Love of wisdom? On breaking philosophy out of its hermetic seal

My father's mother was a "clean-freak." She assiduously covered all of her furniture, for instance, with polyurethane, as if in an attempt to hermetically seal if from the outside world. Sometimes it is hard not to get a similar impression when reading academic philosophy. So much of it sometimes seems sealed off from real life. When I think, for instance, of hard-core moral realism -- with all of the philosophical ink spilt on "moral facts" -- I can't help but think to myself: this does not answer the questions that I, or my students, ultimately want answered. I want to know why I should do what's right, and how there can be moral facts in a natural world that seems to admit no such thing -- and yet...moral realists give me, and my students, what seem to me to be entirely disappointing answers to these questions (there just are moral facts, darn it -- deal with it!). And this is far from the most egregious case. When I read Richard Swinburne on the Problem of Evil -- or really, anyone on that problem -- I can't help but think to myself, "What world are they living in?" Swinburne begings his paper, "Why God Allows Evil", by writing:

It is inevitable that any attempt by myself or anyone else to construct a theodicy will sound callous, indeed totally insensitive to human suffering. Many theists, as well as atheists, have felt that any attempt to construct a theodicy evinces an immoral approach to suffering. I can only ask the reader to believe that I am not totally insensitive to human suffering, and that I do mind about the agony of poisoning, child abuse, bereavement, solitary imprisonment, and marital infidelity as much as anyone else.

Swinburne, however, then goes on to give a theodicy -- his famous "soul making" theodicy -- that seems (to me, and many of my students, at any rate) to be completely callous and lacking an appropriate level appreciation for human and animal suffering, and indeed, in a way that does make one wonder whether he "minds" agony and suffering "as much as anyone else" (even the language he uses here seems callous! One shouldn't just "mind" agony and suffering. One should feel it, empathizing with the sufferer). Basically (although this is to simplify), Swinburne's idea is that a perfect (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) God gave us a world flush with so many horrors to "challenge our souls" -- and unfortunately, it's a part of such a challenging world that some people and animals have to suffer without recompense. How anyone could not regard this as a totally callous (not to mention implausible) answer to the Problem of Evil is simply beyond me. For instance, I read this story in The New York Times the other day, "The Day I Started Lying to Ruth", about a man's experience seeing his cancer-stricken wife through to the very end, and it was one of the most devastating things I've ever read. "Just try to tell me", I wanted to say to Swinburne, "that that is necessary for 'soul-making' -- that a perfect God could not do better than that." This, of course, is just one story. There are countless others -- lives of abject horror and pain: genocide, etc. The idea that all of this is justified as a "challenge for our souls" seems to me offensive -- and callous -- in the extreme. If this is what philosophy leads to -- rationalizing a horrible world through some kind of bizarre Stockholm Syndrome (viz. being thankful to our Captor for giving us such a world of suffering so that we can "make our souls") -- then, I say, philosophy has led us far astray. It lacks soul.

"Philosophy", or so we are told, comes from the Greek roots meaning love of wisdom. Yet, all too often, philosophy seems to lack it -- and not only that, to venerate its lack. I've mentioned the following example before, but I have to mention it again because it was such an eye-opening, insightful moment on the part of one my students, and which in turn led me to wonder deeply about a lot of philosophy. It was in my undergraduate Ancient Philosophy class, and we were working through Plato's Apology, then Crito, then Phaedo, etc. Most of my students seemed quite taken by Socrates, as many philosophers. "What a paragon of critical thinking and integrity!", many of them seemed to think. Well, until a female student of mine chimed in, when we were reading the part of the Phaedo where Socrates has his weeping wife, Xanthippe and her children, summarily escorted out of his sight so that he can spend his dying moments talking metaphysics with young male followers. "What a monster he is", my student said (to paraphrase), "His philosophy, his 'critical thinking', has led him to value death over life, Forms over flesh and blood people, and metaphysics over his wife. If that is not a reductio of everything he is about, I don't know what is." Damn, I thought to myself, this student has it. She was right, I thought. The character Socrates, for all his 'critical thinking', was an emotional monster. He had literally thought himself into such a rationalistic fervour that he had rendered himself emotionally insensitive to his wife -- a flesh and blood person who loved him -- as well as his children. And out of what? A belief in crazy things -- a realm of Ethereal Forms and life after death -- that not even his arguments supported. Abstract philosophical thought can be taken too far, and I would say, philosophers take it too far, far too often. 

Consider, for instance, Epicurus' dictum that if we just make the proper distinctions -- if we realize that one's handsome horse is just a handsome horse, or that one's Ferrari is just a car -- then we can handle whatever life throws at us with equanimity: we do not have to let the death of our horse or the repossession of our Ferrari bother us. Notice, of course, that from a certain standpoint -- the standpoint of perfectly dispassionate reason ("making distinctions") -- the reasoning holds up: your horse really is just a horse, your Ferrari just a car (in which case, indeed, what should it matter to you whether they are destroyed). But now notice: once we are willing to make these distinctions, it is only a short step -- a few more distinctions -- to the conclusion that our fellow human beings don't really matter: that is, to the conclusion, "Don't perturb yourself about your wife or children. They are just human beings, after all" (which, of course, Epicurus basically did say, see The Enchiridon 14-15).

Making too many distinctions, in other words, seems to me something that can comprise a moral and philosophical failing. Psychopaths make distinctions, after all -- and the distinctions they make aren't all that different than the ones Epicurus made (viz. "Why shouldn't I kill this person? They are just a human being, after all!"). Distinctions are important, but unless they are made with moral and emotional wisdom, they can lead us -- as individuals, and as a discipline -- down a bad path. And, it seems to me, we go down this path far too often. Kant went down it, into the bowels of trying to found moral philosophy in "noumenal freedom" outside the physical order. I could go on. It all just seems so...bloodless.

How, then, can we do better? I do not have a simple, pat answer, but I've come to believe more and more that philosophy done well has to engage with everyday experience, including emotional experience, and always "hold its feet" to these things. The further we get away from lived experience, the worse off -- the more horribly abstract, hermetically sealed, byzantine, and scholastic -- philosophy becomes. How, though, do we do it? I revising a book manuscript right now (which I might share with you all; more on this in a future post) where I always try to come back to lived experience: with what it is to be a husband, or a son, or teacher, dealing with real people. I think this is a good way to go, "keeping things real" to use a common phrase. But, let me also suggest something else. When I was in graduate school -- particularly early on -- I was struck by just how immersed in philosophy many people are, to the detriment of other parts of their lives (little time for friendships, hobbies, etc.). I get it, philosophy is hard. It takes immersion, and concentration. But, I want to say, it needs to be informed by life -- and the more we live, and engage with life, examining the emotions we have, how they move us, etc. the more real -- and useful -- philosophy is liable to become.

Allow me to close by sharing a brief story. The Problem of Evil (which I referenced earlier) has always fascinated me, not the least because it was the very first problem I was ever introduced to and wrote my first undergraduate paper on. Although for most of my graduate school and professional career I've set the problem aside (like most do), it's an issue that has always knawed away at me. It hit me deeply, for instance, the first time I had a family member die (when I was a teenager). How could a good, or even minimally decent Creator, make a world like this? And, in one way or another, the problem -- as, I suspect is also the case with most other philosophers -- has never left me. It is near inevitable, when some kind of tragedy happens, that you think yourself, "What kind of world is this that I live in? A horrible one." And so you try -- again -- to make sense of it (and, of course, if you're a human being, invariably you fail; the problem of evil and suffering remains, right there, staring you in the soul).

But my perspective on the problem suddenly changed one day. It didn't change as a result of doing philosophy -- though I have thought philosophically a lot about it since. It changed as a result of experiences. I'm not much of a spiritual person, but I have had what I would say are at least a good half-dozen quasi-mystical experiences in my life -- experiences where I felt that I had tapped some part of my soul, or part of the world, that I had never touched before. One was dancing with my mom to Tony Bennett's version of, "If I Ruled the World", at my wedding, looking in the eyes of this wonderful, imperfect woman who had given birth to me, raised me, and loved me. I can hardly described what I felt at that moment, but it was a mixture of love and sadness -- all of the love and sadness in the world mixed into one. It seemed to me then, as it still does now, a deeply important emotional experience, one that I struggled to understand...until I had another experience. 

I was in Tucson a couple of years ago visiting friends, and had just purchased a hard copy of one of my favorite CDs -- the album "Frengers" by the Danish rock band Mew (who I also posted music by here). I had heard most of the songs previously, but there, on my drive to the airport, I heard one of their most beloved songs, "Comforting Sounds", for the very first time. It's a beautiful song -- the last 5 minutes of it or so are absolutely breathtaking -- and I heard it that day, for the first time, at just the right instant. I drove a route to the airport I had never taken before, and as "Conforting Sounds" began playing, I began driving past something I had never seen before: Tucson's airplane "boneyard" -- a several mile long airplane graveyard that includes rows upon rows of retired airforce planes; bombers, reconnaissance vehicles, fighters, etc. There were so many of them, these remnants of wars past (indeed, I read somewhere that the planes on the ground there would alone comprise the second-largest airforce in the world...behind our actual one. To get a sense of scale, see here, here, here). 

So, there I was, driving past these Machines of Death, and I was listening to this wistful song I had never heard before. Although I don't know what inspired the song's composers, I listened to it many times and it has always seemed to me, lyrically and musically, to be a worn-out soul pleading with God for answers as to why the world is so hard, why we make so many mistakes, why everything is so messed up. And, then, just as the lyrics end, the "answer" comes in the form of no words at all, but rather a slowly growing crescendo -- 3 repeating eight-measure musical patterns -- reflecting, in that moment, as I drove past those bombers, the relentless march of time and the world we live in, with all its joys and sorrows. During those moments, the world seemed to come to a standstill. It was just me, the music, and rows of planes -- and feeling. It felt like I felt every emotion all at once; that emotion I felt staring into my mother's eyes while dancing to "If I Ruled the World." And I felt a kind of answer to the Problem of Evil. It wasn't the answer I wanted, or that Swinburne or other proponents of a Perfect God want. It was a feeling. I felt sorry for whoever created this world, and, in a way, I empathized with it. I imagined to myself that if I were in a Creator's shoes, an imperfect person with a decision to Create something simultaneously horrible and beautiful -- a world just like this, if it were the best I could do -- I don't know what I would do. Would I create a world with so much beauty, but so much horror? Or, would I create nothing at all? The answer was not obvious to me...and so, finally, I felt like I had my answer -- the only answer that, at any rate, has even made half a bit of sense to me.

I hope to write on it someday, but if not, I guess my message is this: I believe that philosophy could stand to be more engaged with the emotional -- the human (and indeed, animal) -- side of life. And I believe that music, and art, and rich lives -- lives of sorrow, and joy, etc. -- can and should play a role in what we write and think about, and how we go about it. I don't know quite know how else to put it that that, but in any case, I hope to put into more practice in my own work.

Finally, although you obviously can't have been there driving past the airplane graveyard with me, here's a beautiful cover of "Comforting Sounds" recorded by a then-16-year-old English musician Birdy (oh how I wish I had such musical taste at 16, not to mention her musical gifts!), as well as the original version by Mew. Last, but not least, I have also attached an aerial video of the boneyard, just in case you might want to watch it on silent to the music. :)

   

Comments

[Phil H]

I sympathise with the thought, but isn't this to some extent a confusion between philosophy the professionalised academic discipline and philosophy the way-of-looking-at-the-world?
That bit that Leiter quotes from the Dawes interview is good on this point: "...the task of reason is to find arguments in support of the faith...Nor can rational reflection be permitted to undermine that faith...It follows that while the arguments put forward by many Christian philosophers are serious arguments, there is something less than serious about the spirit in which they are being offered."
Philosophers are precisely those people who follow the argument where it takes them. There is a sense in which the identification of a philosopher's professional philosophy with their personal "philosophy" is slightly unprofessional: a professional philosopher should be at least able to argue for views which are not their own, and may well at times find themselves professionally obliged to. (I accept that this shouldn't be pushed too far - we do professionally what we are inclined towards personally.)
So to keep harking back to faith or experience or intuition or whatever is as much a betrayal as to argue away faith or experience or intuition.

I once wrote a rant to a bunch of philosophy lecturers about how they shouldn't believe they are going to change the lives of their students, and I still believe that. The more philosophy professionalises and abstracts away from "worldviews," the more progress it will make. Though I do realise that this means giving up another old and important sense of the word "philosophy."

[gradjunct]

Marcus,
A wonderful and wonderfully vulnerable post. Well done. I have also wrestled quite a bit with the problem of evil. One of my first graduate seminars when I was an MA student at University of Missouri St. Louis was on the problem of evil with Eleonore Stump at SLU. Unfortunately I was too wet behind the ears and in over my head to get the best of that seminar (at the time I remembering wondering what the hell people were talking about when they kept talking about 'counterfactuals'), but it has been a topic I have read extensively about over the years.

Like you, I am often overcome by what seems to me to be the tragedy of human existence. Especially in times of personal loss (I've lost my dad, one of my uncles, both of my grandfathers, and both of my grandmothers). I look at the lives of my family, struggling to get by, filled with doubt and pain, and I think, how can it be like this? How would a god let this be? At other times I am struck by what the filmmaker (and philosopher...look it up) Terrence Malik refers to as 'the glory,' the fleeting experience of beauty and value even in the midst of all the tragedy. In those moments the world seems like a diamond in a dungheap.

My own view, and it is admittedly idiosyncratic, is to endorse a form of axiarchism, or the view according to which the universe we inhabit exists because it instantiates valuable properties. There is goodness in the world. The good might not outweigh the bad, but it need not. It only needs to be sufficient good that it ought to exist. John Leslie, most recently in his book "Infinite Minds" defends this view. I think it gets one around the problem of evil inasmuch as it does not require that this is the best possible world. It is weaker. It only requires there be value in the world. And i think there is value.

I am not a traditional theist, but rather a pantheist (more exactly a sort of panentheist), so I do not believe that there is necessarily a morally perfect God would only create the best world(s). I think once a person jettisons the desire for a morally perfect creator, one's options open up a bit. But I know that practically no one will agree with my views.

Anyway, thanks for a wonderful post. i really enjoyed it.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi gradjunct: thanks for your kind and thoughtful comment. I love Terence Malick's work for roughly the same reason. It has a way of capturing the world's beauty and brutality, all at once, in a way that is honest. I also think you and I are not far apart on the philosophy of religion issues. It occurred to me that day that the real question -- for me, at least -- is not whether God is perfect, but whether the creation of this world (if indeed it had a creator) is *forgivable*. And it seemed to me, at least, that if this beautiful, horrific, imperfect were the best world I could create, the decision whether to make it or nothing at all would be an awful moral dilemma -- the sort of dilemma a potential parent has when considering whether to bring a child into the world. Any honest parent knows their child will suffer. It is inevitable. We cannot give our children perfect lives, and cannot guarantee their happiness. And so, just as I can empathize with a parent who brings a child into a harsh world, I found I could empathize with a putative creator. "What would I do", I asked myself, "if I could either create this world or nothing?" The answer was: I don't know. It would be a hard choice. But I would want to be forgiven, and have my creations forgive me, for such an impossible choice if I went through with it. Just another case of Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe...and yet there is so much beauty in the world...

[Justin Caouette]

Excellent post, Marcus. The way you described your experience with your mom reminded me of a discussion I recently had about transformative experience. We were debating/discussing what such an experience would be and I took the sort of experience that you described as one such instance.

[Marcus Arvan]

Phil H: Thanks for your comment.

You write, "I sympathise with the thought, but isn't this to some extent a confusion between philosophy the professionalised academic discipline and philosophy the way-of-looking-at-the-world?"

My reply is: I don't think it is a confusion at all. Socrates, Aristotle, Epictetus, Epicurus, etc. These were real philosophers reflecting carefully about *life*. In the modern era, "serious" philosophy seems to have become ever-more-divorced from real life. I don't think that makes it serious, or more worth taking seriously. Far from it, I think it is why people (perhaps rightly in many cases) take professional philosophers *less* seriously. I want to say that we can do serious philosophy -- and indeed *should* do serious philosophy -- in a way that engages with human experience, including emotional experience; and that the more that philosophy abstracts away from these things, the more *unhelpfully* arcane, and less deep, it too often becomes. I want philosophy -- professional philosophy -- to return to its roots. And its roots were not answering abstract questions in the philosophy room. Its roots were answering *human* questions that human beings face, not just questions that professional philosophers raise amongst themselves.

[Marcus Arvan]

Phil H: I might also add that I agree with you that simply *deferring* to faith or experience is philosophically bad -- but that is not what I see myself doing, or advising for that matter. The book I'm writing, for instance, deals with *really* abstract stuff on practical reason -- it is philosophically serious stuff, doing "academic" philosophy -- but I also do find that it helps to hook up the abstract arguments with lived experience. This is what I think philosophers in the empiricist trend dating back to Aristotle were doing, and it is, I believe, a way to do philosophy well.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Justin: Thanks for your kind comment. Yes, I think transformative is the right way to describe it. As I tried to convey/imply in my reply to Phil H, I found the experience both personally and philosophically transformative, and not just in a "touchy-feely" way, but in a way that altered how I thought about a serious philosophical problem.

[Phil H]

Thanks, Marcus. On this point, as on many, I'm sure that we wouldn't disagree (much!) about how to *practice* philosophy. As you say, making reference to experience is a valuable philosophical practice. The argument is about the theory behind the practice.

But some of the things you say don't resonate with me at all: "...I think it is why people...take professional philosophers *less* seriously." "I want to say that we...*should* do serious philosophy -- in a way that engages with human experience, including emotional experience" "I want philosophy...to return to its roots."

I don't think you should care what "people" think. There's a universities pay you to do philosophy rather than just letting everyone make their own up: you're better at it (through long practice and inclination). I don't think any other discipline would make these demands of its practitioners. Obviously not the sciences, but not history either, nor geography, nor literature. English professors shouldn't have to stop and think, but what would the man in the street say about Woolf's use of metaphor? Use experience as material for philosophy, sure, but not to guide the doing of philosophy; and as for the call to go backwards... that's just... backwards!

There are counters to all the above. I understand that philosophy is a subject slightly unlike all the others. But I think of it in terms of your ultimate objective. If it's to help people feel better, then you're doing self-help or religion. If your commitment is to be right then it's surely necessary to accept that sometimes it won't feel good.

Having said all that, I don't expect philosophers to be soulless. Clearly affective factors are important in how we do philosophy, but they can't pull you away from the real goal of working things out.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Phil H: Thanks for your reply!

I agree and I disagree (big surprise there!). I agree with your point that we shouldn't let affective factors, etc., pull us away from the real goal of working things out, as well as with your point that sometimes (oftentimes?) philosophical answers might not feel good. The latter is part of my point in the original post, by the way. In my view, too many philosophers of religion seem to be guided by a "feel-good" goal of explaining how all of this world's evils can be justified. The answer to the Problem of Evil I settled on (for now, at any rate) is not a feel-good idea. I think any philosophically honest person has to grapple with the fact that this world is a truly awful place (though a place with great beauty as well), and that there is just no way such an awful place could be the creation of a truly perfect Deity. The answer I arrived at was not feel-good at all. It involved the (partly affective) realization that this world is in large part a vast tragedy...with sprinkles of beauty contained within -- and that it was only by way of empathy that I could even begin to understand its possible creation as a kind of moral dilemma, and forgiveness (an affective, reactive attitude) a kind of solution.

What I disagree with you on is that we shouldn't care what the masses think, and that other fields shouldn't as well. The great physicist Richard Feynmann was fond of saying (and I paraphrase) that if you can't explain something in a clear and compelling way to a bright undergrad, you don't understand it. Einstein said similar things. So has my one-time undergraduate mentor, Daniel Dennett (he even explicitly says it in the introduction to his latest book). I wholeheartedly agree with these people, *particularly* in philosophy -- since, again, philosophy concerns issues of general interest (ethics, politics, mind, personal identity, etc). Indeed, I think ordinary people can and should serve -- as they served in Plato's dialogues! -- to keep us philosophically honest.