Philosophy as Defense
In a previous post, I asked what questions learning about philosophy prevented me from asking. I want to say more about this today. This piece is going to be a bit autobiographical.
No art for this post, either. I hope the reason why will become clear by its end.
This is a hard piece to write. It is hard because, in writing it, I risk engaging in the very phenomenon I am hoping to write about.
It is also hard because I do not know what I am doing. I do not think what follows is philosophy, and I don’t think it is psychology either. It is too planned to be a stream of consciousness. I am not sure.
The general structure of this piece will be as follows. I am going to start by saying something about my own life, attempting to highlight a sense in which philosophy has interacted with it. Then I am going to try to say something about what I’ve said and try to draw out a problem and a defense.
Philosophy is a discipline that asks big questions: whether moral facts are objectively true, what the nature of time is, how explanations work, and, last but not least, what on earth the meaning of life is. If, at least, it is on Earth.
This is how philosophy was for me, at least at first. I was particularly interested in the question of whether morality was objective or not. Was there good or bad? Were these stance-independent, person-independent, facts of the universe? Or were they something else?
I flip-flopped as I progressed through undergrad. I started out a staunch subjectivist. Eventually, something clicked, and I became an objectivist. Maybe it was because a lot of the people around me were, or because I subconsciously processed an argument. Either way, I didn’t have one big eureka moment. Eventually, the anti-objectivity-of-morality arguments just stopped seeming any good or persuasive.
I sought out new arguments, ones in favor of an objective morality. I thought about these for a while. I read some new papers and had a lot of fun.
Eventually, though, I tired of this as well. I don’t know why, but I stopped caring much for the conclusions or moves in these arguments.
It was around this time in my college journey that I had a crisis of purpose. Maybe philosophy wasn’t for me; maybe I ought to go into some financial job. After all, you can make much more money crunching numbers than reading philosophy.
This passed too, eventually. I became interested in the sort of philosophy I’ve written about here: What is the nature of desire, of the self, of memory? Grief, loss, the deep stuff. I’ve been thinking about that for the past two or so years. I read some Freud, some existentialists; it was a load of fun!
So far I’ve told one facet of the story: how my interactions with philosophy changed. But I haven’t painted a great picture of my life. I’ve left most of it out, in fact. Not a word about the things that happened in between: the friendships that started and ended, the medical issues that arose in my personal life. Not a mention of romance either. No mention of dreams or desire, of fear or flight.
On second glance, it is a remarkably academic autobiography.
Is this an accident? I wonder. I do not know. I struggle with this.
At most, I mentioned a crisis of purpose. But that was just for a few lines, and it was ultimately not very important. I eventually found my way, after all, back to philosophy!
Things get even more interesting here. The philosophical side of me sees this problem and wishes to deal with it. “OK,” I say to myself, “Good point. I’ve been focusing on my philosophical development a lot. Let’s spend some time thinking about the personal stuff.”
So far I’ve thought this approach was sufficient. It gets the job done: I end up thinking about my crisis of purpose eventually, the medical problems my family faced eventually, the things missing from my personal life eventually.
And, even better, because philosophy has approved of the questions, because it even finds them interesting, I can extend familiar philosophical methods of analysis to them. How is it possible? I might ask myself. What premise best explains the unexaminedness of these deeply important facets of life?
I settle on basic answers. Perhaps I am just a more philosophical person; perhaps it is just what I care about right now.
Huh. Isn’t philosophy a discipline of complexity? One that asks deep questions only to recieve deeper and more confusing answers? Proust spends six books gesturing at a philosophy of memory, desire, love, and forgetting. How could I settle these questions so easily?
I have begun to feel skeptical of this. And by this, I mean that I have started to doubt whether I am really asking these questions—questions about how parts of life could have gone unexamined—with the intent of answering them. I think, rather, I have begun to ask them as compromises.
In asking them, I ‘cross them off the list.’ But because I engage with them in the realm of philosophy, they don’t have the raw emotional impact they otherwise would. By confining them to philosophical questions, ones that I answer in basic ways, I neuter them of their emotional force.
Even now, I’ve turned this worry that I am gutting these important questions of their emotional force into a piece of writing. Emotional uncertainty has been transformed into abstract analysis.
What concerns me, then, is that this begins to look a lot like defense. Philosophy begins to look like something that I do not merely practice, but which I use as a tool to quiet the more uncertain parts of my life. By subjecting them to philosophical method, I acquire distance from them. They become universal laws, abstract phenomena. They no longer emotionally count.
I want to return to my philosophical autobiography. One of the things I noted, in passing, was how passive the changes all felt. One day I was a subjectivist; the next, like the seasons change, I was a realist. I still do not know what this means.
And this raises a more general question: How is this worry—the one I have just raised—that philosophy is acting, for me, as a defense, to impact my life moving forward?
I do not know, and I think, to consider this question would be to play into the defense. It would be to once more treat this as an intellectual problem to solve. So that would be a mistake. But I do not know the alternative.