I’ve lost a measure of faith in the idea that philosophy can be ‘applied’ to the various debates of our times. The story is similar to ‘Part One‘. In most cases, most people wouldn’t understand the arguments because they lack the requisite ‘preparation’; and so if you have a cause to fight for then that would be better served by appeal to other means of persuasion, such as one celebrity endorsement.
Is it too harshly condescending to say ‘most people wouldn’t understand the arguments’? I don’t think so: it is a matter of fact. Each ‘output’ of philosophy comes with a weight of understanding behind it, and I suspect it cannot stand without that understanding. I say something simple like ‘nothing is more important than living a decent life’, but don’t ask me what I mean without also asking what Socrates means, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Epictetus, and Spinoza, and Rousseau, and Hume, and Kant, and Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, and Camus, and Murdoch, and Gaita, and all the countless many other nexus points that form the great coherence of philosophical thought. Take one point out of this context and it becomes a trite platitude: something that anyone could say but that wouldn’t say anything.
For example: anyone could say ‘you shouldn’t lie’. Kant says you shouldn’t lie. Does Kant mean what most people mean? I highly doubt it. Do most people mean by this to say something that comes as a direct consequence of understanding what we are, as human beings, in our essence? That our knowledge and experience of the world is determined by our nature, such that we can only know what we are capable of knowing, but one thing that we are both capable of knowing and incapable of denying is that we are spatial and temporal things that think, that we are subjects and objects and so are subject to objective laws of nature but also the ‘laws of freedom’; and that freedom, meaning autonomy, meaning the free choice and practical necessity to rule yourself by rules of your own choosing, is both a necessary precondition and consequence of our being what we are, as thinking and choosing things; but that if you must think and choose, you must choose thinkingly, according to the categories of understanding determined by your nature, and consequently you must, to be consistent with yourself, choose as if on behalf of all humanity? And it could go on and on, because that is only a small part of Kant’s argument, and that in itself only a small part of Kant, and Kant is a (relatively…) small part of philosophy and would be nothing without Leibniz and Hume and Spinoza and Descartes and Aristotle. And so I think I am stating a matter of fact when I say that the simple version of this statement, ‘Kant says you shouldn’t lie’, says nothing without the weight of philosophy behind it.
The ‘simple’ versions of these things that we can present to the public are understood to be nothing more than what they present themselves to be: simple. And because of that, they are easily dismissed or countered with other ‘simple’ arguments. This is only trading opinions: full of sound and fury, it signifies nothing.
I discuss philosophy with people who don’t understand philosophy, and it seems to be no different from a pilot discussing how to land a plane in bad weather with someone who knows nothing about flying planes. What is the point of this discussion? If the pilot wants to land the plane, safely, they should not listen to anything that the non-pilot has to say because it will only distract them, confuse them, and cloud their judgement. The pilot would be well advised to shut everyone out of the cockpit so that they can focus on their work.
If another pilot is there, then that’s a different matter. Then they would be well advised to take a second opinion. But then we imagine the pilot would welcome the other pilot into the cockpit, along with any other pilots, before once again shutting the door to everyone else.
Which all sounds very much like the attitude of Plato’s Academy.
To continue the analogy: what is the purpose of ‘public engagement’ from this private place? Not to discuss how to land planes in bad weather, clearly; not to find any good answers. And not to report those good answers to others, because, for a start, they are not pilots, so what do they need to know of landing planes? And second, they will not hear what you are saying, because they will hear only what they can hear, which is not the real version, since to hear the real version requires a weight of understanding that is lacking in the public.
The purpose can only be to encourage people to embark on the study required to become pilots, so that they can find the good answers for themselves, or else become someone who might be able to help us in our search for good answers. We call this ‘protreptics’. We want people to become good pilots (philosophers), but we can’t do it for them. Perhaps as a part of this we might show people how we fly planes (do philosophy), and we might even talk with them about how we fly planes, but don’t pretend that this is a ‘discussion’. It’s only a show.
Can you teach someone how to fly a plane by writing an article in a newspaper? How absurd. And if you taught them only one ‘simple’ thing in this article, for example the role and function of the altimeter, and the reader took this as an insight that somehow helped them to understand how to fly a plane, wouldn’t you describe what resulted as an unfounded confidence? They know one thing, perhaps, but it is only a bit of information that teaches them nothing whatsoever about how to fly a plane.
How will they learn? Serious study. That is the only answer, and that is not something that can be achieved with a little article on the subject. And so I fear that all our little writings on philosophy only serve to mislead people into thinking that it is something small enough to be contained in such small things. I think it would be reckless and stupid to give that impression. And so I’m inclined to stop writing in a way that could give that impression.
tobybetenson.com 