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 Encyclopćdia 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 ”

Posted on October 25, 2006

“Metaphors Are Only As Good As Their Interpreters,” Said the Spider to the Starfish Just Before He Flung Him Into the Fire

I’d love to say something positive about the just released The Starfish and the Spider, and so I will before I forget that I intended to. The book is a fun little read if you’d like to revisit the oft-told, winsome startup stories of techno-age successes like eBay and Wikipedia and Skype. I like the authors’ metaphors, too. If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies; ditto, or so argue the two Stanford MBAs who wrote the book, with highly centralized organizations. But if you severe the leg of a starfish, the leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Ditto, the authors argue, for decentralized organizations like, well, Alcoholics Anonymous, Napster, al Qaeda and, again, Wikipedia.

How neat. But then that’s the problem repeatedly with Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book. Any resemblance between their portrayals and analyses of the things and the real world can disappear neatly in the middle of a paragraph. That happens, for example, on p. 39, when they seek to excuse the epically egregious failure of the United States government to respond when Katrinia flooded New Orleans by noting that “the real culprit … was the system itself. It’s times like these that you need a starfish.” Brafman and Beckstrom breezily ignore the reality that FEMA was much more like a starfish before the Bush Administration turned it into something much more like a spider.

But the example that really puts Brafman’s and Beckstrom’s effort to say profound things with Danielle Steel glibness down the toilet is their breathless retelling of the tragic conflict between the invading Spaniards and the indigenous Apaches. Cortés’ spider-like invaders utterly destroyed the equally spider-like Aztecs, but not so, say the authors, the starfish-like Apaches. The Apaches, they note, held off the Spaniards for two centuries. And there they leave the story abruptly in their hurry to compare Napster and Kazaa to the Apaches and the music industry to the Spaniards, or Skype to starfish and the phone companies to spiders.

In many of the us-versus-them episodes that Brafman and Beckstrom recount, I don’t really have a dog in the hunt myself. And I suspect I’ll not be the only reader who can easily find good reasons to be first on the side of the spiders and then the side of the starfish. But the reason this isn’t a worthwhile, believable book for understanding the complexities of a global marketplace and postpostCold-War age is that it’s ridiculously selective in choosing its facts and mounting its interpretations.

Let me let far more impassioned readers than am I make the case. The book’s claim that al Qaeda's success is attributable to its starfish characteristics immediately set off a minor firestorm on the blogs of a Web site called military.com. A reader who signs on as Ironfang observed:

"Why did the Apaches finally lose after 200 years of independence? Because they were decimated, bottom line. The US used some pretty heavy handed tactics. The choice for Native Americans were ‘Reservation or Genocide’. Japanese fanaticism (remember, the original suicide bombers) was cured by the Atomic Bomb. There are few instances throughout history where ideology has been defeated by diplomacy (at least not that I know of, examples would be welcomed). How do you kill a starfish? You throw the complete starfish into a pit of fire.”

You don’t have to approve of Ironfang’s solutions to sense that in only a couple of sentences his analysis gets hugely beyond anything the authors of The Starfish and the Spider have to offer.

I don’t know whether this book will spin its way to the top of the bestseller lists; the whole project walks like a duck and talks like a duck and smells like a duck if your definition of a duck is a “made-on-Madison-Avenue pseudoevent”; as this is written, The Starfish and the Spider (released on Oct. 9) was No. 2,109 on Amazon.com’s sales ranking. But I don’t think it will be translated into Arabic and find its way into al Qaeda’s backpacks to be read alongside their bomb-making manuals. And, frankly, there’s nothing here that is going to be helpful to any CEO, manager or wannabe entrepreneur looking for wisdom on how to organize in the chaos of today’s business or geopolitical worlds. That’s because the reality level, if not the reading level, of The Starfish and the Spider is at about the junior high level.

Editor’s Note: I received not one, but two, pre-release copies of this book because the authors’ publicist is a Brain Technologies associate. As you can see, I’m going to be in deep doodoo with her.

The book can be purchased here: The Starfish and the Spider

Articles by Ori Brafman are here: Starfish Change the Rules of War and The 'starfish model' for the war on terrorism: How to counter a decentralized foe

For the discussion on military.com, go here: Discussion boards

Posted on October 17, 2006

Here’s a Test for You: How Young Were You When You Were First Able to Recognize a Teacher Who Couldn’t Teach?

My own memory is that the skill was becoming well-entrenched by the fourth grade. I can go back through old report cards for confirmation. Classes or subjects in which I received the lowest grades were nearly always classes or subjects where I remember the teacher as being incompetent. It would be easy—and not out of the question—to suggest that the problem was mine (and my brain’s) and not the teacher’s. But after several decades of paying a kind of professional attention to teachers who can and who can’t teach, I won’t concede easily on this point: a sizable number of my teachers in grade school, junior high, high school, college and finally grad school were incompetent, and I could tell almost from the moment they first opened their mouths in my presence.

The worst were these:

• Almost every P.E. (physical education) teacher I ever had. Typically, they were coaches. I quickly learned they didn’t care whether I learned or achieved anything in their classes. I got A’s in golf at one school and A’s in basketball at another, at the first merely by submitting the required documentation and at the second, merely by enrolling and then demonstrating that I didn’t have the skills to compete at the level the teacher wanted to work with.

• The biology teacher who taught my high school sophomore science class. At the time I was thinking I’d be an architect and was taking a mechanical drawing class where a competent teacher was polishing my skills at lettering. I submitted a theme in biology written in the block-y lettering of a draftsman—and was forced by Ms. Autocrat to redo it in script. At that point, I knew I was dealing with a teacher who cared little about what I cared about, and everything about what she cared about. I did poorly in sophomore biology.

• My senior year in high school, a physics teacher who couldn’t fashion two consecutive coherent scientifically oriented thoughts. This was maddening when you thought you might be about to major in college in a scientifically oriented discipline. I got an F for the course. That year I was also president of my school’s chapter of the National Honor Society. In a panic, I went to the school principal to let him know that about half of honor society’s members had just flunked physics. When he said not to worry, I realized that even the principal knew this guy couldn’t teach.

• A buffoon—jerk, really—of a religion professor who taught my college class in Reformation History. My bad, for signing up for the course. Clue No. 1 that the guy was probably trouble was that his first two names were “Martin Luther.” Clue No. 2 was that he’d just returned from touring Germany and would be using his slides in his lectures. His opening lecture was utterly, totally incomprehensible, and so was his final one and every other one in between. I got the lowest grade of my college career in his class.

Such memories suddenly came bubbling to the surface after years of inactivity as I was reading a nicely researched and crafted work called Teaching with the brain in mind. It’s a soft cover, oversized work published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. The 2nd edition hasn’t been out long, and its author, Eric Jensen, a former teacher, prolific book author and apparently a brain scientist (he’s a member of the Society for Neuroscience), is keeping it current with new research findings.

As I read Jensen’s clearly phrased introduction to such topics as what the brain needs to learn (externally such things as support from peers and the right room temperature and internally, such things as engagement, repetition, input quantity, coherence, timing, error correction and emotional safety and support), I realized that at every level of my formal education, I would have wished for a teacher with an avid interest in brain topics. Ideally, each would have been an expert on how, among other brains, my own brain worked.

Such is asking a lot of all those brains who have earned teaching certificates and are drawing a teacher’s pay and who face the multiple demands made on today’s classroom instructor. But it’s not an impossible task. Reading Jensen’s 188-page work and taking it to heart and mind would be an excellent start, for there is no more important subject in all of education.

Jensen’s book is available here: Teaching With The Brain In Mind

Jensen can be reached through his wife, Diane, at diane@jlcbrain.com

Posted on October 05, 2006