Lingering meme: "Why do you study philosophy?"
I accumulate bad mojo every day that I fail to complete this meme. I've been giving it thought ever since, so I thought I'd take the time now (when I should be working on TA stuff) to answer:
"Why do you study philosophy?"
It's a weird question to answer, because I don't really think of myself as studying philosophy. I realize that the philosophy/not-philosophy distinction is one that many people draw, but I don't think it's a particularly useful one. On the contrary, I think the disciplinary distinction is used primarily to block the path of inquiry when it runs between two subjects that carry different labels.
That said, I know what the question means. So I probably can answer it; but what I said about this before was that there are several true answers to this question. This is partly due to the ambiguity of the word "why." Generally, it means "for what reason?" but in practice it gets interpreted variously as "for what purpose?" and "for what cause?" Context often lets us distinguish between the two; in most inanimate domains, the latter suffices. When human agency is involved, we often lean toward the former, in that we are asking people to report the intentions of the agent. If we were naive, this would be entirely consistent, since we would believe that the cause of the action is the intention of the agent. However, since we know that introspection doesn't really work like this, that turns "Why did she do this?" into a conundrum. The cause and the conscious intention could likely have been distinct. In fact, they have to be, in some cases: once we admit human agency into the general flow of causality, then virtually any prior cause, direct or indirect, is a potential answer to the question "Why do you study philosophy?"
So this question is really complicated even before we get past the first word. I'm going to stop stalling though, and answer the question. Here are some answers, in an order chosen according to my personal sense of aesthetics:
I consistently receive psychological rewards in the form of encouragement, commendation from authority, or the feeling of accomplishment when I study philosophy in an academic or pseudo-academic way. This program of rewards probably gets my nucleus accumbens all hot and bothered by studying philosophy, so I continue to do it.
I have an active imagination and a lot of ambition, and together those led me to be interested in politics. But I went to high school with a lot of people who cared much more about politics than I did. They were largely debater types with a lot of rhetorical skill, and the way one proved one's worth in that setting was partly by winning arguments about politics.
Before high school, I thought I was pretty hot shit as far as verbal persuasion went. I thought I could go toe to toe in argument with anybody. But these guys were animals, and I was intimidated. Also, they moved too fast. They would build up a lot of momentum in one part of their argument, then use it to leap over to another part without stopping to address the steps along the way. They would be as confident as ever, but I would just know that they had missed something, that their argument wasn't quite following the logic how it should be, etc....
So I started to get Socratic and analytic. "What do you mean by .... ?" "Wait a second--define your terms." Etc. It drove them crazy. My friend Zach once described it as "like arguing against nothing."
But what I found was that these political questions kept boiling down into questions about what it meant for a government to be just. And those questions boiled down into questions of how we would know if something could be just, etc. The people I was talking with didn't give a damn about these questions. They cared about politics.
But my Junior year I met my friend Piotr, who for what I think were quite different reasons wanted to talk about the same sorts of questions. I think he was mostly interested at that point in pushing a Objectivist agenda. But for whatever reason, we started a Philosophy Society, which mainly involved the two of us, with occasional company (Hao, the Falun Gong guy; Mike, an evangelical Christian; a friend of ours, Hal, who I may have mentioned sometimes...) arguing over dinner. We had some rocking signs that we put up. I should dig them up and post them some time.
Anyway, that sort of reduction from politics to philosophy continued after high school and through college. After a political theory course in high school, I found myself so unconvinced by any theory of justice that I decided I was a philosophical anarchist. The political theory course freshman year didn't help. Each political theory made what I thought were ridiculous assumptions about human nature, the way we acquire knowledge, the nature of morality, etc. So I needed to answer all of those question first, before I could get anything like a coherent political theory....
I don't study philosophy. I study religion. Or rather, I practice a religion.
When I was a kid I was indoctrinated into two beliefs that came into conflict with each other. The first was Christianity of the liberal Protestant flavor--with this came a sense of my purpose in life, a direction in which I always ought to be walking. The second was that it was always a good thing to ask questions.
For the most part, I was encouraged by almost everyone in my religious community to ask questions about religion. They all said that questioning ones beliefs, the interpretation of the Bible, etc., was a part of one's "spiritual journey." Occasionally somebody urging blind faith with respect to religion would wander into my life, but I would see them later ridiculed at the dinner table by my parents, or clergy, or Christian family friends.
But to my surprise I found that the questions continued to erode away the edifice of belief that at the time genuinely had a hold on me. No, there was no good reason to have faith in one religion to the exclusion of faith in another. No, there was no good reason to believe in the divinity of Jesus. No, their was no good reason to believe in the particular authority of Scripture. And so on.
Oddly, however, a certain theory-ladenness of my observations of the world made me see things in a way the reinforced my belief in an active God. In particular, I was convinced, based on personal experience, of the efficacy of prayer.
By this time, I was in high school, and regularly arguing about philosophical topics with my friend Piotr, who at the time was an Objectivist. This made me realize that I needed justification for all my beliefs about God that were not due to my beliefs about the efficacy of prayer. I ended up leaning towards a kind of naive Jamesian justification for my theism, where I would resolve a question for which I could find no evidence by finding the most emotionally satisfying answer. And that answer was a belief in God, albiet one that was uniquely tailored to my needs. It was a God that was, in some ways, crafted in my own image.
I found myself, senior year of high school, lying in bed one day with a terrible crisis. God was the arbiter of what was good and evil, and I was sure that I ought to be good. I thought this was just a matter of definition. But I had absolutely no reliable guide as to what God's intentions about what good and evil were. I had hit what I could later classify as a kind of Nietzschean nihilism; my highest values were simply out of reach. Worse still, I had a hunch that God himself did not know the answers to the basic questions of morality; that He was caught in a similar existential crisis as I was.
So I did what I thought was the only moral thing to do in that situation. With no knowledge of what I ought to do, doubt whether even God knew what I ought to do, but belief in the absolute power of prayer, I prayed and gave away my life to God for the purpose of doing what I ought, whatever that was, or finding out what is was that I ought to be doing, whichever came first. There was a kind of wager here: I was betting my life on the odds that the world was constructed in such a way that by continuing to ask questions, it would save me, not damn me. If I could never know the Answers, I would redeem my existence by spending my life trying to find them.
At this point, I don't have the same theistic beliefs I once had, and so I suppose that I should consider that dedication of my life to be null and void. Nevertheless, I think that day might still have a lot to do with why I "study philosophy."
I planned to provide more, but shallower answers. But I have to go now, and I've already typed too much.
"Why do you study philosophy?"
It's a weird question to answer, because I don't really think of myself as studying philosophy. I realize that the philosophy/not-philosophy distinction is one that many people draw, but I don't think it's a particularly useful one. On the contrary, I think the disciplinary distinction is used primarily to block the path of inquiry when it runs between two subjects that carry different labels.
That said, I know what the question means. So I probably can answer it; but what I said about this before was that there are several true answers to this question. This is partly due to the ambiguity of the word "why." Generally, it means "for what reason?" but in practice it gets interpreted variously as "for what purpose?" and "for what cause?" Context often lets us distinguish between the two; in most inanimate domains, the latter suffices. When human agency is involved, we often lean toward the former, in that we are asking people to report the intentions of the agent. If we were naive, this would be entirely consistent, since we would believe that the cause of the action is the intention of the agent. However, since we know that introspection doesn't really work like this, that turns "Why did she do this?" into a conundrum. The cause and the conscious intention could likely have been distinct. In fact, they have to be, in some cases: once we admit human agency into the general flow of causality, then virtually any prior cause, direct or indirect, is a potential answer to the question "Why do you study philosophy?"
So this question is really complicated even before we get past the first word. I'm going to stop stalling though, and answer the question. Here are some answers, in an order chosen according to my personal sense of aesthetics:
I consistently receive psychological rewards in the form of encouragement, commendation from authority, or the feeling of accomplishment when I study philosophy in an academic or pseudo-academic way. This program of rewards probably gets my nucleus accumbens all hot and bothered by studying philosophy, so I continue to do it.
I have an active imagination and a lot of ambition, and together those led me to be interested in politics. But I went to high school with a lot of people who cared much more about politics than I did. They were largely debater types with a lot of rhetorical skill, and the way one proved one's worth in that setting was partly by winning arguments about politics.
Before high school, I thought I was pretty hot shit as far as verbal persuasion went. I thought I could go toe to toe in argument with anybody. But these guys were animals, and I was intimidated. Also, they moved too fast. They would build up a lot of momentum in one part of their argument, then use it to leap over to another part without stopping to address the steps along the way. They would be as confident as ever, but I would just know that they had missed something, that their argument wasn't quite following the logic how it should be, etc....
So I started to get Socratic and analytic. "What do you mean by .... ?" "Wait a second--define your terms." Etc. It drove them crazy. My friend Zach once described it as "like arguing against nothing."
But what I found was that these political questions kept boiling down into questions about what it meant for a government to be just. And those questions boiled down into questions of how we would know if something could be just, etc. The people I was talking with didn't give a damn about these questions. They cared about politics.
But my Junior year I met my friend Piotr, who for what I think were quite different reasons wanted to talk about the same sorts of questions. I think he was mostly interested at that point in pushing a Objectivist agenda. But for whatever reason, we started a Philosophy Society, which mainly involved the two of us, with occasional company (Hao, the Falun Gong guy; Mike, an evangelical Christian; a friend of ours, Hal, who I may have mentioned sometimes...) arguing over dinner. We had some rocking signs that we put up. I should dig them up and post them some time.
Anyway, that sort of reduction from politics to philosophy continued after high school and through college. After a political theory course in high school, I found myself so unconvinced by any theory of justice that I decided I was a philosophical anarchist. The political theory course freshman year didn't help. Each political theory made what I thought were ridiculous assumptions about human nature, the way we acquire knowledge, the nature of morality, etc. So I needed to answer all of those question first, before I could get anything like a coherent political theory....
I don't study philosophy. I study religion. Or rather, I practice a religion.
When I was a kid I was indoctrinated into two beliefs that came into conflict with each other. The first was Christianity of the liberal Protestant flavor--with this came a sense of my purpose in life, a direction in which I always ought to be walking. The second was that it was always a good thing to ask questions.
For the most part, I was encouraged by almost everyone in my religious community to ask questions about religion. They all said that questioning ones beliefs, the interpretation of the Bible, etc., was a part of one's "spiritual journey." Occasionally somebody urging blind faith with respect to religion would wander into my life, but I would see them later ridiculed at the dinner table by my parents, or clergy, or Christian family friends.
But to my surprise I found that the questions continued to erode away the edifice of belief that at the time genuinely had a hold on me. No, there was no good reason to have faith in one religion to the exclusion of faith in another. No, there was no good reason to believe in the divinity of Jesus. No, their was no good reason to believe in the particular authority of Scripture. And so on.
Oddly, however, a certain theory-ladenness of my observations of the world made me see things in a way the reinforced my belief in an active God. In particular, I was convinced, based on personal experience, of the efficacy of prayer.
By this time, I was in high school, and regularly arguing about philosophical topics with my friend Piotr, who at the time was an Objectivist. This made me realize that I needed justification for all my beliefs about God that were not due to my beliefs about the efficacy of prayer. I ended up leaning towards a kind of naive Jamesian justification for my theism, where I would resolve a question for which I could find no evidence by finding the most emotionally satisfying answer. And that answer was a belief in God, albiet one that was uniquely tailored to my needs. It was a God that was, in some ways, crafted in my own image.
I found myself, senior year of high school, lying in bed one day with a terrible crisis. God was the arbiter of what was good and evil, and I was sure that I ought to be good. I thought this was just a matter of definition. But I had absolutely no reliable guide as to what God's intentions about what good and evil were. I had hit what I could later classify as a kind of Nietzschean nihilism; my highest values were simply out of reach. Worse still, I had a hunch that God himself did not know the answers to the basic questions of morality; that He was caught in a similar existential crisis as I was.
So I did what I thought was the only moral thing to do in that situation. With no knowledge of what I ought to do, doubt whether even God knew what I ought to do, but belief in the absolute power of prayer, I prayed and gave away my life to God for the purpose of doing what I ought, whatever that was, or finding out what is was that I ought to be doing, whichever came first. There was a kind of wager here: I was betting my life on the odds that the world was constructed in such a way that by continuing to ask questions, it would save me, not damn me. If I could never know the Answers, I would redeem my existence by spending my life trying to find them.
At this point, I don't have the same theistic beliefs I once had, and so I suppose that I should consider that dedication of my life to be null and void. Nevertheless, I think that day might still have a lot to do with why I "study philosophy."
I planned to provide more, but shallower answers. But I have to go now, and I've already typed too much.