Philosophy: The Jester of the Sciences

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This is a philosophy description.

Ep 001. Introductory Ramblings

Epistemology

March 17, 2022

Jacques Derrida

Axiology Epistemology Ethics Metaphysics

March 10, 2022

Ferdinand de Saussure

Axiology Epistemology

March 10, 2022

Jean-Paul Sartre

Axiology Epistemology Ethics The Existential

March 10, 2022

Edmund Husserl

Epistemology Metaphysics

March 10, 2022

Ludwig Feuerbach

Epistemology Metaphysics

March 10, 2022

Søren Kierkegaard

Aesthetics Epistemology Ethics The Existential

March 10, 2022

G. W. F. Hegel

Axiology Economics Epistemology The Existential

March 10, 2022

Immanuel Kant

Epistemology

March 10, 2022

David Hume

Epistemology

March 10, 2022

This is a philosophy description.

Philosophy has no value if you aren’t unsettled by a question. But propelled by some question — an ethical “issue,” a theological dilemma, political disagreement, a problem in your family system, or even your own existential fears — then philosophy becomes relevant. What you must have in order for philosophy to become valuable to you is a reason for it to become valuable. The ethics of integrating church practice with cultural concerns, the tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility, the obligations of a government to its people and vice versa, the effects of your parent’s divorce or your brother’s death on your soul, the nature of your dark and lonely depression which grips you — these are questions in disguise. These are philosophical muses. ¹

Philosophy “can never be what it aims to be” without a compelling existential dilemma that must be supplied by the would-be philosopher. ²

Satisfaction and contentment do not breed depth of thought. Pain and conflict in one’s autobiography are more likely sources. It’s no surprise that more political revolutions have been catalyzed by philosophical novels than by philosophical which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts.”
³ Facts are worthless in and of themselves. But if facts can grip the heart, they become a door to an entire world of value.

Philosophy Can Turn Our Existence Upside-Down

Existential: Authentic and self-determined felt experience (as opposed to fabricated or imposed determination of our felt experience).

Immanuel Kant, who many would say is the Darth Vader of philosophy, said this about the philosophical task:

“One cannot learn any philosophy; for where is it, who has possession of it, by what can it be recognized? We can only learn to philosophize, i.e., to exercise the talent of reason in prosecuting its general principles in certain experiments that come to hand, but always with the reservation of the right of reason to investigate the sources of these principles themselves and to confirm or reject them.” ⁴

The principles must always be allowed to overthrow the principles in charge if they work better for reality — regardless of whether or not they work better for us. Mere fact-knowing is not a significant power. More valuable in the 21st century is the ability to do knowledge work — the labor of connecting the dots, and implementing those connections; to use knowledge. But this is dangerous work — the work of being open to having our deepest understandings about the world changed, even the idea that we ought to have an understanding of the world. This is why it is important to understand that philosophy should not be conceived as a “thing,” but as a set of skills. By honing the skills of philosophy, work becomes more efficient, effective, and meaningful. Goals become more meaningfully rooted in their motivations. Complex realities come into harmony with the more elemental ones. ⁵

This is the work of philosophy, and if we find it to be meaningful, it is not without consequences for us. But the danger in all of this, is that philosophy turns our lives around, and we have no control over it. When the urge to philosophize finally seizes us, we don’t have control over where it will throw us.
Philosophical inspiration can be powerful — even too powerful for us. The working of philosophical profundity into our consciousness “enacts a seizure of psychic power oriented towards the future.” ⁶

It is too much for some. René Descartes, for instance, arguably the inventor of modern philosophy, suffered chronic nervous breakdowns, spiraling in and out of sanity. ⁷

Philosophy doesn’t require us to be self-critical in a sadistic, self-deprecating sense. Rather, if we conceive philosophy as a kind of “self-care” — in the same way that brushing teeth is an inconvenient process to maintain hygiene, and exercise is a form of painful self-care because it relieves psychological stress and maintains physiological capacity — so also self-criticism is a way to care for ourselves by ensuring that we are aligned with truth ⁸

Jennifer Michael Hecht, in her book Doubt, summarizes it this way:

“Thus the birth of philosophy is, in itself, one of the origins of doubt—when empirical, rational thinking becomes a goal unto itself, that means people have developed a system for checking whether an idea has a foundation outside plain faith. This sort of checking keeps valuing those ideas that have a demonstrable foundation and scuttling the rest. The very behavior gets one into the habit of devaluing beliefs that have no describable, rational foundation.” ⁹

We must reshape our language for the most basic realities of the universe constantly — even our most fundamental and cherished beliefs. Sometimes we must even reject the realities themselves.

Meaning vs. Meaningfulness of Life
Rationality

Rationality (Short): Being reasonable.
Rationality (Long): The practice of right reasoning, based on both facts and the interpretation of those facts in accordance with the principles of logic.

Philosophy can improve your mental health. It can also hurt it. But I haven’t yet found anyone who has seriously studied philosophy who would trade their philosophical understanding for money. For example, John Russon, writing on the relationship between philosophy and neurosis, comments, the “practice of therapy is ultimately realized as the intersubjective practice of phenomenological philosophy.” Explained in more explicit detail:

“Neurosis is an intrinsically contradictory lived interpretive stance, and the distress marks the conflict of interpretations: the distress reveals the polemical and argumentative nature of the lived theses. The resolution to this distress will amount to a testing—really, a self-testing—of these commitments as truth-claims: caring for—“curing”—this situation will ultimately amount to bringing to explicitude the interpretive commitments that are manifest as the neurotic behavior, discerning their implications, working to establish the soundness or unsoundness of these interpretive values, and engaging in practices to develop an habituation to an alternative (defensible and desirable) interpretive stance.” ¹⁰

To whatever degree this is true, in reading this, the commonsense intuition is undeniable that this is true in some sense . We are not merely victims of our internal physiology or our external circumstances. If that is true, what makes us responsible for our experiences? Russon insists, it is our capacity to philosophize. It is the skill therapists rely upon when we enter the counseling room. It is the skill employers expect when they hire us: to be rational — and more, to be consistently, coherently rational about the endless waves of irrational experiences that come crashing into our lives every day. People don’t make sense to us. The study of philosophy can be used personally because it directly addresses the issues about which psychology prefers to remain agnostic — ironically, the questions of ultimate reality and meaning. Good therapy is categorically the same thing as good philosophy, and yet it can never self-consciously enter into that space. That was the faustian bargain psychology made when it gave into its anxieties about its own status and chose the medicalization of the discipline over creating a new space in which the existential and the clinical can be integrated.

Do I “Have To” Believe Something?

Situated Rationality: The rules of being reasonable are relative to each person’s situation.
Doxastic Obligation: The ethical burden to believe something.
Doxastic Voluntarism: The view that belief is a product of the will — a choice. ¹¹
Intellectual Virtues: The practices of inquiry which fortify the accuracy of its results.

In a sense, computers can do philosophy. ¹² In theory, we could teach IBM’s Watson — a computer that “learns” and “does” (through executing algorithms) the skill — not only of beating Chess Grandmasters or interpreting healthcare metadata, but executing algorithms that will compute more elemental philosophical inquiries such as “the meaning of life.” ¹³

We should, however, note that one philosopher of artificial intelligence (AI) suggests that AI would be impossible if there is anything necessarily immaterial to the constitution of human intelligence. ¹⁴

Thus, if there is anything computational about philosophy, it’s not difficult to conceive its task being carried out by a computer. Yet, if the human intelligence is anything more than material, and if there is anything distinctly human about philosophy, then we have a task before us that only humans can perform.

Think about your day-to-day life.

Could a computer do what you do? Could it perform the tasks you perform? Yes. Without qualification, yes. Could a bot be programmed to create a Hinge profile and find love? Yes. Could it find the code that allows you to assimilate into the popular crowd that sits together in the cafeteria? Yes.

So, what are any of us doing here? How are we not completely replaceable or, on the other hand, how do we know that we are not merely behavioral programs running on a cosmic code? And if we were, would it matter?

“There is in fact a great distinction between humans and computers. Computers merely execute algorithms. Humans must make a distinction between the laws of logic (possibly tied as they might be to some immutable aspect of the universe) and the practices of inquiry (possibly tied as they might be to the unavoidable mutability required by human finitude). This has implications for the ethics of knowledge in general, and the ethics of belief in particular. Can you say to someone “You ought to believe this?” Nicholas Wolterstorff says “No.” ¹⁵

(Quickly: Wolterstorff rejects the notion that we ought to believe any one thing [doxastic obligation], because he rejects the idea that we can choose what we believe about everything [doxastic volunatism]).

For Wolterstorff, there is no such thing as “What you ought to believe” in the abstract (an idea we will learn more about when we study Rationalism). There is no such thing as a universal intellectual obligation. There only exist obligations relative to individuals in certain contexts with certain levels of awareness and maturity. In like manner, each person is responsible for their own intellectual development.

Parents are charged with cultivating lawful children, teachers are charged with instruction and cultivating character, and peers are empowered by ethical competitiveness and camaraderie. But when faced with the impossible tasks of life, or the job interview, or a debate, or a pulpit, or a mission field, there only exists what each one has learned, and what he or she has done with it. Philosophy rewards both learning and doing with information and empowerment — if we put in the work of study and deep thought to make it actionable for ourselves.

Thus, if we want to be more than calculated extensions of the little cultures of power around us, we must do the one thing that the universe gives us which it does not give machines: an ethical obligation — or, an inescapable compulsion — to act for ourselves. ¹⁶

But what those obligations have overlap and variegation from person to person.

“When we study a topic, we become responsible to integrate it into our lives. A machine is obligated to integrate what it learns into its operations because, we might guess for now in this initial lecture, it lacks the human components which make that integration a choice — it lacks free will, and therefore lacks moral responsibility. On “ethical and religious concepts such as honesty, justice, love, God, sin, and faith,” Linda Zagzebski writes, “If a writer on these topics leaves aside the way these concepts may apply to himself, he is leaving out an essential aspect of their use and hence is guilty of a conceptual error.” ¹⁷

Our knowledge promotes us to a higher tier of responsibility in the world around us. The same must be said also of rationality — to study logic is to accept the constraints logic may place upon us. ¹⁸

We call this whole project “the pursuit of intellectual virtue.” Aristotle breaks the intellectual virtues down into five categories:

The Theoretical ([1] wisdom, [2] scientific knowledge, and [3] logic),
The Practical ([4] prudence)
The Productive ([5] technical knowledge). ¹⁹

“These realms of knowledge are the places of learning we find ourselves obligated to “reason rightly.” What’s the sharpest criticism somebody could give you in a conversation? “You’re being irrational.” But what is rationality? It is the coherent embodiment of this constellation of knowledges in a given situation.

Wolterstorff calls this subjective understanding of rationality “situated rationality.” Situated rationality determines what we think is reasonable, because “our noetic obligations arise from the whole diversity of obligations that we have in our concrete situations.” ²⁰

In other words, “obligations to employ practices of inquiry are personally situated obligations.” ²¹

The notion that we must be purely “logical” creatures is not only impractical and unrealistic, but restricts the ways that we can practice intelligence and rationality to certain rules, rather than extending rationality to more diverse forms of inquiry, relative to each person’s situation.

We ought to be “philosophical” in this way: we ought to be rational . Put in terms of what philosophers call “deontological ethics” (right and wrong defined as obligation ), we are obligated to be rational. Construed as a virtue: becoming rational is our best shot at bringing the highest quality of enjoyment into the world, for ourselves and others. But it goes a level deeper.

Wolterstorff applies this notion of situated rationality to what philosophers call “doxastic” obligation — which is, inquiry about what we ought to believe. For all of these things, while we might not yet come to a conclusion about for what knowledge we are responsible, we can begin here: we are responsible for our own knowledge, and we ought to know what we know in the most excellent manner available to us.

Thus, we reject any “ought” someone may put on us relative to any piece of knowledge, but we invite proper “ought” to be required of us relative to our manner of knowing. In other words, in principle, no one can ever require us to believe something in this way: “In order to be rational, you must believe this,” because that would reflect an impoverished understanding of the diversity of personal situatedness. But it is proper to be required to “be rational,” and that is where we must begin.

Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	It is possible that, in reading philosophy, you will discover some reason, some need. But we should be careful — what the ancients labeled “muse,” we in the 21st century tend to label “madness:” “Somewhere around the eighteenth century, culture’s way of thinking about unusual experiences altered markedly. What was once revelation and inspiration became symptom and pathology. What was piety and poetry became science and sanity.” Daniel B. Smith, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets; Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination (New York: Penguin, 2007), 14.
↑2	Allen Wood explains the fundamental problem of philosophy well: “Philosophy … is condemned to be a form of critical thinking which aims at practical transformation of the world but remains essentially divorced from that world. Philosophy succumbs to its own dialectic: to understand what it is is to understand why it can never be what it aims to be.” Allen Wood, “Philosophy: Enlightenment Apology, Enlightenment Critique” in C. P. Ragland and Sarah L. Heidt (eds.), What is Philosophy? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 113 [96-120].
↑3	Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (New York: Verso, 1991, 1994), 34. They earlier comment on the relationship between the concept of “concept” (“the philosophical concept”) and the discipline of philosophy: “Science needs only propositions or functions, whereas philosophy, for its part, does not need to invoke a lived that would give only a ghostly and extrinsic life to secondary, bloodless concepts. The philosophical concept does not refer to the lived, by way of compensation, but consists, through its own creation, in setting up an event that surveys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs. Every concept shapes and reshapes the event in its own way.” Ibid., 33-34.
↑4	Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason , trans. Paul Guyer and Allen w. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 694 (A838/B886).
↑5	Cal Newport encourages those in “knowledge work” to pursue depth for the sake of its effect on the rest of life: “To embrace deep work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying—a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things.” Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 91.
↑6	Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 50.
↑7	Stephen Gaukroger comments, “Descartes was in fact in a state of considerable nervous anxiety.” Moreover, regarding the diagnosis of melancholia as becoming “a savadge creature, haunting the shadowed places, suspicious, solitarie, enemie to the sunne,” Gaukroger comments that Descartes’ behavior has “a striking similarity to the symptoms of the disease described here.” Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 110.
↑8	Aristotle states that listening to the rebuke of a logical argument is like listening to the advice of a doctor. Michel Foucault insisted that we must cultivate a habit of self-criticism in order to develop a “point of resistance” to the opposite of extremes of normalization and estrangement. Self-criticism keeps at bay “everything which separates the individual, breaks his link with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way.” Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1982): 781 [777-795]. See Christian Iftode, “Foucault’s Idea of Philosophy as ‘Care of the Self:’ Critical Assessment and Conflicting Metaphilosophical Views,” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 71 (2013): 76-85.
↑9	Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 4.
↑10	John Russon, Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life, A Volume in the SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 129-130. We should note that this is a philosophical construal of cognitive therapy. There are other practical therapies which would take issue with the weight Russon here gives conscious and discursive knowledge in the therapeutic process of “curing” healing mental illness — essentially, equating an ability to perform calculated, syllogistic reasoning with an ability to overcome mental illness. This will be explored in depth later.
↑11	Ronney Mourad offers a simple and succinct explanation: “If a belief is a disposition to apprehend some state of affairs as real or to think of some proposition as true, then it is sometimes possible for us to choose to believe. Voluntary choices are possible only if our evidence underdetermines or overdetermines our beliefs, and by choosing them, we aim to achieve some purpose other than holding true propositions and avoiding false ones. Since voluntary beliefs are possible, it makes sense to talk about regulating them. We have a prima facie moral obligation to refrain from choosing beliefs in pursuit of goals other than truth, and this obligation is grounded in the values of consistency and honesty.” Ronney Mourad, “Choosing to Believe” in Eugene Thomas Long and Patrick Horn (eds.), Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribue to D.Z. Phillips (New York: Springer, 2008), 69 [55-69].
↑12	Artificial intelligence is philosophical explication turned into computer programs. The limitation of the computer program parallels the limitation of philosophical theory.” Clark Glymour, “Artificial Intelligence is Philosophy” in J. H. Fetzer (ed.) Aspects of Artificial Intelligence, Studies in Cognitive Systems (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 195-208.
↑13	Dr. Jesse Hoey, a professor and researcher of AI, believes that Watson cannot be taught to meet the emotional needs of humans, or replace humans. Yet, it is unclear why learning emotional intelligence would be different from learning intellectual intelligence, especially because of the multiple ways humans colloquially and subconsciously quantify emotional interaction. Thus, Watson’s (or a similar program’s) ability to solve existential problems does not seem to rest on a qualitative distinction between machine and human, but a temporal quantitative distinction between the present and the future. See Adam Miller, “The Future of Health Care Could be Elementary with Watson,” CMAJ 2013, 185, no. 9 (June 11 th , 2013): E367-E368; Jennifer L. Malin, “Envisioning Watson As a Rapid-Learning System for Oncology,” Journal of Oncology Practice 9, no. 3 (May 2013): 155-157. See also Eric Topol, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (New York: Basic, 2012). We might ask Topol: What about mental health, particularly as it is connected so explicitly with philosophical concerns, on both medical and experiential sides?
↑14	John Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 255n3
↑15	Thus, if we conceive of rationality is a universal phenomenon defined in each place entirely by social convention, we arrive at what Wolterstorff calls “situated rationality:” “My own view is that there are no purely intellectual obligations; the practices of inquiry that one is obligated to employ are a function of one’s obligations in general. And the obligations that one has vary from person to person depending on one’s situation: one’s maturity, one’s role in society, the state of knowledge in one’s society, and so forth.” Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, “Foreword” in Nathan D. Shannon, Shalom and the Ethics of Belief: Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Theory of Situated Rationality (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015), viii [vii-ix].
↑16	Pushing these boundaries, AI can in fact practice “situated rationality,” and showcase the radically subjective factors of individuated experience — which raises, for instance, the concept of programmable virtue . See Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 58-59; Peter Danielson, Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games (New York: Routledge, 2002). However, a machine cannot breach the gap of epistemology and metaphysics — if humans are merely materials, than by means known to us, machines can never become human in a sense that is meaningful beyond perception.
↑17	Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 333.
↑18	In other words, it is too strong to say that we are morally obligated to believe everything we know. We cannot with exacting precision calculate all of our activities from our assumptions. What we perceive to be (Our “Is”) does not always follow, at a psychological level, to what we choose to do (Our “ought.”) To the degree that our “is” determines our “ought,” we have a working concept of rationality. Zagzebski comments, “Some intellectual virtues have to do more with the quality of the knowledge than with its quantity, and knowledge is also something that admits of higher and lower quality.” Ibid., 315.
↑19	He also praises the skills of deliberation, sensibility, decisiveness, and cleverness. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket, 2014), intelligence ( nous , 6.6), scientific knowledge ( epistēmē , 6.3), wisdom ( sophia , 6.7), prudence ( phonēsis , 6.5), technical knowledge and art ( technē , 6.4), understanding ( synesis , 6.10), good sense ( gnōmē , 6.11). See Irene Zavattero, “Moral and Intellectual Virtues in the Earliest Latin Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics ,” in István P. Bejczy (ed.), Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics , 1200-1500 (Boston: Brill, 2008), 31-54. Zavattero highlights the distinction between infused virtues and acquired virtues — “according to the theologians, man is only the source of evil, not of good. In order to act rightly, it is necessary that the ‘First Intelligence’ infuse rectia ratio into our intellect. Right reason, the criterion of reasonableness by which man chooses to act for a useful and right end, is accordingly removed from the responsibility of man, and the credit for every good action is traced back to God’s goodness. Therefore, according to theologians, the infused habitus precedes every good action, while in the opinion of philosophers the habitus arises from good actions produced by the will of man.” Ibid., 35.
↑20	Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?” in Practices of Belief: Selected Essays, Volume 2 , ed. Terence Cuneo (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 231 [217-264].
↑21	Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Entitlement to Believe and Practices of Inquiry” in Practices of Belief , 111 [86-117].

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