they know very well the limitations of our little Earth reality- they have lived it in the long distant "past". No matter, I like that they are willing to take "time" to explain their greater understanding and experience of the field of time.  

Our scientists have discovered the plasticity of time. I have been churning my way through physicist Thomas Campbell's Theory of Everything--a trilogy (the culmination of thirty years of study and exploration) unifying philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. You can imagine how juicy this work is! Ok it is written from a scientific point of view (which translates to slow progress) but it is oh so content-dense.

Campbell theorizes that our reality, including our perception of time, is digital. He proposes our universe can be likened to a very big computer simulation that can be paused, rewound, and fast-forwarded by the operating system, and can be explored by us, via intent and desire. A lot of what Campbell writes makes sense to me--and is a more concise description of our reality than the channeled info can provide. This, because the Big TOE is written from within our reality as opposed to the channeled info whose source is outside it.


But this theoretical information is only for those who hunger for answers, and Campbell reiterates time and again that you must have an open mind, maintain a skeptical nature, and learn from your own experience. Which means you must take the time to think things through, to venture into unknown waters, and get your feet wet within the metaphysical realms. This is not for everyone. 

Meditation is the first step in the process for those who are uninitiated. I have begun the practice of regular meditation and have found it a challenge, but one that is worth pursuing. I do want some of my own answers--answers gained through experience of the great beyond. Only when we can keep the head noise at bay, will we be aware of the greater possibilities for connection outside of our "normal" plane of existence. Focus, always the bane of my years, is a valuable tool for gaining this access. I would like to share my experiences and will do so in the upcoming days. 

In the meantime, if anyone would like to share their meditation experiences, rituals, dos and donts, I welcome the input. As with everything, what works for one doesn't necessarily work for another, but a community is bound to be supportive at the very least.