|
|
Rationally Speaking
A monthly e-column by
Massimo Pigliucci
N. 21,
February 2002
Is philosophy useless?
This
column can be posted for free on any appropriate web site and
reprinted in hard copy by permission. If you are
interested in receiving the html code or the text, please send
an
 .
Or,
you can subscribe (free) to the Rationally Speaking announcements
list.
If you mention philosophy at
a party you are most likely to be greeted by rolling eyes,
complacent smiles or embarrassed silence. Philosophy just
isn’t considered a good topic for conversation, let alone for
serious consideration in everyone’s daily life. This wasn’t
always the case. On the contrary: philosophy, as we understand
it today, was born in ancient Greece as a tool to improve
one’s life, especially from an ethical perspective, and to
find meaning and purpose in it. Today, so few people
understand philosophy that most use meaning and purpose as
synonyms, without realizing the difference.
Let me try to explain. Suppose you enter a restaurant and
are given a menu to pore over. The purpose of that menu is to
make it possible for you to eat at the place. The meaning of
the menu is to present you with a series of choices to fulfill
that purpose. If you don’t understand the language in which
the menu is written, the menu has purpose but no meaning. If
the menu is made of pictures of the food items available and
you start to eat the menu, you are confusing purpose with
meaning! You get the point.
One of the complaints that pundits of all stripes most
often make about modern life is that it has become meaningless
and without purpose (though they seldom make the distinction
between the two), that ethics has become a luxury, is based on
outdated and difficult to defend theologies, or has been
drowned by rampant relativism that makes Cole Porter’s
“Anything Goes” sound like an ironic prophecy.
So, why not resort to philosophy? After all, we have the
accumulated thought of 2400 years or more of cogitation about
the deep questions of life, explored by some of the sharpest
minds of the Western and Eastern traditions. What’s stopping
us from dipping into this treasure and make philosophy work
for us again?
Despite its general reputation for obscurity or
irrelevance, philosophy is making a comeback. The American
Philosophical Association has decided to celebrate its first
centenary this year by promoting a series of activities geared
toward the general public, including a series of radio shows
featuring brief philosophical discussions. Furthermore, the
United States has recently imported from Europe two
potentially important new ways to bring philosophy out of
academia and back to the people: philosophical cafés and
philosophical counseling.
Philosophical cafés are open-ended discussions based on the
ancient Socratic idea that asking questions is the best way to
learn about a subject. In the United States, there is a
Society for Philosophical Inquiry which helps people setting
up cafés. The presence of an actual philosopher is a plus (you
can get one on loan from the local University), but it is not
deemed necessary. What is required is the willingness to
openly question and discuss just about anything. No sacred
cows allowed.
Philosophical counseling has also been pioneered in the old
continent and is now slowly spreading in the US. The idea is
to offer an alternative (which can be complementary) to
traditional psychological counseling. After all, some people
have emotional problems rooted in their past, but most of us
simply don’t know how to tackle immediate problems or crucial
junctures in our lives, and considering the broad picture,
i.e. approaching the problem philosophically, might help.
Philosophical counseling is currently controversial, with
professional philosophers as divided on the topic as
professional psychologists were at the beginning of the
psychological counseling phenomenon. According to the American
Philosophical Practitioners Association, the role of a
counselor is what Socrates advocated in ancient Athens: to be
a sort of philosophical midwife, to help people understand
that they do have a philosophy, but that they usually don’t
think about it and don’t attempt to articulate it so that they
can examine it and decide if that’s the sort of perspective on
life they really wish to maintain. Critics accuse
philosophical counselors of being sophists ready to sell their
services for vile money (as if University professors don’t
actually get paid, albeit little), but that’s a different
discussion.
No matter how it is delivered, philosophy should be
relevant to everyone simply because we tend not to do much
thinking about problems small and large, and thinking
is—allegedly—what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal
world. The problem can be a major ethical dilemma or a
relatively minor inconvenience. It may deal with what to do if
one of your parents is physically incapacitated but mentally
alert, or it may be spurred by a coworkers’ complaint about
your taste in decorating your office (these are both actual
cases from the philosophical counseling literature). Either
way, it does help to discuss your views with other people, and
to learn what thinkers from Socrates to Peter Singer have
thought about similar problems or situations. Really, the
choice is not to do without philosophy altogether, only to
carefully examine the philosophy you do have or to be ignorant
of your own perspective on life.
|
