Philosophy is routinely dismissed as good-for-nothing: an old and out-dated discipline that serves no useful purpose. It is not alone.
Martial Arts
People who learn esoteric martial arts can spend their entire lives happily occupied in mastering their art and will walk around convinced that they can protect themselves effectively. It gives them unrivalled confidence. The training does them good. They have a community of believers and can play language games within these worlds of their own making, telling one another what makes sense and what doesn’t, correcting each other according to the established rules of the game (tradition, masters, grades, drills and forms). Since we are so rarely physically attacked, they never have themselves tested. They can continue happily in their belief, no matter how false it might be.
But once they are tested and shown to be lacking, the lie is shattered. Bad fortune shows you what you really are.
The Sceptic
The sceptic doesn’t wait to be tested: they see that these games of make believe are only placebos with a small grain of truth. In this they lose faith, and in that a source of confidence. Having seen through enough lies, they find it hard to believe in anything. But now they have no reason to occupy themselves with what does them good. Because of this, they do nothing.
What they have in exchange is that they are not trapped in a lie. I’d say I’d be ashamed to strut around, convinced in my kung fu, lost in a fantasy world. What a picture of a fool. But it’s a shame I lose what is good in it along with it. You lose the grain of truth that comes with the placebo, and the real benefits that both bring.
Ask a Shallow Question
There is a temptation to see old martial arts as nothing more than theories that have been shown to be false. The test is simple: if these old martial arts are really effective, how is it that mediocre MMA fighters can easily beat grandmasters?
Of course this is only failing by one measure: winning fights. Old martial arts were never just about winning fights and it would be a shallow understanding to say so. Nevertheless, to the extent that old martial arts claimed to be good methods of fighting, that claim is difficult to support in light of the UFC.
Old martial arts are ‘old skills’. They are easily dismissed and difficult to believe in; and besides, they are difficult to learn. Is philosophy the same? If you listen to some psychologists or neuroscientists, they will say it is. But hearing them dismiss anything other than CBT and medication and mindfulness is like hearing people dismiss old martial arts in favour of MMA. Which only shows one thing: that if you ask a shallow question, you will get a shallow answer.
Does it help you win a fight? Yes. But what does it teach you of any value? How does it help you conduct your life? And yet it helps you win fights… Does it enable you to see beyond winning? Does it teach you what matters? Because does winning fights matter? Or would you rather be a decent person?
People only seem to care about winning fights these days; literally and metaphorically. The purpose of martial arts is to make you fit and strong, to give you confidence and assertiveness, to protect yourself, and to defeat your opponent; the purpose of psychological healing is to get you back to work, be more productive, feel better, and succeed. The martial artist spends so much time learning how to win fights that they never stop to ask whether they ought to. The psychiatrist spends so much time learning how to fix people that they never stop to ask whether it’s the patient that’s broken, or their purposes.
Philosophy should not be so susceptible to these unreflective errors, but to the extent that academic philosophy presents itself to be about winning arguments or training people to get jobs, it shares in those errors. It needs to rise above this shallow conception of the discipline and rediscover its depth, or else it will lose this fight that it did not choose.
Losing a fight shouldn’t trouble a philosopher: they should be grateful to discover their mistakes. To continue the analogy, if a philosopher were a martial artist they would be grateful to the UFC for the lessons it has taught us, but they would never have made the mistake of thinking that the value of martial arts was determined primarily by the winning of fights. If you want to be a good fighter, then fight, by all means; but surely there’s more to life than that?
As for esoteric martial arts? I believe in the myth of it. I can’t help but find those stories inspiring. But they are only stories; they’d be fairy stories, were it not for the physical achievements that result from the training. Show me a non-physical or ‘spiritual’ kung fu and I say it is a fairy story. Show me a physical ideal (like Bruce Lee or similar) and I will say that is an impressive achievement. But I can’t join them in their faith: I’ve seen too much bullshit in most of it to take any of it seriously. Which is a shame, because it did me good.
Postscript
This is a tortured allegory. I mean martial arts to be analogous to philosophy, and also the ways that we try to address our mental health, but also my academic and scholarly efforts, and also my experience with actual martial arts. Even I am confused by it.
Let me try to make it clearer, for both our sakes. Once I was a martial artist, now I am a sceptic; once I was an academic, now I am a sceptic; once I followed the standard medical advice of CBT and medication and mindfulness, now I am a sceptic. I remain inspired by martial arts, but I can’t bring myself to believe in them. I remain impressed by scholarly achievement, when it is true, but I can’t join them in their commitment. And I think most of our responses to the majority of mental health difficulties are only placebos with a small grain of truth and not real solutions. If you can believe in them, then they will work for you much better than if you can’t. Like martial arts. If you want these ‘solutions’ to work, you’d better hope that bad fortune doesn’t put you to the test.
But if you want something that works even and especially in times of bad fortune, look to yourself and to philosophy, and to the thing that will help you when you are knocked down. Because as I have said before: philosophy works, not because it gets you what you want but because it changes what you want.
If you want to win fights, then go ahead and learn MMA, and fight, a lot, because that is the only way to become a better fighter. Only know that you will end up battered and bruised, dazed and foggy, and conditioned to the mindset of a fighter. It might be better for you to change your understanding of what matters and avoid all that trouble.
Because as the old adage goes: if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. Fighters learn to fight and defend themselves, and so they see fights and threats everywhere. Scholars get locked in school and see no reason to leave. Psychiatrists see only people that aren’t functioning properly. These narrowed views come to define the discipline: the function of martial arts is fighting; the function of scholarship is an academic career; the function of psychiatry is to get people functioning ‘properly’. When people succeed by this measure, they believe they’ve hit the nail on the head. Instead, in doing this, they might have missed the point entirely. They should not be using hammers for this problem.
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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