Some people fail to see a distinction between the product of an activity and its purpose. This isn’t always and everywhere a failure to see things as they really are, since sometimes there is no distinction to be drawn. But when it is a failure it can lead to serious consequences. Because what follows from it: to come to define something’s purpose by its most visible product and then measure its value in those terms.
A work of art might be sold for a lot of money but we know it wasn’t made for that reason. An athlete might win a competition but that isn’t all that matters: do all those who fail to win waste their lives shamefully? Education might result in good grades and a higher-paid job but only a shallow person would think that that is the point of it.
Some of this might seem obvious. But the mistake creeps, in a way more subtle, into the popular understanding of philosophy. People ask: ‘What is the point of philosophy? What do philosophers do?’ They want an answer in terms of a visible product. I say that this misses the point entirely, but without a capacity to distinguish between the product of an activity and its purpose we’re in danger of philosophy being sold very short.
What do philosophers do? They think things through, they talk about what they’ve thought about, and some of them occasionally write-up their work, but beyond that they don’t really do anything. The best of them live an ‘examined life’ and for the sake of that they neglect the ‘active life’ of productive achievement.
‘What a waste of time’, people think, ‘to dedicate your life to doing nothing but thinking’.
People condemn what they don’t understand. And they don’t understand because they haven’t spent the first bit of time studying these things. We could be petty and point to just a few of the ‘products’ of philosophy: democracy as we know it, rights as we know them, science (and therefore all medicine and technology), computers (and all that followed), capitalism and socialism (and all in between). If you trace their origins, you will find philosophy at the root of all of these human developments. What a waste of time. Let’s not be petty.
The purpose of an activity is not necessarily its most visible product. Consider an example. Suppose I say ‘the purpose of philosophical ethics is not to do the right actions or make the right choices but only to have the right understanding’: without a capacity to distinguish between the product of an activity and its purpose, this sounds like I’m saying ethics is only about your intentions, or what you think, and has nothing to do with what you do, which would be untenable nonsense.
Of course the product of ethics remains something that can be seen in behaviour (actions and choices and consequences and the like), but the purpose of ethics is distinct from these things.
This is shown in the way we do ethics, or perhaps better shown in the way we don’t do ethics. For example, if my ethical purpose were only to ensure the best ‘product’ – as in the ‘right action’ – then I should probably outsource my ethical-decision-making to an ethical expert. And we should all do this, since not many of us qualify as ethical experts. There should be local meeting rooms or internet forums (you know the ones…) where people ask ‘what should I do?’, and to which highly-qualified ethical professors would reply by instructing people how to go about their lives.
It is an absurd example (or at least it ought to be). But contrast this example with medicine, which is one of those cases where it is difficult to draw a distinction between the purpose of the activity and its product. The purpose of medicine is to heal the sick or prevent sickness, and that is also its product: healing or health. In this case, it makes perfect sense to outsource to an expert and go to a doctor when we are sick. There is nothing more to it than that: our purpose is the product. No one expects you to know how to heal yourself, let alone find your own method of healing, and any practising doctor whose activity produced no good effect would not be considered a very good doctor. Doctors must ‘do something’, or else they are charlatans and quacks.
There are other examples like this, such as business, where the purpose and product is profit (no profit = bad business). Once upon a time agriculture would have been an easy example, since the purpose and product of farming was ‘produce’ in some form (no produce = not farming), but with the recent shift towards environmental management that is no longer clearly the case. For many farmers nowadays, at least in the UK, what they produce is little more than a by-product of what they do.
Philosophy
Philosophy is a different case entirely. Obviously there are many ‘products’ of philosophy: there are university degrees, books or journals, jobs and titles. But to see the purpose of philosophy in these things would be absurd (or at least ought to be). Although clearly it’s got to a point where – in the ever more business-oriented character of the modern university – philosophy spends most of its time and effort on the production of these products, we all know that this isn’t really what philosophy is about, don’t we?
And what about beyond the academy? There are products here too: there are articles in newspapers and books that you can buy. There are YouTube channels. Do these products satisfy the purpose of philosophy? Only an ignorant fool would say that they do. But if not for the sake of these products, then what is the purpose of philosophy?
It’s tempting to say ‘there are many different purposes’ or ‘it depends on context’ but I think that’s too easy. I suspect there is one true purpose that guides all of philosophy, including the writing of it, and it is not particularly mysterious. It is the pursuit of wisdom.
Does philosophical writing help you to pursue wisdom? Of course: how many mistakes are worked through and discarded on the cutting floor of earlier drafts.
Does philosophical writing help others in their pursuit of wisdom? Of course, provided it is good, only don’t make the mistake of thinking that wisdom is something you can learn from a textbook. Good philosophical writing is like Socrates’ conversation: as he would say, not like giving birth but rather like midwifery. It is a matter of prompting and guiding; I think of it as offering ‘corrective provocations’. All of the hard work is done by the reader. As for the writer: if you do it right it looks like you’ve done nothing much.
And in the academy, does a degree in philosophy help you to pursue wisdom? Does a career in philosophy exemplify the pursuit of wisdom? Here, sadly, it is less clear; though I fear this is a modern development and was not always the case. But I digress…
Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom: that is its proper purpose. Ethics is the wisdom of how to live and act in a way that is right and good, which after investigation we discover is one of the most important kinds of wisdom you can have. But what follows from this is nothing more than what has already been said: the purpose of ethics is to have the right understanding.
The purpose of ethics is to know what is right and be what is good. But if you manage to achieve anything close to that then the product of ethics, in terms of acting rightly and doing good, will come as naturally as fruit from a healthy tree.
Look after the tree and the fruit will take care of itself.
tobybetenson.com 