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10/25/2006: "Philosophers Aren’t a Modest Bunch: They Argue That Few of Us Would Know Much About Anything If Philosophy Didn’t Know Something About Something"

During grad school days in Austin, the wife and I befriended a young philosopher and his wife. He was an expert at a tender age in phenomenology, specifically the ideas of the modern-day French savant, Paul Ricoeur.

Today, you can learn much more about phenomenology than I could tell you by checking with Encyclopædia Britannica. EB describes the genre as “a 20th-century philosophical movement, the primary objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions.”

Intuitively, I like the ring of that. Sounds right down to earth, phenomenology does. Understands, it would appear, that there is that pesky brain interlocking and interceding and intervening and interfering with our understanding of phenomena. Or at least I suppose the phenomenologist first posits a brain before she or he posits a consciousness, although I don’t really know that. It’s probably much over my head and beyond my ken. In fact, our graduate school friend told me as much one day when I sought to question him about what he was an expert in—said it was much too complicated to try to explain. At that point his wife hurried to agree that this was the case. So that’s where we left it.

The taste of that conversation has endured all these years, and it is a bad taste. From that point forward, I’ve been skeptical of philosophy and philosophers. Not to the extent that Edward Abbey, the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, was. Abbey intended to be a professor of philosopher but two weeks of wrestling with symbolic logic in graduate school at Yale ended those hopes. He would later write a friend, "When I hear the word 'phenomenology,' I reach for my revolver."

I’ve gone a different route. I seldom spot a book on philosophy that I don’t open. Often, I acquire the book for our online bookstore after thumbing through it and reading for a while. Not infrequently I get a perverse pleasure out of seeing how quickly the philosophical mind can induce numbness in my own. For example, the other day I spotted a copy of the late Jean E. Hampton’s The Authority of Reason. Dr. Hampton set a new record. She required only 25 words to do me in. "Although this book seeks to show that the naturalists are wrong to criticize the normativity in moral theory, nonetheless in Part I, I shall be..." she wrote. That did it. If you want to know what happened in Part I, you’ll have to buy her book. I was already moving on.

On as it turned out to W.B. Macomber’s The Anatomy of Disillusion; Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth. This time, unwilling to again risk the onset of numbness so quickly, instead of starting at the front of the book, I went to the back. And found myself reading about Nietzsche, not Heidegger. Macomber, himself a philosopher, has a nice style. I suspect I could have a conversation with him about phenomenology and not come away thinking I’m mentally deficient. He explained, for example, that Nietzsche prescribed not partial nihilism but “complete nihilism” as needed to purge Western society of the damage done to it by its history. “There is no curing cancer with Noxema,” writes Macomber. Now, I strongly suspect that this is one of the few instances in the history of philosophical writing that the word “Noxema” has appeared in a scholarly work, and perhaps the only time. And I just find that phenomenological!

What I’ve concluded after all these years and all these brief encounters with philosophical prose is that philosophers are actually incomplete or failed novelists. They can plot but they can’t entertain. They can write dialogue but only if it is themselves they are engaging in conversation. It is only once in a blue moon that any of the lot says anything of importance, and it is usually a century or two before anyone can look at history and tell how much damage the idea did.

Harboring such thoughts, you can imagine my glee at picking up the October 16 issue of Newsweek at the doctor’s office and finding a young Indiana philosopher trying to explain his career choice in an article plaintively titled, “I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood.”

Young Erik Wielenberg was disarmingly straightforward about what he does for a living: “What I do, in a nutshell, is this: I find a question or puzzle that interests me. I try to figure out a solution, usually reading what others have had to say about it along the way. If I come up with anything good, I write it down and see if anyone is interested in publishing it.”

Well, now. If that’s what a professional philosopher does, maybe I have something in common with such dudes after all. I’d like to think that someone such as I who is attentive to how the mind influences what questions or puzzles a philosopher chooses to work on, who he reads after once he’s selected one and how he goes about explaining what he thinks about it all is himself raising very important philosophical issues.

In fact, just the other day I was reading Abraham Kaplan’s The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, and realized that he certainly understood that kinds of minds—and the choices they make—are all important to the philosophical inquiry. One type of philosopher, he argues, will look at a statement and ask, “What would the world be like if it were true?” A philosopher with another cast of mind will ask, “What would we have had to do to come to believe it?” Yet another will ask, “What would we do if we did believe it?”

All of which makes one of young Wielenberg’s closing observations make a great deal of sense. “Philosophy,” he said, “is an inefficient activity: much of it is useless.”

The saving grace is that there’s always another philosopher around to try and help make it less useless than it would otherwise be. You may find this hard to believe but I swear on the writings of Socrates that it’s true. A few moments after reading, with considerable puzzlement except for the Noxema thing, W.B. Macomber’s comments about Nietzsche and nihilism, I came across a book called What Nietzsche Really Said. I bought it in a heartbeat. Now, if only I had young Wielenberg to tell me what it means. It is, in finality, this endless circularity that both makes philosophy and philosophers attractive and repulsive to me.

There are many reasons to read philosophy, and one very good one not to bother reading very much of it. The anti-reason is that if you sample the writings of philosophers to any extent at all, especially from the past 300 or 400 years, you can’t help but suspect that knowledge among philosophers is simply getting broader, not deeper.

Read about the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang here: "Where have you gone, Edward Abbey?”

Order Jean Hampton’s book here: "The Authority of Reason”

Order W.B. Macomber’s book here: "The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger's Notion of Truth ”

Order Abraham Kaplan’s book here: " The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science ”

Order Robert C. Solomon’s and Kathleen M. Higgins’ book here: " What Nietzsche Really Said ”

Read Erik Wielenberg’s Newsweek article (you’ll need to register): " I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood ”