The Culture of Criticism – What Do We Owe the Enlightenment?
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It's a little OT but I want to ask HN a simple question. The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances completely despise philosophy and they have one single question: what is the usefulness of philosophy?
I am often inspired by reading philosophy related articles, as I was inspired by my philosophy teacher in high school. Unfortunately/fortunately I was in another country with a completely different educational system. In this country most people only meet philosophy in a single semester in college and it's only a rush to memorize the most things possible about philosophers. How do I explain the importance of philosophy for the development of our mind?
The other argument is that it is a challenge and a pleasure to follow some of the strongest minds as they make, elaborate, and challenge theories. Not everyone will find it a pleasure. Still, I suspect that the difference between encountering Plato or Locke in a one-semester summary and actually reading Plato or Locke is comparable to the difference between encountering "The Marriage of Figaro" in a plot synopsis and in attending a competent performance.
Beyon
Yes, I also hit wikipedia to know how the Fringe and Life on Mars would end because the fillers were too much to bear.
Because that forces you to actually think through your positions and argue for them using your own words, rather than deliberately obscure academic slang?
In natural sciences and math the simplest theory that works is the preferable one to use. In "modern" philosophy and various branches of academic criticism everyone tries to outdo each other in complexity. The practical result of it is that many people operate under false assumption: the assumption that if no one understands you, you automatically "win". This does nothing to improve the quality of reasoning or discourse.
The failure points of Bayesian probability is a great example of this. Suppose I start drawing cards from a 52 card deck of cards and I ask you to estimate the odds that the next card will be a 6H. You work though the math and everything looks fine. I draw AH, JC, 2S, 6H, and all is well with the world, except the next card is another JD. Now what? What if the next card is a picture of an Apple followed by a 2S?
PS: The failure point being you need a probability that your prior probability estimate is right, and then a probability that that prior estimate is right recursively.
"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein
Try Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding -- short and high-impact), Russell, Rousseau, Searle, Putnam, or Dennett.
Heck, you don't even need to wait a hundred years. Go to any philosophy department in the English-speaking world right now and ask how many people know Searle vs. any of the poststructuralists.
If you can't explain it, are you sure it's really there?
If philosophy is valuable, give concrete examples of cases where it's helped you. Programmers in particular are great at abstracting by themselves, are more than capable of spotting the general principles - you need to give them the specific examples.
You could tell them asking that question is actually `practising philosophy'.
Your friends are right to despise philosophy, if by "philosophy" you mean the kind of thing that most students learn in college. I once taught a course like that, too, and I'm not proud about it at all. In order to appreciate the value of philosophy, you need to define it in a different way.
Philosophy is not a collection of knowledge, but a way of life that never tires of asking "why?", uses the power of reason to figure out the answer, and tries to live according to that answer. In other words, the life of a philosopher is a life of criticism. It is a life of reflection, a life dedicated to developing and refining the one faculty that distinguishes us from all other animals.
I honestly don't give a shit about any of the dead white guys that we call philosophers. Because the point of philosophy is not to learn who they were and what they said. The point is to learn the way of life that those people exemplified. The content doesn't really matter; most of that is wrong anyway. The methodologies, however, are worth learning. How to spot a fallacy, how to construct convincing counterexamples, how to go about dissecting a tightly woven rhetoric so that it collapses as spectacularly as possible.
I think philosophy is to the mind what exercise is to the body. You don't become an athlete by memorizing trivia about famous athletes; you become one by emulating their daily routines. Similarly, you don't learn philosophy by memorizing what Descartes said; you become a philosopher by learning to think like him in everyday life and practicing it until you're good at it.
STEM fields also help you train your mind, but usually in more specific ways. Philosophy is more general. It's like maintaining a generally active lifestyle vs. training specific muscles.
Doesn't this kind of talk presume a foundationalist epistemology that is actually quite hard to justify?
If you keep asking "why?" and end up running in circles, that's fine. What's important is to recognize that your beliefs depend on one another, and to be able to trace those dependencies. That way, if you ever need to update one of your beliefs, you will be able to follow the network and flag other beliefs that also need to be recompiled. Whether the dependencies are linear or circular doesn't matter.
> I think philosophy is to the mind what exercise is to the body. You don't become an athlete by memorizing trivia about famous athletes; you become one by emulating their daily routines
This is a good way to put it.
I also hated that philosophy crash course. I understand why my friends despise philosophy because of that. In fact I'm looking for arguments to simply redeem the idea of philosophy in their minds so they do not reject it immediately after hearing the word.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of philosophy isn't really that good, and involves blatantly ignoring Wittgenstein to push words around and claim something of substance has been thought.
Philosophy does develop the mind but not in an interesting or useful way even from a philosophical point of view. Beyond Wittgenstein's take on philosophy as therapy is Zizek's (implicit) take on philosophy as entertainment.
Zizek is right.
So promote philosophy as fun rather than useful and geeky rather than literary and you won't go far wrong.
Not sure there's an easy path out from this. Reading, education, book clubs may help. "Useful" must be released from the confines of just "Useful for the market economy".
Mathematics, physics, theology, biology, sociology, just about science started out as a sub-field of philosophy.
This is kind of the wrong question to ask, if I may say so.
Once you realise that everything that is not science is philosophy, philosophy doesn't only become interesting, but essential to living a worthwhile life.
A Ph.D in the comments said s/he didn't like teaching college philosophy, and I think this is partly to blame for what Philosophy (with uppercase P) has become--people interpret philosophy as that subject you take in school with archaic, primitive ideas. Every major philosopher has probably only one good idea, yet they've wasted thousands of words trying to explain it or find a solution. This is what students spend most of the time studying, so it becomes tiresome.
Philosophy is really critical thinking and understanding the various modes of logic/reasoning our brain chooses when acting consciously or subconsciously. Our lives are not one of pure deductive reasoning. However, you'd be surprised how many people (even scientists) use deductive reasoning. Once we understand that a brain holds different modes of reasoning at the same time, we learn to talk more openly, consider another point's of view more carefully, and attack our differences less so readily. In turn, this creates a better society--one which is based on understanding why and how we do things. The only real enemy of contemporary philosophy is tradition. And there are certainly many of those still around. But listen to a theistic philosopher speak and observe how he acts. Then listen to a dogmatic cult preacher in his multi-millionaire dollar celebrity church or from a celebrity religion. Tell me which one you prefer.
Philosophy teaches us to be inquisitive but not naive. It softens our emotions when considering others' differences, because most of us hold views that neither science nor philosophy can explain. Yet, just like in science, pleasure does not come from knowing the answer, rather from searching for the enigma.
(Edited to clarify some ideas.)
For those who feel enlightenment still matters, think deeply... Very deeply about the meaning of this.
The New Republic faces, itself, the central paradox of the Enlightenment humanist's project: if he succeeds, he abolishes himself by converting humanistic literature into accurate naturalistic and scientific description. Having done so, he is out of a job.
Thus the Enlightenment becomes the enemy of the humanist, who must defend his office lest he be pushed around by those awful math nerds.
Which is unfortunate, since naturalistic philosophy can be quite good[4].
[1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114172/leon-wieseltier-sc...
[2] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-re...
[3] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112481/darwinist-mob-goes...
[4] http://edge.org/conversation/dennett-on-wieseltier-v-pinker-...
In naturalist philosophy, "ought" statements eventually dissolve into a very specific class of "is" statements. One observes that the universe consists of particles, bits, and joules, and comes up with moral foundations suitable for living life as a human being who is made of particles, bits, and joules. If the universe contained a fundamentally moral component which we could exhibit and manipulate - the same way we can exhibit and manipulate particles, bits, and joules - we would consider that to be basic too. But it doesn't: so moral statements must reduce to non-moral statements.
What one does not do is precisely what is done in non-naturalist philosophy, which is to insist that "oughtness" is an ontologically primitive property of certain objects called "moral propositions", which have nothing whatsoever to do with atoms, bits, and joules, and which, despite the non-naturalistic philosopher's inability to exhibit any such thing beyond "Surely torturing puppies is wrong!", are nonetheless considered an essential component of the universe on a level with particles, bits, joules.
People have always been all too ready to insist that anything we don't fully understand, but which affects us emotionally, is an irreducible, ontologically primitive component of the fundamental nature of the universe, while anything you can actually exhibit and manipulate is mere gadgetry, used to make smartphones run but otherwise of no account. Problem is, the reverse is true: examining things we can exhibit and manipulate, naturalism, has given us more fruitful and abundant insight into the world and our lives in it than any other approach ever tried. It has taken endless seemingly-disparate phenomena and united them in a single conception of the universe that ties everything from the stars in the heavens to the beat of the human heart in grand threads of causality.
When we rely on any fixed and finite system of propositions to describe our universe: ignoramus et ignorabimus. As we learn more and more fundamentally independent propositions and unite our disparate magisteria: wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen! And this will extend to the moral realm as well, so that when we say torturing puppies is wrong, we will know that we are describing a matter of fact.
But this is yet another argument over definition or a value judgement. I have spent most of my life studying math and science, and yet reading Dostoyevsky has given me much more abundant insight into my life than anything science ever taught me. The point is, of course, what do "insight" and "relevance" mean? Their meaning can be entirely subjective, and is certainly not scientific. For that matter, what does "meaning" mean?
There's no doubt that science has improved our lives, but so has politics (which has often been very much influenced by contemporary science). True, technology's effects are quantifiable and measurable, but being quantifiable and measurable is not the only way of assigning value.
As to non-naturalist ethics, I see absolutely no problem with concepts that are irreducible to atoms. Neither is math, even though math was created/discovered by humans, which live in this universe and are composed of atoms. I think that you're misrepresenting those ideas when you're describing them as "essential components of the universe", when the universe is merely the arena where these concepts form. The fact that you can find a causal chain -- a reduction, if you will -- does not mean you can always describe the end of the chain in terms of the first link (I'll get to that again later).
In short, I don't think you can reduce, say, literature, to atoms and forces even though the author and the reader are composed of atoms, and the reading process involves photons hitting receptors that start a chemical reaction in the retina. Doing so will teach us nothing of value about literature.
I think that it is your position -- that only that which can be reduced to atoms -- that lacks justification. Saying that science and technology are quantifiably or "physically" useful is almost (not quite) a tautology. A shovel is more useful than a pen for digging holes, but who says digging holes is more worthwhile than writing? Even if you think it is, you cannot prove it scientifically, because science can say nothing about values, only point at relationships between causes and outcomes.
> As we learn more and more fundamentally independent propositions and unite our disparate magisteria: wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen! And this will extend to the moral realm as well, so that when we say torturing puppies is wrong, we will know that we are describing a matter of fact.
That doesn't follow. First, I don't know how science can teach us that something is "wrong". I don't know by what scientific or mathematical mechanism you can ever make the jump from the "is" to the "ought" -- at the very best science can teach us that if we seek a certain outcome, we should take a certain action, but can it tell us what outcome we should seek?
But it's even worse than that because there is another philosophical, unscientific mediating factor here, which is "understanding". Being able to describe the universe and understanding it are two very different things. We can know without understanding. In fact, I can even give the last statement a more mathematical facet: that a process B reduces to a more fundamental process A, does not guarantee that fully knowing A will let us predict B because of intractability. We already know that most "interesting", i.e. complex processes in the universe are intractable, so at best, they are theoretically reducible, but rarely practically so. Our understanding of particle physics can teach us little about psychology (although it may assist in building instruments to study psychology).
So I disagree both with your assumption that we can know (or rather, that knowing means fully understanding or predicting), as well with the supposed consequences of knowledge.
And you think there is no science of people? You think that just because our current understanding of psychology is fairly hazy, it must remain that way forever?
Or worse: do you think that there is nothing psychological about what happens when you read Dostoyevsky, nothing that a science of human beings can say about your experience, even in principle? How much are you willing to multiply "irreducibility"? Until it covers your whole worldview like a cancer?
>As to non-naturalist ethics, I see absolutely no problem with concepts that are irreducible to atoms. Neither is math, even though math was created/discovered by humans, which live in this universe and are composed of atoms.
But of course math is reducible to atoms. Or, if that seems a strong statement, math is not irreducible by default: Platonism is not the only viable philosophy of mathematics, such that taking any other position generates an immediate internal (within math) or external (with our other knowledge of the world) contradiction. Both constructivism and formalism yield neat interpretations of math as certain kinds of computations being done within human minds.
>In short, I don't think you can reduce, say, literature, to atoms and forces even though the author and the reader are composed of atoms, and the reading process involves photons hitting receptors that start a chemical reaction in the retina. Doing so will teach us nothing of value about literature.
See above regarding psychology. Since atoms and forces make up the author and reader, we can use our theories about those to zero in on correct theories about the author and the reader, thus gaining an understanding of what the reader is experiencing and how he is playing an active part in reading a book. Certainly science can teach us more about literature!
You seem to be confusing naturalism with what's been called "greedy reductionism", which is a metaphilosophical - and therefore damn near nonsensical - view, namely that only the most ontologically basic level of description actually matters. In fact, if we don't employ our more abstract, high-level concepts like "human being" and "Dostoyevsky novel" and "armchair", we completely fail to make accurate predictions about the behavior of the very much natural world around us.
As long as these higher-level, and yet closer-to-experience, concepts possess causal power - as long as they make our predictions better and our counterfactual models more accurate upon interventional testing - we must use them. Your thoughts and feelings are utterly essential components of a naturalistic explanation of the world.
They are also, ultimately, made of particles, joules, and bits.
Likewise to such mental activities as math and morality.
>A shovel is more useful than a pen for digging holes, but who says digging holes is more worthwhile than writing? Even if you think it is, you cannot prove it scientifically, because science can say nothing about values, only point at relationships between causes and outcomes.
This displays the funny post-religious misconception that values are relative to "the Universe" rather than to agents. This is incorrect.
And, presto change-o, when speaking of a specific agent, I can certainly say whether digging a hole is more worthwhile than writing, or the other way around. Again: a scientist who fails to predict that I (to take the personal example) would rather read and write than dig a hole is simply inaccurate.
>That doesn't follow. First, I don't know how science can teach us that something is "wrong". I don't know by what scientific or mathematical mechanism you can ever make the jump from the "is" to the "ought" -- at the very best science can teach us that if we seek a certain outcome, we should take a certain action, but can it tell us what outcome we should seek?
Which shows a nasty hole in your philosophical education, but regrettably an all-too-common one: you were never told ethical naturalism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/) exists.
>But it's even worse than that because there is another philosophical, unscientific mediating factor here, which is "understanding". Being able to describe the universe and understanding it are two very different things. We can know without understanding.
You seem to be just pushing words around, but may I venture to guess that you mean to differentiate between discriminative "describing" and causal-counterfactual "understanding"?
>In fact, I can even give the last statement a more mathematical facet: that a process B reduces to a more fundamental process A, does not guarantee that fully knowing A will let us predict B because of intractability.
Certainly. In fact, this is the nature of reduction: to reduce B < A implies that B happens as a specific instance of A, which often means that B occupies a tiny corner of A's parameter space, and almost always means that B's parameter space is much smaller than that of A. For example, in describing gasses, we can describe the precise velocities of every single molecule (the more-reduced theory), or we can measure the temperature of the gas as a whole (the less-reduced, higher-level theory). The intractability is often both computational and informational.
This merely reinforces what I said above, which is that we need the higher-level concepts to correctly understand, interpret, and predict the world. Concepts like "human being", "sunset", "profundity", "confusion", and (just for the hell of it) "love" are also utterly inescapable components of a naturalistic worldview.
It's just "irreducibility", or in other words, metaphysical handwaving and magical thinking, that aren't.
Sure but will that knowledge be so predictive as to be truly essentialist? After all, we can't provide tractably predictive models for even n-body systems for pretty small values of n, so I doubt we will for people. BTW, I believe that those answers we will be able to prove and reduce with any measure of definiteness will only tell us things we already know (or "know").
> Both constructivism and formalism yield neat interpretations of math as certain kinds of computations being done within human minds.
Ah, but here I think I can convince you, and make a much more powerful point than the one regarding intractability. Consider the universal Turing machine and its approximate physical manifestations. Whether or not it is truly universal is an open question, but most assume that it is, yet they are not perturbed by the following result: our universe may contain a machine that can simulate not only this universe but any universe, i.e. there are objects that can arise within our physical universe that are more universal than our universe itself. Can the simulated universe be reduced to the atoms and forces of the one containing the machine? Most people will say no, as universal computation breaks reduction. It is more general than the mechanism implementing it, with possibly more degrees of freedom.
> would rather read and write than dig a hole is simply inaccurate.
But the question is a different one. I wasn't asking what you want to do or even what you will do, but what you should do. The definition of "should" can live, if you will, as a concept within the Turing machine.
> This displays the funny post-religious misconception that values are relative to "the Universe" rather than to agents. This is incorrect.
That does not follow from what I said at all. I didn't say the universe or "morality" necessarily dictates an answer. What I said was that the answer -- even if it is subjective, if it exists at all -- does not necessarily follow the laws that gave rise the the being asking the question. Universal computation etc.
> you were never told ethical naturalism exists.
Again, I think there's a disagreement on definitions. It seems like naturalist ethics seems to say "if we know how people behave, we can deduce how they'll program their Turing machines (and they will always program them in a similar way), and we can therefore say something about the programs themselves", while non-naturalist ethics simply studies the "computer science" of those programs. I think both approaches are complementary, rather than contradictory, and really discuss different things, even if they give them the same name.
> B's parameter space is much smaller than that of A
So what? A's entire parameter space cannot be practically determined either (even if A is well understood), and the emergent property A may well require that in order to be explained in terms of B. For example, to explain psychology in terms of particle physics, we may need to understand the interactions of, say, 1e15 bodies. Since we cannot do that, we cannot explain A in terms of B.
Also, universal computation may arbitrarily increase (or reduce) degrees of freedom.
> It's just "irreducibility", or in other words, metaphysical handwaving and magical thinking, that aren't.
Let me make clear that I am not in any way opposed to the naturalist worldview. In fact I fully and utterly subscribe to it, just as I fully and utterly subscribe to non-naturalism. I see absolutely no contradiction between the two, just as I see no contradiction between simulating a universe with different physics in a computer that exists in ours.
When I say something is irreducible, I simply mean you cannot construct a useful model for it in terms of a lower abstraction -- not that it is not an emergent property of that lower abstraction; obviously, it is (unless it's a simulation run by universal computation).
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Of course, there is one glaring bug in my appeal to universal computation, and that is the composition not of the machines but of the programmers. Since there is no free will in the universe, the programmers are then deterministic, and therefore the programs themselves. Still, even though this greatly reduces the space of possible programs (and makes the naturalist approach to studying the programs sensible) I think that few people will consider this (i.e. a deterministic programmer) a useful reduction.
In any case, I think everyone will agree that the programs can be studied in isolation of the universe that created the programmers, and that doing so may be useful.
The only question is does reduction work when the programmer -- though not the program -- is reducible. I think it's what makes the reduction useful, but it's certainly not enough to make it the only -- or even the primary -- approach.
But then,
> If science is contested, the Enlightenment, it seems, has become a relic
It seems like the author is falling into the same pattern. (Not that I think creationists have a leg to stand on, or that their prevalence isn't worrying.)
The even funnier part about it is that, after stopping and thinking about it, I can understand why some people might not believe in it and how this could bring to endless arguments.