The Purpose of Philosophy

Over the centuries, the purpose of philosophy has changed, and I think the change has not been for the better.  The Hellenic and Roman cultures, philosophy was intended as a guide to life, to living a meaningful existence.  It was not, at least in intent, an academic exercise--although of course there were those frauds for whom the teaching of philosophy was just another way to make a living, as there will be in any age or culture.

In our world, philosophy is coming to mean analytic philosophy, but that is only a small part of its function.  Of course we have to analyze events, experiences and so forth, but we should do so with the intent of creating a meaningful whole, a coherent view of the world.  This does not mean that we should create fantasy worlds ala Plotinus or Porphyry, but it does mean that it should provide a reasonable guide to how to live.  It must address the significant events in peoples' lives, such as disappointment, the grief over the loss of a loved on, and so on.  If it does this it can attract the interest and devotion of the educated populace that wants a rational guide to life, and not surrender the field to superstition. 

Immortality as the Search for Meaning

Is the belief in, and the desire for, personal immortality ultimately the result of a desire for meaning in one's life?  I think so, and here are the reasons why I say that:

In the classical Hellenic and Roman cultures, the belief in some form of personal immortality, at least a meaningful one, was absent from the traditional culture.  In the Iliad, when Achilles sees the ghost of Paris, he says, Amazing, even after death something remains, but there is no heart of life in it.  Whatever immortality there was, to the Hellenes and Romans, a shadow existence not worthy of the the name.  Yet, by the end of the Roman Republic, the quest for some form of life after death was a central part of much religious practice.  What changed?

This is what I think changed everything: the death of the free city-state, and its replacement by the large bureaucratic empire.  Most Greek states had been swallowed up by the despotic Hellenistic kingdoms like that of the Ptolemies, the Seleucid Empire, Pontus, Pergamum, and so forth.  In the free city states, which were small, the individual counted; he could make his mark, he was known.  This was true in the Roman Republic as well.  Each citizen who owned property could state his views and vote for candidates for office and actually participate in the enactment of legislation.  He had some control, at least, over the laws that bound him and regulated his life.  (Contrary to popular belief, the Senate did not make laws.)  With the death of these free republics, meaningful citizen participation ended. The free citizen of a Republic had become the helpless subject of a despot.

It is about this time that we see the increase in the popularity of the mystery cults, in their focus on personal survival and meaning after death.  Is it surprising, when this life had reduced people to cogs in a bureaucratic machine?

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Martin Buber was known for his definition of relationship as falling into one of two categories, I and Thou and I and It.  The latter is the way we should look at material objects, inanimate tools: home, car, computer, and so forth.  Human relations, he felt, should always fall into the I and Thou category, which mirrors the relationship he felt we should have with God.  People are never things, and we should never treat people as things.

However, he was wrong, at least in this way:  In his book The Secular City, Harvey Cox argues that we should NOT want all human relationships to be of a deep interpersonal nature.  True, that does not mean that we treat another person as a tool for our happiness, but he felt the dichotomy was false.  For example, he writes about his relationship with his TV repairman.  Yes, he says, I should treat him like a fellow human being.  No, I do not want to have much contact with him, because, if I do, it means that my television is broken and seeing him will cost me money!  We have a mutually respectful business relationship, and there is no moral obligation to make it personal in any way.  He called this type of relationship I and You.

Now, my own categories of general and special relationship do not falls into this scheme, but Cox's analysis does show that there are many ways to look at the nature of social relationships, and that they need not fall into traditional paradigms to be valid.

The Foundation of RIght and Wrong

  In Stoic thought, we say that one of the choices we have that is within our control is our ability to act on our moral principles.  Although we are never guaranteed success--that is an external and, hence, a "thing indifferent"--our actions are totally within our control.  We can always choose to do the right thing in the given circumstances.  But...what makes something right or wrong?  In a purely naturalist philosophy, how do we determine what is ethical and what is not?

  Start from this observation: in our relationships with others, there are two basic types of relationships.  There are general relationships, those where we are simply aware of our shared humanity, where we have nothing more in common than the fact that we both exist.  There are also what I call "special relationships," where we have entered into a voluntary association, such as a friendship, a business, or a marriage.  These relationships will entail certain specific responsibilities, IF we wish to preserve them.   It is sort of an if-then situation; IF I wish to maintain this friendship, THEN I will have to treat this person in a friendly way.  If I do not do so, the friendship will be lost.  In general relationships, on the other hand, all I am obligated to do is to leave the other person alone, to avoid infringing on his or her space.

   There is another key observation we have to make.  Philosophical and religious systems can be classified as falling into one of two types, along a continuum with these two ideals representing the opposite poles of the continuum.  There are "perfectionist" moral systems, where we focus on improving our nature, so to speak, and "social" moral systems, where the goal is to define the rules that allow the society to function.  In the latter, it does not matter what you think, only how you act.  You could hate me, but as long as you do nothing harmful to me you have done no wrong, violated no laws.  

   Say that this other person, Joe, is riding a subway with me.  My only obligation to him is to avoid bothering him.  Our shared existence does not require anything further engagement.  I am not responsible for Joe's happiness. I have no obligation to support him, take care of him, or do any other thing of an affirmative nature.  Now, if he happens to be a friend, that would be a different matter, if I wish to "preserve the character of friend," to use Epictetus' phraseology. 

   This means that as naturalists we cannot affirm any form of Golden Rule or categorical imperative as least insofar as it might affirm positive duties to mankind as a whole.  Negative duties, yes, because a social order cannot exist without them.  Common sense tells us that a society that allowed anyone to simply take the property of another because he wanted it would not survive.  Negative obligations are all that we can affirm, at least in relationships to strangers.

   There is one other consideration for the Stoic, and that is this, and it is also along the "If, Then" model.  If I wish to emulate the Stoic ideal, there may well be certain forms of behavior that are conducive to such a life, and simply logic may compel me to act in certain ways.  But, these are not universal in their applicability. 

How do we know what we know?

    Everything we know about the world comes from one source: observations.  They may be as systematic as a laboratory science, or they may be totally anecdotal and unorganized.  They may be personal observations, or they may come from the observations of others who may—or, admittedly, may not—have more expertise than we do.  Nonetheless, everything ultimately comes from some form of direct observation.

  We do, of course, also learn things by making extrapolations and interpolations from data.  Mathematics and logic do play roles in learning about nature, and we regularly make inferences—not all of them justified—from what we have observed.  We also make completely non-rational conclusions about the world, and many of these are correct; the activity of the right brain is inherently non-linear and non-rational, like throwing a crossword puzzle into the air thousands of times a minute until it lands in the correct order.  For any of these non-direct conclusions to be reliable, however, they have to be testable by observed data.  Without such testing, they are useless, dogmatic proclamations.

  We can work through an example of how that process.  I see you standing in a field with a stone in your hand; you let go of the stone and it falls to the ground.  I learned from this that, at one point in time you held this object, let it go, and it fell.  Technically, that is all I have learned, that it happened once.  Now, if I see you do it several times, and if, every time, the stone falls to the ground when you let it go, then I can conclude that when you let go of the stone, it will fall to the ground.  I am curious, so I get other people to do the same thing and, wonder of wonders, every single time someone holds a stone and lets it go, it falls to the ground!  Thinking I might be stumbling upon something profound, I get people to hold different objects, not just stones, and observe further that when any object is released, it falls to the ground.  I may not know the cause, but I do see what happens: objects that are released from the hand, or any other way they are supported, fall to the ground when that support is no longer there.  From this I deduce a general rule that when objects are dropped they fall to the ground.

   Here is an example of how I can learn from a direct observation and, as well, from an extrapolation from that data.  If we look closely, however, that “knowledge” I obtained from the extrapolation is not as reliable as the information I obtained from the first observation.  First, I have not, and cannot, observe every single incidence of something being dropped; it is at least possible that my universal conclusion is incorrect.  Furthermore, not only are my data incomplete, but I could interpret the data incorrectly.  Suppose in my “experiment” I asked you to hold and drop a rock, and other person to hold and drop a leaf at the same time.  Sure, I observe that they both fall to the ground as they had in the past, but I also note that the rock hits the ground before the leaf does.  Furthermore, whenever a leaf and a rock are dropped together, the rock seems to fall faster.

   What do I conclude from this?  I might conclude correctly that it is the shape of the leaf that is causing it fall more slowly—air resistance—or I might conclude, incorrectly, that it is weight that cause the difference, that heavier objects fall faster than light ones.  This is, in fact, the error that people made, and this error was not corrected until Galileo performed his famous experiments at the tower of Pisa.  If I do not have you drop two stones of the same shape but different weights at the same time, I am likely to draw the erroneous conclusion.  So, we have to admit these two caveats about empirical observation:  a direct observation can be wrong if I did not see what I thought I saw, but conclusions drawn from data can be wrong for several other reasons as well.  Direct observation will only be incorrect if I observed incorrectly, but extrapolations can be incorrect if any of the following occur: if I observe incorrectly the data will be wrong, if I extrapolate too without sufficient data, or if I make a failure in logic and reason improperly.

   Suppose I did guess the right reason. I am still likely to draw an improper conclusion, because I might be tempted make the conclusion more universal than it really is.  Unless I performed the experiment in a zero gravity environment, or in a vacuum with no air resistance, or with objects that would be subject to the same resistance, like two identically shaped objects,  I am unlikely to make the proper connections, and come up with a wrong explanation about the data.  A key part of explaining the data is to understand the parameters of the experiment, and limiting the conclusion to the variables of the experiment.  Yes, the conclusion will be limited, but the more limited, the more reliable.

   As I mentioned earlier, we cannot ignore the role that non-rational insight provides in advancing knowledge.  Collected data may well tell us that a conclusion at which we arrived earlier was incomplete, or even incorrect, but the data will not provide the new conclusion.  That comes from insight, the “aha” factor.  We examine the data, and in a moment of insight, guess—and at this point it is still a guess—a new explanation.  In religion we may assume that it was the gods, or the spirits, that provided this new explanation, but empirical research does not work that way.   Primitive people did not think that one would question or test the gods, but modern man does.  We don’t take this insight on faith; we test it.  We call this insight an hypothesis, and subject it to repeat testing. 

   Most hypotheses will fail the experiments devised to test them, and, even when they pass, the results are published so that others may test them.  Alternative explanations for the data are welcomed, not condemned, so that all possibilities can be investigated.  There is, unfortunately, always the possibilities of honest error, tunnel vision and, sadly enough, outright fraud.  The antidote, of course, is the kind of transparency that science considers the ideal.  No question is ever considered to be finally and completely answered.  On all matters, our conclusions are always tentative, always incomplete, and always open to correction.  There is no final, absolute truth as far as we are concerned, only better and more accurate conclusions.  Common sense will tell us, then, that if we want to avoid looking like fools, we should avoid making absolute statements outside of the realm of mathematics and formal logic.

   This all means, of course, that we have to regard the world as purely a natural phenomenon.  If there is no room for faith, or any form of divine revelation, then we can make no statements about things that cannot be observed.  Since we cannot empirically affirm there is any type of deity, we leave the question alone.  If we want to know the nature of reality, we turn, not to religion, and not to philosophy, but to physics.  Physics—and the other sciences—tell us what the world and life is, and the role of philosophy is to interpret those findings for their relevance to our lives.  In other words, we should understand nature, and human life, in the terms described by the best science, and then we should turn to philosophy to explain what those facts mean for our lives, for how we live. At this point all science can tell us is that we are an animal, more intelligent than others, but not inherently different, living on a planet that exists because of purely natural events.  Science gives us the facts; philosophy gives us the significance of those facts.

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When We Make Mistakes

  No matter how much we try to live the Stoic ideal, we will slip up, we will make mistakes.  We will get angry or sad when things go wrong, we will be happy when things go well.  That is natural; we are flesh and blood creatures, not marble statues.  Perhaps things go well at work and you are congratulated, or something goes wrong and you are called on the carpet.  We try to remember that the events themselves are out of our control, and thus indifferent, but we will react nonetheless.  What do we do then?

  The first thing to remember is that must not fall into the trap of thinking of mistakes in terms of sin, in the Judeo-Christian sense, nor in terms of karma in the Buddhist or Hindu sense.  A mistake is a mistake, an event that is passed.  In and of itself, it does not need to be atoned for, but learned from.  Think of a mistake in these terms: if you are target shooting and miss the target, do you need to get down on your knees and repent for missing the bull's eye?  No, you get up, see where you made the mistake, and try again.  Perhaps your breathing was wrong, or your trigger grip was incorrect, or you did not account for wind.  You see what you did wrong, correct the mistake, and see if there is any improvement.  With practice you will get better and better.

  Look again at the chariot imagery.  Your intellect is the driver.  Sometimes, the horses--the emotions and drives-will get spooked, perhaps by an animal or something else that startles them.  There may be a pothole or a bump in the road that forces the chariot off the track.  Once you have regained control, you keep practicing until you master the rules of the road, until the ride is smooth.  This is how we must treat mistakes in judgement, as opportunities to learn, not as sins for which we must beg forgiveness.

The Stoic and Drugs

I wonder why anyone who professes the Stoic way of life would want to use any substance that would interfere with the functioning of the brain.  Consider this: our brain, and our sensory apparatus, evolved over millions of years in order to give us an accurate picture of the world around us.  Without this, we do not survive as a species.  Why alter it?

Our brain is, for us, an optimal combination of sensory perception and reasoning ability.   Sure, there are animals that see better than we, who hear better, who smell better.  No argument there.  But, such abilities come at a price.  I was watching a presentation on the Animal Planet; in it the host was talking about a breed of dog--and I forget which one--with an incredibly accurate sense of smell, and it wasn't the bloodhound.  This dog has an amazingly accurate sense of smell, but 50% of his brain is dedicated to smell perception and recognition.  That is a high price to pay for that ability.

Anyone who has owned a bloodhound knows what I mean.  Those amazing animals can track a scent for miles on only a drop of blood, but that ability has left them with a brain that is one of the least capable in the canine world for learning new tasks not related to smelling.  In other words, that dog can track a tiny item for miles--and save lives in the process--but not be able to learn to get off the couch!  That is a trade-off that would have meant elimination for the hominid line.

To refer back to the image of the chariot: the driver must control the chariot and the horses, and it is just as hard to drive a chariot while intoxicated as it is a car.  What is gained?