Our Philosophy About Philosophy
Internet philosophy is not without its challenges. Curious folks are faced with a number of different choices: YouTube explanation videos, pre-recorded lectures, blog posts. But all of these have something in common. It is remarkable that such a diverse range of mediums are all consumed in similar kinds of ways: with headphones on, in the quiet of one's room.
On the internet, then, philosophy can easily become solitary. And because our chances to learn about it are lonely, there is a temptation to engage with philosophical ideas passively, simply consuming them and scrolling on to the next video. Of course, this is natural: there is nothing else to do. Very rarely are there, e.g., classmates, and, if there are, one's relation to them is confrontational, debate-oriented, rather than constructive.
In my experience, this is not much of a consolation -- I find that, without discussion, without engaging with other people, anything I think I may have absorbed evaporates like breath on a mirror. And even if I do remember it, it doesn't impact me. It doesn't change the way I think. (And yes: ‘like breath on a mirror’ is inspired by Doctor Who.)
I watch a video, maybe even send it to a friend, and then forget about it.
This was how I was first introduced to philosophy. I tried to learn it on my own: I read plenty of online articles, watched videos, and even stumbled into reading academic papers. But I almost always found that the reading I did never ended up amounting to much. Very often I would think I understood some topic, but, in conversation with another person, I'd be left totally unable to explain it. Certainly unable to explain why it was important.
And I think there is a very basic reason for this. I did a lot of reading, but I never did anything with the reading. I didn't internalize it, maybe.
Compare this, however, to the general experience of someone studying philosophy in an academic setting. Not only do they have to write papers and take tests, but they exist within an environment full of people with whom they can bounce ideas off of. People they can think with.
For me, the most crucial moments in my college study of philosophy weren't lectures, and they weren't even the many hours I spent reading. They were, rather, the times when I sat with a TA in front of a whiteboard for an hour and a half, puzzling over the solution to some philosophical problem. And the philosophical problem wasn't always important, as many are quick to remind us. Some philosophy is far from practical.
But still, in sitting with it, in really sitting with it, I came to think about it more cohesively. Jumbles of thought in my mind began to crystallize. And this was rarely confined to the philosophical problem I was, at the time, thinking about. Philosophy has a way of echoing throughout the rest of our lives. Before I knew it, I had developed a more general skill: I was starting to think philosophically. This helped me think about a whole load of things.
So it turned out that doing philosophy was not a matter of acquiring mere knowledge. This should be no surprise, either. The Greek word, philosophia, roughly means a 'love of knowledge.' Loving a person, however, does not mean simply knowing everything about them. To think about love as purely a matter of collecting information is to already misunderstand it, and to doom oneself to fail in pursuit of it. Why would we expect a love of knowledge to simply be a matter of knowing as much of it as you can?
Rather, the hope is that, in doing philosophy we learn to engage with knowledge and ideas in a special, a loving, sort of way.
So this helps us make a bit more sense of our initial problem. ‘Content' and 'videos' are great for adding to our stores of knowledge, but because they don't give us the opportunity to do anything with what we've learned--to puzzle over it, to be confused by it, to assimilate it--they leave us as 'philosophical' as we started, but perhaps with a new word under our belts.
So if we want to get better at philosophy, we need to shift our paradigm – learning facts, or the names of theories, or the ability to list off premises and conclusion is one thing, but understanding them, contending with them, and playing with them is something entirely different, and, dare I say, more valuable.
This is why, I think, college was such a special experience for me. It filled in the gap I had not realized internet philosophy had left.
But this is a huge undertaking to lay down on the plate of the curious person. To expect them to be able to do this from the beginning would be to expect them to be able to become philosophical thinkers in a flash. This is another benefit of going to college: students have teachers and graduate students to whom they can aspire. Companions, people to think with, make doing philosophy well much easier.
But as philosopher Christine Korsgaard says, quite beautifully: a clear statement of the problem is often a statement of the solution. If internet philosophy's problem is that it is too lonely, then the solution is that it shouldn't be. Philosophy needs community, something more than a comments section on a YouTube video.
But before I discuss the solution to the first problem, I want to pause and consider a second one. Online philosophy, after all, has other problems. One of them is that summaries abound, and engagement with primary texts is rare. Videos or articles which seek to explain Kant summarize him, which is perfectly fine, but it also leaves the person watching without the experience of toiling over what on earth Kant is saying. And it is that toiling, that work of interpretation, that is so often a source of philosophical, or perhaps even personal, growth related to a text.
This is, of course, entirely understandable. Though I may sound critical, I assure you, reader, that I have no intention of faulting anyone. Kant did not write for a general audience. Undergraduates, with troves of professors and TAs, fear his writing. It is filled with jargon (Analytic a priori or synthetic a priori … good god …), it is long, it is tiring, and it requires so, so much background. Who is he responding to? Who does he have in mind when he is making such-and-such point.
Who wouldn’t want to forego reading the guy himself for someone who makes this all much clearer?
Yet this short-changes the learner. Philosophy is not, after all, a matter of knowing as much as possible. It is a matter of loving knowledge. Of playing with it, of working with it, and of making it one’s own. If the ideas become too easy to digest then there won't be much thinking left, for the curious to do.
Solving these problems is important. Deeply so: philosophers and anyone interested in the subject recognize its relevance. After all, it is a discipline that professes to tell us what to do in hard circumstances, what a good life is, to answer questions like: "'why go on living?'" It would be sad if a fruitful engagement with such questions were hidden behind a paywall, an increasingly expensive one at that. The internet has the potential to solve this problem. However, we worry that the solutions which abound today are not entirely adequate. They leave out community, and tend not to be as focused around texts as they could be.
And here is the ‘plug.’ Now, other philosophy communities do exist, and some of them are wonderful. Discord groups, or The Catherine Project (which you would do well to check out!)
But such communities tend to either be exceedingly academic and thus inaccessible to a general audience or far too debate-oriented. We wanted to create a community built around philosophy, around texts, and around being thoughtful that was also accessible.
This is why we created our Daily15 tool: to give you all the context you need to start engaging. 3 days a week, we share an excerpt of philosophy. And we mark it up: highlight it, underline it. All of this to give you the requisite background to think about it for yourself.
But most importantly, we created A Community Of Thinkers. We wanted to build a place where you can think with others, and where you could play with the ideas of philosophy. Take them out of their texts, and relate them to your lives. What would it be to think philosophically about music, about art, about a play, about literature, or, even, that cup of tea?
And that's what we've tried to build here at A Life Of Thought. We don't mean to say everyone else is wrong. If you like watching what’s out there now, all the power in the world to you. Really. This, after all, is simply our philosophy (about philosophy) -- and even it is open to question.