Ivory Tower Onanism (Rough)

Again I find myself in this position, sitting down to write something as I know I should be going to bed. Things get bad this late at night. Every homophone is accidentally replaced with a different spelling of itself, earning the hatred of grammar nerds everywhere, which is a great shame, because some of my closest friends are grammar nerds. With luck, the hour will push me to keep things short, as I tell myself that as soon as I finish this I can go bed. Unfortunately, Blogspot is interacting poorly with the Facebook chat with Kieran F(The first personal name mentioned in this blog? I think so) in another tab, so I may not even get that far. Perchance I will simply introduce my topic, go to bed, and return another day to finish it. Perchance it will be tomorrow, but more likely two weeks from now.

Actually, I think I am going to just come back to this whole thing tomorrow. Why, you ask, would I then leave this whole irrelevant introduction lying around when anyone can come upon it and judge it? Well, this whole blog is just an excuse to get me writing, and so I would like to preserve everything I do write, however useless. So this introduction remains. See you later, when I will talk a little about philosophy, and maybe mention another personal name.

Huh. Last night, I thought I was making a cliff-hanger, but with only a line of blank space between where I left off then and where I start now, the suspense doesn't end up being very effective. Anyway, I was talking a while with Sophie K about philosophy, and how generally useless it is. Well, she was talking about how generally useless it is, and I was trying valiantly to defend it. Unfortunately, there wasn't very much I could do.

We had just read an article by Bertrand Russel about the limited proof we have that anything outside our minds really exists. The basic argument was that there is no way we can know that the people and things we see around us are actually there in a physical sense, or if they are just constructions created by (thinking philosophically) our mind or (thinking in science-fiction) a giant computer simulation. She wondered why anyone should be concerned with the reality of outside objects as long as they appear to exist for us. I admitted that there was indeed no way of being certain, though the apparent consistency of the world we experience implied that there seemed to be. I said philosophers generally admitted that we could not be certain of outside reality, and they are usually concerned with what to do in case we are. They want to know how we should think of ourselves and our relationships with others, if those others are not as real as we are.

She said that was all well and good, but repeated her objection. Who cares if everything around us does not exist, as long as we can still interact with it as though it does? There was no good response to that. I tried to argue that we without the presence of other people, we would be lonely and unfulfilled. She said that even if other people were constructions of her subconscious, she could still interact with them as though they were distinct from her, and so she had no reason to be lonely. I asked if sex, the most physical and intimate human sensation, would be as satisfying if she were not actually experiencing with another person, and if, in fact, she had no material body to actually experience it. She said it might not, but she could never know that for sure, and even if she could, the mental stimulation she had when she perceived herself as having sex was everything the physical act could be, so there was no loss.

We were probably missing some deep philosophical nuance in our argument. As I think about it now, I am sure we had some fundamental difference on definition on some point, though I can't put my finger on where. I am also finding objections to the idea that we could be entirely alone and without other people; in what sense are figments of our imagination less real than we are if they have all of the experiences and apparent complexities we do? Regardless of how philosophically rigorous we were being, the conversation made me realize that this sort of philosophy, the staple of all of the Greats - Plato, Descartes, Kant - did not lend as much as its creators might imagine to the everyday average life of most people.

Philosophers tend to think, in my experience, that they have their finger on the pulse of the times, that their theories can explain everything and make things simpler for everyone else. In Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, he explains the ontological priority of his existential analytic of Dasein (I had to)as its ability to provide a firm foundation for all of the other sciences. He said that without the complete understanding of the meaning of Being that he was developing, any investigation of individual beings was incomplete. Heidegger only ever got a third of the way through his project, but I don't think that is why it is not required reading for every new scientist or scholar. It's because despite his sense of his own importance, we really don't need to have a complete theory of ontology before we can begin to investigate the things we see. Scientists have been doing it very well since the Greeks, even without a philosophical framework for what they were describing. Ordinary people can live in a world they don't entirely understand without freaking out. So why does anyone bother to philosophize?

The answer I came up with, and I am probably not the first, is that some people just have to. The great mass of humanity can sleep at night not knowing for sure why they are on this planet, or not being assured that they only believe the sun will rise tomorrow because of habit, not because of any deductive proof that the law of cause and effect will continue to hold. They may have doubts or confusions now and again, but for the most part, people can take the comforts of religion, or their family convictions, or even a constitutional optimism and feel secure. They don't need to doubt their senses, because their senses explain things better than their intellect. In fact, they often tend to distrust rational attempts to explain such things as foolish or unnecessary. Why justify the world when it seems perfectly content to justify itself? You'd have to be an idiot.

The thing is that such idiots exist. There are people who, for one reason or another, just can't rest content with what they have. They are curious, they strive for certainty. They might go a variety of directions. People like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman fall under this category as much as Schopenhauer and Hegel. They all possess that germ of curiosity that needs something more than what it can see to be secure in its existence. Scientists look more closely outside themselves for strict laws to give order and coherence to their lives, while philosophers are introspective and search themselves for the answers they speak. Nonetheless, they are kindred temperaments and believe as a group that "you've got to stop and think about the complexity, to really get the pleasure" or security.

That explains why they do it, for sure, but it doesn't really explain the point and why anyone but this small caste of people should care. Scientists are obviously useful, because they give provide us technology and ideas that will affect how we live, but what do philosophers really do for us? Who needs 'em anyway?

And I think, the answer is that no one really needs 'em, just like no one really needs painters or composers or all of the other people who make human creativity manifest in the world. It's not necessary, for sure, but it is a uniquely human activity to be able to think rationally about grand questions of reality, and it is by doing so that we assert our consciousness and prove that we are more than simply organic machines that simulate intelligence. You could argue that people are in fact nothing more than bundles of cells that seem to function as something greater than the sum of the interrelationships between their parts, and you would be right as long as everyone believed that. Philosophers seek to justify the human place in the world with logic, and even though they may fail, their efforts are their own justification. Or so we tell ourselves.